finds time to visit our sick soldiers, and
carry to them the little that she can spare, and that which she has
begged of her wealthier neighbors,--the spirit of that poor seamstress
who snatches an hour daily from her exhausting toil to sew for the
soldiers,--the spirit of that mechanic, who, having nothing to give,
makes boxes in his evening leisure, and sells them for the
soldiers,--the spirit of the brooks, that never hesitate between up-hill
and down, because "all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is never
full,"--the spirit of all who do with love and zeal whatever their hands
find to do, and sigh, not because it is so little, but because it is not
better.

God grant that this spirit may obtain among us,--that our soldiers, and
their helpless families, may be to us a national trust, for which we are
bound individually, even the very humblest and meanest of us, to care.
The field is vast, and white for the harvest. Now, for the love of
Christ, in the name of honor, for very shame's sake, where we counted
our laborers by tens, let us number them by fifties,--where there were
hundreds, let there be thousands.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

BY ONE WHO KNEW HIM.

The great master of English prose has left us suddenly, but to himself
not unexpectedly. In the maturity of his powers, with his enduring
position in literature fairly won and recognized, with the provision
which spurred him to constant work secured to those he loved, his death
saddens us rather through the sense of our own loss than from the tragic
regret which is associated with an unaccomplished destiny. More
fortunate than Fielding, he was allowed to take the measure of his
permanent fame. The niche wherein he shall henceforth stand was
chiselled while he lived. One by one the doubters confessed their
reluctant faith, unfriendly critics dropped their blunted steel, and no
man dared to deny him the place which was his, and his only, by right of
genius.

In one sense, however, he was misunderstood by the world, and he has
died before that profounder recognition which he craved had time to
mature. All the breadth and certainty of his fame failed to compensate
him for the lack of this: the man's heart coveted that justice which was
accorded only to the author's brain. Other pens may sum up the literary
record he has left behind: I claim the right of a friend who knew and
loved him to speak of him as a man. The testimony, which, while livin