reaches beyond the vision, extends into the portals of the other and the better life.  We may profess friendship, but that is an empty profession; our membership in a lodge is fruitless and our meetings produce no good results unless we have charity.  It is but a small part that we should perform our mystic rights, typifying friendship, love and truth, but that we should so live them and act them that the touch of a member is the touch of a brother whose words sweeten the asperities of life and whose last offering is a tribute at the grave.  We may be rudely brought back to the world with its pomp and show, its pageantry and vanity, by an emblem of mortality presented to us, but should we not ever have the spectre of mortality before our eyes?  In the mad rush through life we forget the kinship of man to man.  We are too often forgetful that the hand of a brother is reaching upward for succor.  We forget that we are mortal, and the heart grows cold; our sympathies extend only to those around and nearest to us, forgetful that all mankind is our brother, and that he is especially our brother and friend who has mercy.  But in this mad rush in life we are suddenly and almost rudely brought back to a full realization of our mortality, our helplessness, our emptiness, our nothingness, when we stand at the grave of our departed brother and reflect that here lies one who was born and had ambitions and died as we must die.  His ambitions and hopes all went in the grave with him.  The little grassy mound and the little marble slab is all that remains visible to tell us that he was our brother.  Life would hardly be worth living; its struggles would be disastrous, its triumphs vain, empty bubbles, if the clods that fall upon the coffin and the sprig of evergreen tell the whole story of an Odd-Fellow.  No, the very fact that we bury our departed brother teaches us that the grave is not the end of all.  Though our brother dies he shall live in our hearts, in the flowers that we cast, in the precious memories that forever cluster around the links, the heart and the hand, the altar and the hour glass.  When the supreme moment comes and the brother gathers his arrows into his quiver and fades from sight into the grave, we know that he has passed the portal into the land of the eternal, but the quiver and the arrows will ever stand as the badge of friendship.  The heart may cease to beat, and the hand fall listless in death, yet the heart and hand will ever be emblems of love, and denote that when the hand of an Odd-Fellow is extended his heart goes with it.

The good Odd-Fellow has constantly before his mind the book of books.  His first sight into a lodge-room catches sight of that divine missive to man.  It is his solace in life, and its precepts his consolation in death.  It ever stands to him as an exhaustless fountain of truth.  On these three cardinal principles he lives and dies, and in the constancy of that life we venerate his memory and do him kindly offices.