the bride and groom, and guests, as if to say:  “What does all this mean?” No one behaved with more propriety and no one looked more radiant than he, with a ray of sunlight on his beautiful coat of long hair, his bright brass collar, and his wonderful head.  Bruno did not live to see the old home broken up, but sleeps peacefully there, under the chestnut trees, and fills a large place in many of our pleasant memories.

On November 12, 1880, I was sixty-five years old, and, pursuant to my promise, I then began my diary.  It was a bright, sunny day, but the frost king was at work; all my grand old trees, that stood like sentinels, to mark the boundary of my domain, were stripped of their foliage, and their brilliant colors had faded into a uniform brown; but the evergreens and the tall, prim cedars held their own, and, when covered with snow, their exquisite beauty brought tears to my eyes.  One need never be lonely mid beautiful trees.

My thoughts were with my absent children—­Harriot in France, Theodore in Germany, Margaret with her husband and brother Gerrit, halfway across the continent, and Bob still in college.  I spent the day writing letters and walking up and down the piazza, and enjoyed, from my windows, a glorious sunset.  Alone, on birthdays or holidays, one is very apt to indulge in sad retrospections.  The thought of how much more I might have done for the perfect development of my children than I had accomplished, depressed me.  I thought of all the blunders in my own life and in their education.  Little has been said of the responsibilities of parental life; accordingly little or nothing has been done.  I had such visions of parental duties that day that I came to the conclusion that parents never could pay the debt they owe their children for bringing them into this world of suffering, unless they can insure them sound minds in sound bodies, and enough of the good things of this life to enable them to live without a continual struggle for the necessaries of existence.  I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe parents a debt of gratitude for the simple fact of existence, generally conferred without thought and merely for their own pleasure.  How seldom we hear of any high or holy preparation for the office of parenthood!  Here, in the most momentous act of life, all is left to chance.  Men and women, intelligent and prudent in all other directions, seem to exercise no forethought here, but hand down their individual and family idiosyncrasies in the most reckless mariner.

On November 13 the New York Tribune announced the death of Lucretia Mott, eighty-eight years old.  Having known her in the flush of life, when all her faculties were at their zenith, and in the repose of age, when her powers began to wane, her withdrawal from among us seemed as beautiful and natural as the changing foliage, from summer to autumn, of some grand old oak I have watched and loved.