and he goes through the world with his little _repertoire_ of "The Calf of Gold," "Infelice," "O mio Palermo," "The Last Man," and the "Wanderer," a very Ishmael of wretchedness, and a howling Dervish of despair. He drinks beer, and all sorts of fiery damnations, eats sausage and kraut with impunity, and smokes villainous tobacco in short clay pipes. He despises the razor and eschews the little weaknesses of kids and patent leathers. The tenor is the nightingale; he is the crow. The tenor is the beloved of women, but for him no serenade, no face in the lattice shaming the moon with its brightness and beauty. I pray, therefore, all gentlefolk to deal kindly with the basso, and make his rough road as smooth as possible, for it is as inevitable as fate that he will live to an hundred years of age, and sing every blessed day of the century, and will finally be gathered to his fathers, singing as he goes. And, as he goes singing to his fathers, I have another topic of which he reminds me. As I sit here writing, some poor fellow, who has got through with the troubles of the world, is going home to sleep under the turf, which is now so restless with all the quick impulses of spring-life, and which will soon weave a green and flower-embroidered counterpane above him. A band is playing a dirge, the wail and melancholy rhythm of which fall unheeded upon his ears, forever closed to the sweet sounds of the earth. To me, there is something ineffably sad in the playing of a dirge in the open air. The funereal solemnity of the music contrasts so strangely with the beauty of the clear heavens and the joyous life of nature, and interweaves an _Andante_ so unexpectedly in the _Scherzo_ of the din and jargon of the busy street life, that I cannot keep the tears out of my eyes, and I cannot but pause for a minute, on my journey, to think. And I think of the day when I shall drop out of the comedy of life and some one else will take up my part and go on with it, as if I had never been in the play at all. I think that, some bright morning, A will meet B on the street and say: "Did you know that ---- died yesterday?" "No! Is that so? What was the matter with him?" And then the two will talk of grain and corner lots, for it was only a bubble that disappeared on the great tide of humanity, ever flowing from one eternity to another. I wonder if anyone will remember me from one spring-birth of flowers to another. And I think of those standing about me, with their hearts beating to the time of the dirges, and with each pulsation approaching a step nearer to the long sleep. And, somehow, although the dirge saddens me, by sending a shadow across the brightness of the sunny day, I think I feel the better for having heard it.