vacated by Tiberius, and from its slimy top had pitched victims to wild beasts and voracious fish, and amused the bloody pauses in his grim, mad humors by feeding his favorite horse with gilded oats, and would have made him consul had not the least inhuman brute died before his quadripedal instalment into the office which Cicero sought so long and praised so loudly. The great events, especially if at a distance, fill large spaces in our histories; but, like a marriage or death in the family, they occupy but a comparatively brief part of the life of any of its members. There is a great deal of water, even in rivers that are famous for large fish, that holds no fish at all,—waters whose onflow gladdens and refreshes large districts. A nation or a community must at some time have marked events to stir its blood and create noble memories; but it cannot live on Fourth of July or the remembrance of Waterloo. The life of the greater part of the colonists passed, as that of most people in all times and countries is spent, in quiet, steady work during the day, eating three meals if they had them, and two if they had not, and in sleeping as well nights as the hot or cold weather, wives or children, or other disturbers of the peace, would permit. We read of some red-letter event, like Kidd’s piracies in 1696–1698, that tossed from the deck possibly twenty people; and fancy that this Semmes must have borne an important part in those closing years of the century, without reflecting that almost every week in the year records more victims on our rivers and railroads,—victims despatched by us between the mouthfuls of our toast at breakfast. Such events bear the same relation to the volume of life as the capital letters, which head the chapters of a book, to its solid contents. They are the daubs of paint on the card of gingerbread; the small pinholes pricked in the large family loaf. We eat one thousand and ninety-four meals in the year without any recollection of them; we remember only the one Thanksgiving dinner which did us no more good than the others, and which probably, like Kidd’s piracies, stuck in our crops very distressingly. No doubt many of the colonists never heard of Robert Kidd; and others, who had listened to Mary Jane singing the song which told “how he sailed,” fancied that, like Bluebeard, he was only invented for songs and red-covered primers. In fine, these notable events are, in general, but the froth-bubbles on the river’s surface. The solid on-pressing mass does not feel the puffy little globes, iridescent though they be, and swells though they may appear to the few fish just around them. There was only one Kidd on the wide seas. Of the many other craft, carefully managed, sailing slowly and wearily, earning patient wages, and making port at the same time, we hear nothing.