Poor M——! Chained to his early disappointment, and intellectually so far removed from his plodding neighbors that none thought it necessary to offer him their sympathy. How little the average man knows the average human heart. Education only strengthens the soul’s hunger for sympathy, love and fellowship, and because I sympathized with the man of the wasted life, and he sympathized with me in my almost hopeless struggles, a warm friendship grew up between us, and he allowed me to see farther into the shadows that shrouded his disappointed soul than any of his family ever penetrated. He was one of those retentive minds that could not forget, and he tried to dull the pain at his heart with drink. Sometimes he would make a strong effort to reform and rebuild his wasted resolutions, and for several months he would toil on the farm like a hired man. But his mind was too active for such a vegetable existence, and his books would take him out of the fields of physical labor. Then the old discontent, the memory of the old love would fill his soul and again he would drown everything in liquor, like a second Edgar Allen Poe. In one of these sprees he died, and his wasted life ended in a death that shocked his many friends. GARRET MEMORIES My boy expressed a fear to go up on to the attic one day recently, and when I asked him what he found to fear up in a dusty old garret, he said there was so much old stuff up there that belonged to people who were dead, and if these old things had memories they must surely be thinking of the old days and the old friends, and had no welcome for the boys of the present generation. Well, wife and I know the old garret has many memories, or at least articles that suggest old memories, and we seldom make a trip to the old store house of family heirlooms without coming away with a queer feeling of loneliness tugging at our hearts. No doubt the boy has often detected the subdued and solemn expression on our sobered faces; and learned his lesson of awe and veneration from reading the lines and shadows he has so often seen there. The last time we were up on the garret, the three of us, we set about digging up old memories, because a lady’s side saddle hanging to a rafter started us to digging up some old family lore. The saddle belonged to wife’s great-grandmother, and is almost a century old. It was on this saddle her great-grandmother made the ride of nine miles through the dark to warn her father that burglars were trying to break into their house.