May this be our happy case, gentle reader, if we meet not again on earth, we shall meet in heaven, “for we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.”  I have spread out before you the secret musings of many a midnight hour, and I feel that I am responsible for what I have written.  May God grant forgivness for the wrong.  And thus we part, gentle reader, to toss yet a little longer upon the stream of time, ere its waves and its billows pass over us forever.

  “When midnight o’er the moonless skies,
    Her shades of mimic death has spread,
  When mortals sleep, when spectres rise;
    And nought is wakeful but the dead. 
  No bloodless shape my path pursues;
    No shiv’ring ghost my couch annoys,
  Visions more sad my fancy views,
    Visions of dear departed joys,—­
  The shade of youthful hope is there.”