get a certain book, about which he knows nothing, and the title
of which he can not decipher. Here is a person asking for "comfort
books" for the sick. Here is Mrs. So-and-So, who tells us her husband
is very ill, unconscious; she has to sit up by him all night, and must
have something "very amusing" to divert her mind. Here is the angry
man to whom by mistake was sent a book inscribed "to my good wife and
true." Heaven help the poor book clerk when the same good wife and true
comes in with her present of a naughty book with humorous remarks
written in it!

Now, how do you like the job?

XX

THE DECEASED

I think it was William Hazlitt's brother who remarked that "no young
man thinks he will ever die." Whoever it was he was a mysterious
person who lives for us now in that one enduring observation. That is
his "literary remains," his "complete works." And many a man has
written a good deal more and said a good deal less than that concerning
that "animal, man" (in Swift's phrase), who, as Sir Thomas Browne
observes, "begins to die when he begins to live."

No young man, I should say, reads obituary notices. They are hardly
"live news" to him. Most of us, I fancy, regard these "items" more or
less as "dead matter" which papers for some reason or other are obliged
to carry. But old people, I have noticed, those whose days are
numbered, whose autumnal friends are fast falling, as if leaf by leaf
from the creaking tree, those regularly turn to the obituary column,
which, doubtless, is filled with what are "personals" for them.

And yet, if all but knew it, there is not in the press any reading so
improving as the "obits" (to use the newspaper term), none of so
softening and refining a nature, none so calculated to inspire one with
the Christian feelings of pity and charity, with the sentiment of
malice toward none, to bring anon a smile of tender regard for one's
fellow mortals, to teach that man is an admirable creature, full of
courage and faith withal, constantly striving for the light,
interesting beyond measure, that his destiny is divinely inscrutable,
that dust unto dust all men are brothers, and that he, man, is (in the
words of "Urn Burial") "a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous
in the tomb." I doubt very much indeed whether any one could read
obituaries every day for a year and remain a bad man or woman.

In many respects, the best obituaries are to be found in country
papers. The