“Ut appareat iis qui in tenebris et umbra mortis positi sunt.”

“Darkness and the shadow of death” indeed, and what light like the light and comfort such a woman as my Mary Masury brings!

And so, but for one of the accidents, as we call them, I should have dropped the boys at the corner of Dover Street, and gone home with my Christmas lesson.

But it happened, as we irreverently say,—­it happened as we crossed Park Square, so called from its being an irregular pentagon of which one of the sides has been taken away, that I recognized a tall man, plodding across in the snow, head down, round-shouldered, stooping forward in walking, with his right shoulder higher than his left; and by these tokens I knew Tom Coram, prince among Boston princes.  Not Thomas Coram that built the Foundling Hospital, though he was of Boston too; but he was longer ago.  You must look for him in Addison’s contribution to a supplement to the Spectator,—­the old Spectator, I mean, not the Thursday Spectator, which is more recent.  Not Thomas Coram, I say, but Tom Coram, who would build a hospital to-morrow, if you showed him the need, without waiting to die first, and always helps forward, as a prince should, whatever is princely, be it a statue at home, a school in Richmond, a newspaper in Florida, a church in Exeter, a steam-line to Liverpool, or a widow who wants a hundred dollars.  I wished him a merry Christmas, and Mr. Howland, by a fine instinct, drew up the horses as I spoke.  Coram shook hands; and, as it seldom happens that I have an empty carriage while he is on foot, I asked him if I might not see him home.  He was glad to get in.  We wrapped him up with spoils of the bear, the fox, and the bison, turned the horses’ heads again,—­five hours now since they started on this entangled errand of theirs,—­and gave him his ride.  “I was thinking of you at the moment,” said Coram,—­“thinking of old college times, of the mystery of language as unfolded by the Abbe Faria to Edmond Dantes in the depths of the Chateau d’If.  I was wondering if you could teach me Japanese, if I asked you to a Christmas dinner.”  I laughed.  Japan was really a novelty then, and I asked him since when he had been in correspondence with the sealed country.  It seemed that their house at Shanghae had just sent across there their agents for establishing the first house in Edomo, in Japan, under the new treaty.  Everything looked promising, and the beginnings were made for the branch which has since become Dot and Trevilyan there.  Of this he had the first tidings in his letters by the mail of that afternoon.  John Coram, his brother, had written to him, and had said that he enclosed for his amusement the Japanese bill of particulars, as it had been drawn out, on which they had founded their orders for the first assorted cargo ever to be sent from America to Edomo.  Bill of particulars there was, stretching down the long tissue-paper in exquisite chirography.  But