A man recognizes the certainty of this event's taking place with regard to his neighbor, his friend, and the members of his own family. He feels that the hour of separation from his aged and beloved parents must come; that the brother or sister, whose infant joys and sorrows are his own, whose sympathy has cheered his manhood, must one day be taken from him; that the wife of big bosom must close her eyes in death; that the stern messenger may at any time smite the darlings of their little flock, gathered around his knee in play or prayer; and while they are yet in life he prepares for them the last resting-place in some sheltered spot, some woodland cemetery, where the brightest smile of nature may gild the place of their repose. But he cannot realize that he himself, in the pride of his manhood, the blood coursing cheerily through his veins, a sense of vitality giving an elasticity to every movement, will be called upon to lay down this glorious panoply of life, to feel the bounding blood curdle and become as ice within his veins, and the bright vision of the world fade into nothingness before his glazing eyes. He himself, by some miracle, must be snatched from the universal doom. Thus death finds almost every man unprepared. The very criminal, upon whose ears fall the deep tones of the funeral knell, hopes for a reprieve even at the foot of the scaffold. The soldier cannot think of death as he mounts the "imminent deadly breach;"--his comrades may fall, but he must escape. Thus, in our strange, delusive sophistry, even if we think of death, we seek to alienate the idea from ourselves.