THE THATCH OF AVARICE.

It does not matter.  As the great river broadens in the Spring, so do his feelings swell and overflow his nature now.  Why does he tremble,—­that rough, weather-beaten man?  Because there is but one place on the great earth where “an eye will mark his coming and grow brighter.”  If that beacon still burns for him, he can continue his voyage.  If it has gone out, if anything has happened to it, his way is dark; nothing but the abiding hand of the Great Father can steady his helm and hold him to his desolate course.

[Illustration:  Childhood.

     “Childhood is the bough where slumbered
       Birds and blossoms many-numbered;
     Age, that bough with snows encumbered.”]

The man who wandered “mid pleasures and palaces,” had no Home, and when he died he died on the bleak shores of Northern Africa, and was buried where he died, at the city of Tunis, where he held the office of United States Consul.  “To Adam,” says Bishop Hare, “Paradise was Home.  To the good among his descendants,

HOME IS PARADISE.”

“Are you not surprised,” writes Dr. James Hamilton, “to find how independent of money peace of conscience is, and how much happiness can be condensed in the humblest home?  A cottage will not hold the bulky furniture and sumptuous accommodations of a mansion; but if love be there, a cottage will hold as much happiness as might stock a palace.”  “To be happy at home,” writes Dr. Johnson in the Rambler, “is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”  In the mind of the good there gather about the old Home

HALO UPON HALO OF FOND THOUGHT,

of nearly idolatrous memory.  Upon this very green, the joyous march of youth went on.  Here the glad days whirled round like wheels.  At morn the laugh was loud; at eve the laughter rang.  To-day, perhaps the most joyous of the flock lies in the earth.  Perhaps the chief spirit of the wildest gambols is bent with sharp affliction; the one that loved his mother best is in a foreign land; the one that doubled her small cares with dolls goes every week to gaze at little gravestones, and the one that would not stay in bed upon the sun’s bright rise now sits in awful blindness.  You cannot rob these hearts of their sweet memories.  The mystic keyword unlocks the gates.  The peaceful waters flow; the thirsty soul is satisfied.

THE LONG AGO.