and as such they will act, regardless of the jibe and sneer of those who accuse them of change, of inconsistency, of being mutable and unstable of purpose.  The point to the march of improvement, the advance in the actualities of life, and ask, ’When every thing else is on the move, shall we stand still?  Shall the opinions of a quarter of a century, a decade, a year, a month ago, remain unchanged, immutable, fixed as a star always, amidst the new demonstrations looming up like mountains everywhere around us?’

“Man’s life is short at best; a little point of time, scarcely discernible on the map of ages; his aspirations, his hopes, his ambition, more transient than the lightning’s flash; but his opinions may tell for good upon that little point occupied by his generation, and he should ‘speak them in words hard as rocks.’  They may aid in illuminating the darkness of the present, and he should therefore ‘speak them in words hard as rocks.’  They may have some influence in building up and ennobling human destiny in the future, and he should therefore ‘speak them in words hard as rocks,’ regardless of the contumely heaped upon him by little minds for having thus spoken them.  What if the ridicule, the denunciations of the unthinking, the sensual, the profligate, the unreflecting fools of the world be poured upon him?  What of that?  To-day, may be one of darkness and storm.  The cloud and the storm will pass away, and the brightness and glory of the sunlight will be all over the earth to-morrow.  Let him ’speak his opinions then of to-day in words hard as rocks, and his opinions of to-morrow in words just as hard.’  Let him speak his opinions thus on all subjects within the range of human investigation, upon science, philosophy, politics, religion, morals; and leave to little minds to settle the question of consistency or change.  Let his be the eagle’s flight towards the sun, and theirs to skim in darkness along the ground, like the course of the mousing owl.”

After it became dark, Smith and Martin went out around the lake night hunting, and the rest retired to our tents.  We heard the report of Smith’s rifle from time to time, and concluded that we should have to court-martial him for a wanton destruction of deer, contrary to the law we had established for our government on that subject.  But on his return, we ascertained that, though having had several shots, he had succeeded in killing or, according to Martin’s account, even wounding but one, and that a yearling, and the poorest and leanest we had seen since we entered the woods.  Though it was thus diminutive in size, Smith declared that he had seen, and shot at, some of the largest deer that ever roamed the forest.  He insisted that he had seen some, by the side of which the largest we had looked upon by daylight, were mere fawns, and thereupon he undertook to establish a theory that the large deer fed by night and the smaller ones by day.  This would have been all well enough, were it not for the fact, understood by