Then, among the names of the dead of our own day, I saw those of Dickens, Bulwer, Macaulay, and Dr. Livingstone.

Kings, queens, statesmen, soldiers, clergymen, authors and poets here have equal station.  Some may lie under richer tombs than others, but all rest beneath the vaulted roof of Westminster Abbey, the place of highest honor that England can offer her departed sons.

CRIP’S GARRET-DAY

BY SARAH J. PRICHARD.

Crip was having a dismal—­a very dismal time of it.  Crip was eleven, it was his birthday, and Crip was in disgrace—­in a garret.

Wasn’t it dreadful?

It happened thus:  Crip’s father was a shoemaker.  The bench where he worked and the little bit of a shop, about eight feet every way, in which he worked, stood on a street leading down to the town dock, and the name of the town we will say was Barkhampstead, on Cape Cod Bay.

Now and then—­that is, once or twice in the year—­a whaling vessel set sail from the dock, and sometimes, not always, the same vessels returned to the dock.

The going and the coming of a “whaler” made Crip’s father, Mr. John Allen, glad.  It was his busy season, for when the seamen went, they always wanted stout new boots and shoes, and, when they came, they always needed new coverings on their feet to go home in.

Two years before this dismal time that Crip was having, the ship “Sweet Home” went away, and it had not been spoken or signaled or heard from in any way, since four months from the time it left the dock at Barkhampstead.

The fathers and mothers and wives and little children of the men who went in the “Sweet Home” kept on hoping, and fearing, and feeling terribly bad about everybody on board whom they loved, when, without any warning whatever, right in the midst of a raging snow storm, the “Sweet Home,” all covered in ice from mast-head to prow, sailed, stiff and cold, into Barkhampstead harbor.

Oh! wasn’t there a great gladness over all the old town then!  They rang the meeting-house bell.  It was a hoarse, creaking old bell, but there was music in it that time, as it throbbed against the falling snow, and made a most delicious concert of joy and gratitude in every house within a mile and more of the dock.

Mr. John Allen rushed down to the “Sweet Home,” as soon as ever it came in.  He hadn’t anybody on board to care very particularly about, but how he did rub his hands together as he went, letting the snow gather fast on his long beard, as he thought of the thirty or forty pairs of feet that must have shoes!

Crip, you know, was to be eleven the next day, and his mother, in the big red house next door to the little shop, had made him a cake for the day, and, beside, plum-pudding was to be for dinner.

Before Crip’s father had gone down to the dock he had said to Crip:  “Now, you must stay right here in the shop and not go near the dock, until I come back;” and Crip had said “Yes, sir,” although every bit of his throbbing boy body wanted to take itself off to the “Sweet Home.”