The anguish of the situation became so intense that it was almost a relief when the cat was shot by the heroic burgher in the very shot by which he completed a hundred consecutive bull’s-eyes--or would have completed them, but for the fated animal. Jake’s life was ruined by this failure; as Elisa’s was ruined by the loss of her companion, and the village life was ruined because there remained nothing to talk about thereafter. So, all the inhabitants of that Norwegian hamlet shut their windows tight, and continued each in the pursuit of his own serious hobby, neither washing, nor smiling, nor making allowance for the hobbies of the rest, but only grinding out remorsely the magnificent tragic material of Norwegian life. DR. HOWE. There are men who have great fame during their lives, and then disappear forever; and there are others who live unknown to their contemporaries, and then emerge upon posterity, and cast back a perpetual reproach upon their own times which were not worthy of them. To neither of these classes does Dr. Howe belong; for he was a hero in his own day, and has left behind him so many memorials of his mind and times that he can never become wholly lost to the world. He belongs rather to that class of reappearing reputations which die through successive resurrections, and distribute their message to humanity through many undulations of loss and rediscovery. One cannot tell where to set the boundary to such men’s influence, for while the student writes, the shadow moves. The scribbler who is assigning values and labels to history becomes an instrument in the hands of his subject, and something is accomplished through him which is beyond his own horizon. This is the mechanism through which great men reach the world. The present age has all but forgotten Dr. Howe: his name has for some years been on the road to oblivion. For I do not count as fame the dusty memorials and busts of dead philanthropists which adorn and disfigure college libraries. Their honored and obliterated features carry something, but it is not fame. They are like neglected finger-boards which have fallen by the wayside and are calmly undergoing unimaginable dissolution through the soft handling of the elements. Wordsworth might have addressed a sonnet to these men had he not been so preoccupied with external nature. “Behold, this man was once the sign-board of classical learning, this of electricity, this of natural science.” But Wordsworth would have been obliged first to rub the moss from the inscriptions.