wretched stretch on which they are now, nor keeping up the hollow appearance of what is not the fact.  But there are folk who make it a point of honor never to admit, that, in doing or not doing anything, they are actuated for an instant by so despicable a consideration as the question whether or not they can afford it.  And who shall reckon up the brains which this social calamity has driven into disease, or the early paralytic shocks which it has brought on?

When you were very young, and looked forward to Future Years, did you ever feel a painful fear that you might outgrow your early home affections, and your associations with your native scenes?  Did you ever think to yourself,—­Will the day come when I shall have been years away from that river’s side, and yet not care?  I think we have all known the feeling.  O plain church, to which I used to go when I was a child, and where I used to think the singing so very splendid!  O little room, where I used to sleep! and you, tall tree, on whose topmost branch I cut the initials which perhaps the reader knows! did I not even then wonder to myself if the time and would ever come when I should be far away from you,—­far away, as now, for many years, and not likely to go back,—­and yet feel entirely indifferent to the matter? and did not I even then feel a strange pain in the fear that very likely it might?  These things come across the mind of a little boy with a curious grief and bewilderment.  Ah, there is something strange in the inner life of a thoughtful child of eight years old!  I would rather see a faithful record of his thoughts, feelings, fancies, and sorrows, for a single week, than know all the political events that have happened during that space in Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Turkey.  Even amid the great grief at leaving home for school in your early days, did you not feel a greater grief to think that the day might come when you would not care at all; when your home ties and affections would be outgrown; when you would be quite content to live on, month after month, far from parents, sisters, brothers, and feel hardly a perceptible blank when you remembered that they were far away?  But it is of the essence of such fears, that, when the thing comes that you were afraid of, it has ceased to be fearful; still it is with a little pang that you sometimes call to remembrance how much you feared it once.  It is a daily regret, though not a very acute one, (more’s the pity,) to be thrown much, in middle life, into the society of an old friend whom as a boy you had regarded as very wise, and to be compelled to observe that he is a tremendous fool.  You struggle with the conviction; you think it wrong to give in to it; but you cannot help it.  But it would have been a sharper pang to the child’s heart, to have impressed upon the child the fact, that “Good Mr. Goose is a fool, and some day you will understand that he is.”  In those days one admits no imperfection in the people and the things