The more likely too it is to be lasting, and crown sincerity, earnestness, and kindness, with constancy. Too many things there are to break the unity of our lives, and scatter into fragments our book of experience. Yet some ties we need, and may have, that run their silken thread through its various chapters, and make a volume of the leaves else fragmentary as the Sibyl's. True friends are such ties, and whether of our kindred or not, they can be won by friendliness and kept only by constancy. Some deemed such may fall off and become indifferent, perhaps false, but who that has any heart cannot feel happy in some form of constant kindness, and say with the Scripture and from experience: "A friend loveth at all times, And a brother is born for adversity." Happiness indeed, when as we go through life and take its ups and downs, and look upon its ever-enlarging horizon, we can meet betimes and often some one or more whom we have known from youth, and whose very faces and voices express our best remembrances and hopes. As rising above dull etiquette, we call them by their familiar names, and say William, or Henry, or Mary, or Ellen, grim time seems to drop his inexorable scythe, and the roses that appeared withered in our path bloom out as amaranths of immortality. Power, as well as pleasure, comes from the interview, especially if, under the incentive, noble friendship gives its fascinations to wisdom, and thus stirred we review our lives closely, scrutinize our ways seriously, and our whole experience rises up under a new charm to warn us of evil and urge us to good, ready to say religiously: "Change not a friend for any good, by no means, Neither a faithful brother for the gold of Ophir."