thought of its simple words of manly and hearty sorrow.  I knew that the eminence he had reached had not come till she who would have been proudest of it was beyond knowing it or caring for it.  And I cannot say with what interest and satisfaction I thought I could trace, in the features which were sad without the infusion of a grain of sentimentalism, in the subdued and quiet tone of the man’s whole aspect and manner and address, the manifest proof that he had not shut down the leaf upon that old page of his history, that he had never quite got over that great grief of earlier years.  One felt better and more hopeful for the sight.  I suppose many people, after meeting some overwhelming loss or trial, have fancied that they would soon die; but that is almost invariably a delusion.  Various dogs have died of a broken heart, but very few human beings.  The Inferior creature has pined away at his master’s loss:  as for us, it is not that one would doubt the depth and sincerity of sorrow, but that there is more endurance in our constitution, and that God has appointed that grief shall rather mould and influence than kill.  It is a much sadder sight than an early death, to see human beings live on after heavy trial, and sink into something very unlike their early selves and very inferior to their early selves.  I can well believe that many a human being, if he could have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken before coming to that! Mansie Wauch’s glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame.  And it would be no comfort—­it would be an aggravation in that view—­to think that by the time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to it. That is the worst of all.  To be wicked and depraved, and to feel it, and to be wretched under it, is bad enough; but it is a great deal worse to have fallen into that depth of moral degradation and to feel that really you don’t care.  The instinct of accommodation is not always a blessing.  It is happy for us, that, though in youth we hoped to live in a castle or a palace, we can make up our mind to live in a little parsonage or a quiet street in a country town.  It is happy for us, that, though in youth we hoped to be very great and famous, we are so entirely reconciled to being little and unknown.  But it is not happy for the poor girl who walks the Haymarket at night that she feels her degradation so little.  It is not happy that she has come to feel towards her miserable life so differently now from what she would have felt towards it, had it been set before her while she was the blooming, thoughtless creature in the little cottage in the country.  It is only by fits and starts that the poor drunken wretch, living in a garret upon a little pittance allowed him by his relations, who was once a man of character and hope, feels what a sad pitch he has come to.  If you could get him to feel it constantly, there would be some hope of his reclamation even yet.