The second is this: "And so Jane Placide is dead. The theatrical people of New Orleans then have lost much. She imparted a grace and a force and dignity to her rôle which few actresses have been able so admirably to combine. She excelled in a profession in the arduous sphere of which even to succeed requires uncommon gifts, both mental and physical. Her disposition was as lovely as her person. Heaven lodge and rest her fair soul!" The reader will recollect Miss Placide as the friend about whom young Forrest quarrelled with Caldwell and withdrew from his service. How strangely the millions of influences or spirits that weave our fate fly to and fro with the threads of the weft and woof! While he was writing the above words in the capital of France, her remains were sleeping in a quiet cemetery of the far South, on the other side of the world, with the inscription on the slab above her,-- "There's not an hour Of day or dreamy night but I am with thee; There's not a wind but whispers o'er thy name, And not a flower that sleeps beneath the moon But in its hues of fragrance tells a tale Of thee." He passed over to England again, to visit a few spots sacred in his imagination which he had not seen in his former journey there. Chief among these were the house and grave of Shakspeare, at Stratford-upon-Avon. With the eagerness and devotion arising from the lifelong enthusiasm of all his professional studies and experience, reinforced by the feeling of the accumulated homage paid at that shrine by mankind at large, he wandered and mused in the places once so familiar with the living presence of the poet, and still seeming to be suffused with his invisible presence. In the day he had made a careful exploration of the church where the unapproachable dramatist lies sepulchred. Late in the evening, when the moon was riding half-way up the heaven, he clambered over the fence, and, while the gentle current of Avon was lapping the sedges on its shore almost at his feet, gazed in at the window and saw the moonbeams silvering the bust of the dead master on the wall, and the carved letters of the quaint and dread inscription on his tomb,-- "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust encloséd here. Blessed be he who spares these stones, And cursed be he who moves my bones." What a contrast the picture of him in this night-scene at the church-window would have made for those familiar with his appearance on the stage in the wrath of Coriolanus, the remorse of Macbeth, the sneer of Richard, the horror of Othello, or the tempest of Lear!