THE TWO COLUMNS. Music wooes, and leads the human race ever onward, and there are two columns that follow her. One is the happy column, ringing with laughter and song. Its line of march is strewn with roses; it is hedged on either side by happy homes and smiling faces. The other is the column of sorrow, moaning with suffering and distress. I saw an aged mother with her white locks and wrinkled face, swoon at the Governor's feet; I saw old men tottering on the staff, with broken hearts and tear stained faces, and heard them plead for their wayward boys. I saw a wife and seven children, clad in rags, and bare-footed, in mid-winter, fall upon their knees around him who held the pardoning power. I saw a little girl climb upon the Governor's knee, and put her arms around his neck; I heard her ask him if he had little girls; then I saw her sob upon his bosom as though her little heart would break, and heard her plead for mercy for her poor, miserable, wretched, convict father. I saw want, and woe, and poverty, and trouble, and distress, and suffering, and agony, and anguish, march in solemn procession before the Gubernatorial door; and I said: "Let the critics frown and rail, let this heartless world condemn, but he who hath power and doth not temper justice with mercy, will cry in vain himself for mercy on that great day when the two columns shall meet! For, thank God, the stream of happy humanity that rolls on like a gleaming river, and the stream of the suffering and distressed and ruined of this earth, both empty into the same great ocean of eternity and mingle like the waters, and there is a God who shall judge the merciful and the unmerciful!" THERE IS A MELODY FOR EVERY EAR. [Illustration: THE MID-NIGHT SERENADE.] The multitudinous harmonies of this world differ in pathos and pitch as the stars differ, one from another, in glory. There is a style for every taste, a melody for every ear. The gabble of geese is music to the goose; the hoot of the hoot-owl is lovlier to his mate than the nightingale's lay; the concert of Signor "Tomasso Cataleny" and Mademoiselle "Pussy" awakeneth the growling old bachelor from his dreams, and he throweth his boquets of bootjacks and superannuated foot gear. The peripatetic gentleman from Italy asks no loftier strain than the tune of his hand organ and the jingle of the nickels, "the tribute of the Caesars." The downy-lipped boy counts the explosion of a kiss on the cheek of his darling "dul-ci-ni-a del To-bo-so" sweeter than an echo from paradise; and it is said that older folks like its music. The tintinnabulations of the wife's curtain lecture are too precious to the enraptured husband to be shared with other ears. And in the hush of the bed-time hour, when tired daddies are seeking repose in the oblivion of sleep, the unearthly bangs on the grand piano below in the parlor, and the unearthly screams and yells of the budding prima donna, as she sings to her admiring beau: