etty little "Kitty" who claimed his
devotion, and countless other affairs, before "Eliza" appeared. "Eliza"
was a married woman and apparently the last love of the heart-scarred
Sterne.

[Sidenote: Left by the Dead]

No earthly thing is so nearly immortal as a love letter, and nothing is
so sorrowful as those left by the dead. The beautiful body may be dust
and all but forgotten, while the work of the loving hands lives on. Even
those written by the ancient Egyptians are seemingly imperishable. The
clay tablet on which one of the Pharaohs wrote a love letter, asking the
hand of a foreign princess, is to-day in the British Museum.

The first time a woman cries after she is married, she reads over all
the love letters the other men have written her, for a love letter is
something a tender-hearted woman cannot bring herself to destroy.

[Sidenote: The New Child]

The love letters of the man she did not marry still possess lingering
interest. The letters of many a successful man of affairs are still
hidden in the treasure-box of the woman he loved, but did not marry.
Both have formed other ties and children have risen up to call them
blessed, or whatever the children may please, for even more dreadful
than the new woman is the new child. Between them, they are likely to
produce a new man.

The new child is apt to find the letters and read them aloud to the
wrong people, being most successfully unexpected and inopportune. A box
of old letters, distributed sparingly at the doors of mutual friends, is
the distinguishing feature of a lovely game called "playing postman."
Social upheavals have occurred from so small a cause as this.

It sometimes happens, too, that when a girl has promised to marry a man
and the wedding day is set, she receives from a mutual friend a package
of faded letters and a note which runs something like this:

"My Dear:

"Now that my old friend's wedding day is approaching, I feel that I have
no longer the right to keep his letters. They are too beautiful and
tender to be burned and I have not the heart to make that disposition of
them. Were I to return them to him, he would doubtless toss them into
the fire, and I cannot bear to have them lost.

"So, after thinking about it for some time, I have concluded to send
them to you, who are the rightful keeper of his happiness, as well as of
his letters. I trust that you may find a place for these among those
which he has addressed to you. Wishing