I like old songs into which the writers have poured their souls; songs as full of passion and pain as the West sometimes is full of thunder clouds; songs full of sadness which is not the boisterous wo of the hired mute, but as unobtrusive and gentle as the summer rain; songs full of the quaintness, and delicacy, and beauty which time has only mellowed, and which come down to us hallowed with associations which cluster around them like vines. Now and then you get a song which touches the heart at once, but a song, like a friend, must have been tested by experience before you can fully receive it. Who would not take Mendelssohn's "First Violet," and gladly give up all the flower-songs of to-day? Has the religion of to-day anything more delicately beautiful and graceful than Herrick, anything more massive and majestic than the "Ein Feste Berg"? Do our modern lovers sing such dainty serenades as Spenser and Sidney sang to their Phyllises? I like old friends. A man can't afford to have too many friends. It is too expensive in the social economy, not in the matter of dollars and cents, but in the personal wear and tear they occasion one. A man with a thousand friends is worse off than the Wandering Jew. A man with five hundred friends is to be pitied. A man with a hundred friends is a victim. A man with fifty friends is happy in a quiet way. A man with twenty-five friends can find time to be a philosopher. A man with ten friends, one for each finger, each one of whom will stick to him like his fingers, is justified in crying "Eureka" over the discovery of perfect happiness. The result of my observations in a feminine direction, is, that women are so made that they will be inconsolable without a thousand dear friends, to whom they are bound by the tenderest ties until death, and ten thousand other friends entitled to the confidences which distract the female breast, without which relief, the female breast would be simply a pent up Vesuvius. If, therefore, you have ten friends, and they are old friends who have travelled all along the journey with you, through storm and through sunshine, with any one of whom you would exchange your personal identity, I congratulate you.