Oh, those were grand days!  No better than the present, for life grows brighter to me all the time; but we shall not forget the quaint, strong, brusque professor who so unceremoniously smashed things which he did not like, and shook, the class with merriment or indignation.  The widest awake professorial room in the land was Dr. Henry’s, in the New York University.  But the participators in those scenes are all scattered.  I know the whereabouts of but three or four.  So we meet for a little while on earth, and then we separate.  There must be a better place somewhere ahead of us.

“I have also been looking over a book that overhauls the theology and moral character of Abraham Lincoln.  This is the only kind of slander that is safe.  I have read all the stuff for the last three years published about Abraham Lincoln’s unfair courtships and blank infidelity.  The protracted discussion has made only one impression upon me, and that is this:  How safe it is to slander a dead man!  You may say what you will in print about him, he brings no rebutting evidence.  I have heard that ghosts do a great many things, but I never heard of one as printing a book or editing a newspaper to vindicate himself.  Look out how you vilify a living man, for he may respond with pen, or tongue, or cowhide; but only get a man thoroughly dead (that is, so certified by the coroner) and have a good, heavy tombstone put on the top of him, and then you may say what you will with impunity.

“But I have read somewhere in an old book that there is a day coming when all wrongs will be righted; and I should not wonder if then the dead were vindicated, and all the swine who have uprooted graveyards should, like their ancestors of Gadara, run down a steep place into the sea and get choked.  The fact that there are now alive men so debauched of mind and soul that they rejoice in mauling the reputation of those who spent their lives in illustrious achievement for God and their country, and then died as martyrs for their principles, makes me believe in eternal damnation.”

With this last sentence my friend Leatherbacks gave a violent gesture that upset his cup and left the table-cloth sopping wet.

“By the way,” said he, “have you heard that Odger is coming?”

“What!” said I. He continued without looking up, for he was at that moment running his knife, not over-sharp, through a lamb-chop made out of old sheep. (Wife, we will have to change our butcher!) He continued with a severity perhaps partly caused by the obstinacy of the meat:  “I see in the ‘Pall-Mall Budget’ the startling intelligence that Mr. Odger is coming to the United States on a lecturing expedition.  Our American newspapers do not seem, as yet, to have got hold of this news, but the tidings will soon fly, and great excitement may be expected to follow.”