Allow me to compress into closing sentences, a few general remarks....  Those lakes that have no outlet, grow salt and bitter; we all know the ennui and bitterness of those souls that receive many blessings, sending forth none; better drain your soul out for others, than have it become a Dead Sea....  Black, that absorbs all rays, reflecting none, is an anomaly in nature; it is true, but one earthly character has reflected all the rays of goodness, absorbing none, making the common light ’rich, like a lily in bloom;’ yet every man can reflect at least one ray to gladden the earth....  It is not necessary, even in the cold atmosphere of this world, to become contractedly selfish; cold expands noble natures as it does water....  Lastly ...

Yours, MOLLY O’MOLLY.

NO.  IV.

The old trout knows enough to keep off the fisherman’s hook; the squirrel never cracks an empty nut; the crow soon learns the harmlessness of the scarecrow.  But man, though he may have twenty times wriggled off the hook, the patient angler catches him at last.  He always cracks the empty shell, then cries:  ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’  This cry he might be spared would he learn a lesson from the squirrel, who weighs his nuts and throws away the light, hollow shell....  And there are scarescrows, the harmlessness of which the human biped learns not in a a lifetime.  How long is it since that horned, cloven-footed monster whom the monks made of Pan theos and called him Devil, was an object of fear?  How ‘the real, genuine, no mistake’ (savin’ his presence) must have laughed at his own effigy!  Then there is Grim Death, too, a creation of the Dark Ages, for in no age of light could this horror have been ever conceived.  Unlike the other, against him no exorcism avails....  As if the soul about to be launched on the dim sea Eternity, after all lights and forms of the loved shore have become indistinct, must be cut loose from her moorings by this phantom.  The idea that ‘Death comes to set us free,’ would hardly make us ’meet him cheerily, as our true friend,’ were this his real shape.  But were I disposed to enumerate our scarecrows, the list would be incomplete; as there are doubtless many that I have not the shrewdness to recognize as such.

The only humbugs are not those that work on our fears.  There are humbugs that work on our hopes.  These have been likened to bubbles that dance on the wave, burst, and are no more.  They are too often like bomb-shells, that in exploding scatter ruin on all around.  They have also been named air-castles, chateaux en Espagne, ‘baseless fabrics of a vision.’  The baseless fabric of a vision is built of ‘airy nothingness;’ but men found on a wish, structures that tower to heaven, put real, solid material into them, and when they fall, as fall they must—­I’ll not attempt to give an idea of the utter desolation they leave, of the waste place they make of