I have endeavored to call up a few of the reflections that may console a man under adversity, remembering that drooping fortunes may revive, that many of the noblest men have suffered the same privations, and remembering how much lighter this form of affliction generally is than some others that Providence often sees fit to lay upon us.  Trite as it is, I can not help echoing the remark, how vastly the sum of human happiness would be increased, if men could only learn to prize more highly the blessings they have.  Those of us who are in moderate circumstances find it so much easier to envy our rich neighbors than to think with gratitude of our happy lot, contrasted with the many thousand of our needier brethren.  We enjoy so many blessings, that we become unmindful of them.  We rarely think at all about our health, until a few days’ sickness reminds us of the boon we have been enjoying so unconsciously.  In the darkest days of the great crisis, accounts reached us every week from India, telling us that refined and delicately-reared English men and women were being brutally slaughtered or exposed to the loathsome horrors of a lingering siege.  What a paradise the humblest cottage at home would have seemed to these poor creatures, though some of them had been accustomed to ‘stately homes.’

How beautifully this sentiment of gratitude for the common blessings of life has been expressed by Emile Souvestre, one of the purest and noblest writers of our time, and one whose early history presents an instance of great obstacles and trials nobly met and overcome!

’If a little dry sand be all that is left us, may we not still make it blossom with the small joys we now trample under foot.  Ah! if it be the will of God, let my labor be still more hard, my home less comfortable, my table more frugal; let me even assume a workman’s blouse, and I can bear it all willingly and cheerfully, provided I can see the loved faces around me happy, provided I can feast upon their smiles and strengthen myself with their joy.  O holy contentment with poverty! it is thy presence I invoke.  Grant me the cheerful gayety of my wife, the free, unrestrained laughter of my children, and take in exchange, if necessary, all that is yet left me.’

* * * * *

The Molly O’MOLLY papers.

NO.  III.

When Dogberry brought Conrade before Leonato, the only offense he seems to have had a clear idea of, was the one against himself:  ’Moreover, sir, this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me ass.  I beseech you, let it be remembered in his punishment.’  Shakspeare has, by this ’one touch of nature,’ made Dogberry kin to the whole world.  It would be the most terrible of punishments to run the gauntlet of a company, every one of which you had called an ass; whatever may have been the original offense, this would be the one most remembered in your