All this has had the result of making our men dull companions; after dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is tabooed, they talk of nothing! It is sad for a rich man (unless his mind has remained entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to realize that money really buys very little, and above a certain amount can give no satisfaction in proportion to its bulk, beyond that delight which comes from a sense of possession. Croesus often discovers as he grows old that he has neglected to provide himself with the only thing that "is a joy for ever"--a cultivated intellect--in order to amass a fortune that turns to ashes, when he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources he fondly imagined it would afford him. Like Talleyrand's young man who would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for himself a dreadful old age! No. 16--A Holy Land Not long ago an article came under my notice descriptive of the neighborhood around Grant's tomb and the calm that midsummer brings to that vicinity, laughingly referred to as the "Holy Land." As careless fingers wandering over the strings of a violin may unintentionally strike a chord, so the writer of those lines, all unconsciously, with a jest, set vibrating a world of tender memories and associations; for the region spoken of is truly a holy land to me, the playground of my youth, and connected with the sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past. Ernest Renan in his _Souvenirs d'Enfance_, tells of a Brittany legend, firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of "Is," which ages ago disappeared beneath the waves. The peasants still point out at a certain place on the coast the site of the fabled city, and the fishermen tell how during great storms they have caught glimpses of its belfries and ramparts far down between the waves; and assert that on calm summer nights they can hear the bells chiming up from those depths. I also have a vanished "Is" in my heart, and as I grow older, I love to listen to the murmurs that float up from the past. They seem to come from an infinite distance, almost like echoes from another life. At that enchanted time we lived during the summers in an old wooden house my father had re-arranged into a fairly comfortable dwelling. A tradition, which no one had ever taken the trouble to verify, averred that Washington had once lived there, which made that hero very real to us. The picturesque old house stood high on a slope where the land rises boldly; with an admirable view of distant mountain, river and opposing Palisades.