friend to the young Tutor, I am afraid I shall have to give her up as the heroine of a romantic episode.  It would be a pity if there were nothing to commend these papers to those who take up this periodical but essays, more or less significant, on subjects more or less interesting to the jaded and impatient readers of the numberless stories and entertaining articles which crowd the magazines of this prolific period.  A whole year of a tea-table as large as ours without a single love passage in it would be discreditable to the company.  We must find one, or make one, before the tea-things are taken away and the table is no longer spread.

          The Dictator turns preacher.

We have so many light and playful talks over the teacups that some readers may be surprised to find us taking up the most serious and solemn subject which can occupy a human intelligence.  The sudden appearance among our New England Protestants of the doctrine of purgatory as a possibility, or even probability, has startled the descendants of the Puritans.  It has naturally led to a reconsideration of the doctrine of eternal punishment.  It is on that subject that Number Five and I have talked together.  I love to listen to her, for she talks from the promptings of a true woman’s heart.  I love to talk to her, for I learn my own thoughts better in that way than in any other “L’appetit vient en mangeant,” the French saying has it.  “L’esprit vient en causant;” that is, if one can find the right persons to talk with.

The subject which has specially interested Number Five and myself, of late, was suggested to me in the following way.

Some two years ago I received a letter from a clergyman who bears by inheritance one of the most distinguished names which has done honor to the American “Orthodox” pulpit.  This letter requested of me “a contribution to a proposed work which was to present in their own language the views of ‘many men of many minds’ on the subject of future punishment.  It was in my mind to let the public hear not only from professional theologians, but from other professions, as from jurists on the alleged but disputed value of the hangman’s whip overhanging the witness-box, and from physicians on the working of beliefs about the future life in the minds of the dangerously sick.  And I could not help thinking what a good thing it would be to draw out the present writer upon his favorite borderland between the spiritual and the material.”  The communication came to me, as the writer reminds me in a recent letter, at a “painfully inopportune time,” and though it was courteously answered, was not made the subject of a special reply.