The ministers did not at his obsequies have a hard time to make out a good case as to his future destiny, as in one case where a clergyman in offering consolation as to the departure of a man who had been very eminent, but went down through intemperance till he died in a snow-bank, his rum-jug beside him.  At the obsequies of that unfortunate, the officiating pastor declared that the departed was a good Greek and Latin scholar.  We have had United States senators who used the name of God rhetorically, and talked grandly about virtue and religion, when at that moment they were so drunk they could scarcely stand up.  But Henry Wilson was an old-fashioned Christian, who had repented of his sins and put his trust in Christ.  By profession he was a Congregationalist; but years ago he stood up in a Methodist meeting-house and told how he had found the Lord, and recommending all the people to choose Christ as their portion—­the same Christ about whom he was reading the very night before he died, in that little book called “The Changed Cross,” the more tender passages marked with his own lead-pencil; and amid these poems of Christ Henry Wilson had placed the pictures of his departed wife and departed son, for I suppose he thought as these were with Christ in heaven their dear faces might as well be next to His name in the book.

It was appropriate that our Vice-president expire in the Capitol buildings, the scene of so many years of his patriotic work.  At the door of that marbled and pictured Vice-president’s room many a man has been obliged to wait because of the necessities of business, and to wait a great while before he could get in; but that morning, while the Vice-president was talking about taking a ride, a sable messenger arrived at the door, not halting a moment, not even knocking to see if he might get in, but passed up and smote the lips into silence forever.  The sable messenger moving that morning through the splendid Capitol stopped not to look at the mosaics, or the fresco, or the panels of Tennessee and Italian marble, but darted in and darted out in an instant, and his work was done.  It is said that Charles Sumner was more scholarly, and that Stephen A. Douglas was a better organizer, and that John J. Crittenden was more eloquent; but calling up my memory of Henry Wilson, I have come to the conclusion that that life is grandly eloquent whose peroration is heaven.—­DR. TALMADGE, in The Sunday Magazine.

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XLIV.

JOAN OF ARC

(BORN 1412—­DIED 1431.)

THE PEASANT MAIDEN WHO DELIVERED HER COUNTRY AND BECAME A MARTYR IN ITS CAUSE.