Can we not see in this heathen parable some glimmering of the Great Hope which was never entirely obscured to the ancient world?—some faint foresight of, some vague longing after, the great Example which has since taught its holy lesson of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice? It is not for me to enlarge on a topic so sacred and so sublime. Enough for us and such as we are, if by lavishing gold for silver freely on our brother, we can cast but one humble mite into the treasury of our God. There is much talk in the world about ingratitude. People who do good to others at cost or inconvenience to themselves are apt to expect a great flow of thanks, a great gush of sentiment in return. They are generally disappointed. Those natures which feel benefits the most deeply are often the least capable of expressing their feelings, and a speechless tongue is with them the result of a full heart. Besides, you are sure to be repaid for a good action at some time or another. Like seed sown in the Nile, “the bread cast upon the waters,” it may not come back to you for many days, but come back at last it most certainly _will_. Would you like your change in silver or in gold? Will you have it in a few graceful, well-chosen expressions, or in the sterling coin of silent love with its daily thoughts and nightly prayers; or, better still even than these, will you waive your claim to it down here, and have it carried to your account above? I am supposing yours is not one of those natures which have arrived at the highest, the noblest type of benevolence, and give their gold neither for silver nor for copper, but freely without return at all. To these I can offer no encouragement, no advice. Their grapes are ripened, their harvest is yellow, the light is already shining on them from the golden hills of heaven. CHAPTER VI A DAY THAT IS DEAD I have been burning old letters to-night; their ashes are fluttering in the chimney even now; and, alas! while they consume, fleeting and perishable like the moments they record, “each dying ember” seems to have “wrought its ghost” upon my heart. Oh! that we could either completely remember or completely forget. Oh! that the image of Mnemosyne would remain close enough for us to detect the flaws in her imperishable marble, or that she would remove herself so far as to be altogether out of sight. It is the golden haze of “middle distance” that sheds on her this warm and tender light. She is all the more attractive that we see her through a double veil of retrospection and regret, none the less lovely because her beauty is dimmed and softened in a mist of tears.