In the name of our common humanity, do we not play pranks enough with the living to let the dead rest? Why vex their memories with the foolery of fashion? Why make ourselves walking sign-boards, announcing to the world, that does not care a whit about it, that we are in this or that stage of grief? With our fashionable mourning, we are putting a libel on immortality, and lowering to the vulgar level of common notoriety what should be most sacred and strictly private. And now I suppose that, in answer to all this, somebody will fling at me that stupid old apothegm--_De mortuis nil nisi bonum._ It is time that maxim was exploded, or, at least, dissected, so that it may have proper application. A, who has been a rascal all his life, dies, and immediately we are all so tender of his reputation that we very nearly canonize him. As soon as a man dies, it is the universal outcry to let him rest. I do not see the slightest danger of disturbing his rest by anything we can say or do. He will probably lie quite as still as if we are silent. It is not probable that he will grow indignant if we tell the exact truth about him, or exhibit any large amount of gratification over our eulogies. In this upper world it is quite a common thing for us to assail our dear friends as soon as their coat-tails are over our thresholds, when this backbiting may be cruelly unjust, and there are some of us who require a very light stock of material to do a thriving business in slander. We pursue our friends with defamation while living, and while it will injure them, but when dead and past all injury, we grow suddenly reticent and commence the rather ungracious task of eulogy, and we usually outdo ourselves in the latter direction. Let equal justice be done. Hold up the dead man's virtues to emulation, and his vices to abhorrence. He is quite beyond any harm we can do him, and if we have any tenderness to bestow on reputation, let us bestow it on the living. October 26, 1867. _OUR THANKSGIVING._ We had just got up from dinner table on Thanksgiving Day and retired to the parlor to chat--Celeste and Boosey, Aurelia and her husband and infant, Mignon and Blanche, Old Blobbs and Mrs. Blobbs and myself.