It is certainly painful, that the requirements of suffering humanity should make the occasional violation of the grave indispensably necessary. Whether the spirit, released from its confinement, lies in the limbo of the fathers, the purgatory of the Catholics, awaiting the great day of doom; whether called from a life of virtue, all time and distance annihilated, it sweeps free and unconstrained in heavenly delight through the myriads and myriads of worlds, rolling in the vast sublimity of space; whether summoned from a course of evil, it shudders in regions of darkness and desolation, or writhes in agony amid flaming atmospheres; or whether its germ of life remains torpid, as in the wheat taken from the Egyptian pyramids, thousands of years existent, but apparently not sentient, must, of course, be to us but the wild theories of imagination, and so remain until that judgment, predicted by the holy Revelation, shall sweep away the darkness with which, in inscrutable and awful wisdom, the Almighty has enveloped us. But that the spirit can look with other than indifference, if not loathing, on the perishing exuviæ of its chrysalis existence, which, to its retrospective gaze, presents little other than a tasking house of base necessities, a chained prison of cruel disappointments, even to our human reason, clogged as it is with bars and contradictions, appears hardly to admit the opportunity of question, and of consequence to that spirit its disposition can but be a matter of indifference. Still, to the surviving friends, whose affection cannot separate mind from matter, those forms lying in the still and silent tomb, retain all their dear associations, and surely it most gravely becomes the members of that profession, which, next to the altar, stands foremost in benevolence, that the deepest prudence should be exercised in this gloomy rite required by the living from the dead. OLD KENNEDY, THE QUARTER-MASTER. (Constitution and Guerriere.) No. I.