“My own house, though small,
    Is the best house of all.”

When boys get tired of eating tarts, and maids have done with winning hearts, and lawyers cease to take their fees, and leaves leave off to grow on trees, then will John Ploughman cease to love his own dear home.  John likes to hear some sweet voice sing,

    “’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
    Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;
    A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,
    Which, wherever we rove, is not met with elsewhere. 
        Home!  Home! sweet, sweet home! 
        There’s no place like home!”

* * * * *

XLIII.

HENRY WILSON

(BORN 1812—­DIED 1875.)

FROM THE SHOEMAKER’S BENCH TO THE CHAIR OF VICE-PRESIDENT.

Henry Wilson, the Vice-president of the United States, was at my tea-table with the strangest appetite I ever knew.  The fact was, his last sickness was on him, and his inward fever demanded everything cold.  It was tea without any tea.  He was full of reminiscence, and talked over his life from boyhood till then.  He impressed me with the fact that he was nearly through his earthly journey.  Going to my Church that evening to speak at our young peoples’ anniversary, he delivered the last address of his public life.  While seated at the beginning of the exercises, his modesty seemed to overcome him, and he said:  “I am not prepared to address such a magnificent audience as that.  Can not you get somebody else to speak?  I wish you would.”  “O no,” I said, “these people came to hear Henry Wilson.”  He placed a chair in the center of the platform to lean on.  Not knowing he had put it in that position, I removed it twice.  Then he whispered to me, saying:  “Why do you remove that chair?  I want it to lean on.”  The fact was, his physical strength was gone.  When he arose his bands and knees trembled with excitement, and the more so as the entire audience arose and cheered him.  One hand on the top of the chair, he stood for half an hour, saying useful things, and, among others, these words:  “I hear men sometimes say, when a man writes his name on the records of a visible Church, that he had better let other things alone, especially public affairs.  I am not a believer in that Christianity which hides itself away.  I believe in that robust Christianity that goes right out in God’s world and works.  If there ever was a time in our country, that time is now, when the young men of this country should reflect and act according to the teachings of God’s holy Word, and attempt to purify, lift up, and carry our country onward and forward, so that it shall be in practice what it is in theory—­the great leading Christian nation of the globe.  You will be disappointed in many of your hopes and aspirations.  The friends