A lady opens a short epistle from her brother.  He is rich, successful, busy, in short driven, cannot visit her at a certain date, regrets, with love, etc., all in ten short lines.  What does this dry notice tell?  It tells of a buffalo-robe which, by much strategy, can be secured from father’s study; it tells of a daring, rollicking boy who has got the strategy and will soon get the buffalo-robe.  It tells of two boys and three girls, all gathered in the robe, with the rollicking one as fireman and engineer, making the famous trip down the stairs which shall tumble them all into the presence of a parent who will make a weak demonstration of severity, clearly official, and merely masking a very evident inclination to try a trip on the same train.

WHERE WAS THIS?

Why at the dear old Home, in the Long Ago.  Who was the fireman and engineer?  Why, this great, pompous man of business, whose short note his sister has just laid down—­of course, he was the fireman and the engineer!

We see the sister of Rembrandt, the painter, traveling weary miles to the house of the brother whom in youth she shielded from the wrath of a drunken father, whose rude pictures she concealed from eyes that would have looked upon them in anger.  Now he is the most celebrated painter of his time.  He is rich beyond the imagination of his humble contemporaries.  He never receives people into his stronghold.

TWO GREAT DOGS GUARD THE ENTRANCE.

Into a gloomy portal the aged sister enters, and soon the miser and the good angel of his past are together.  There they sit in the dusk, and recall, after sixty years of separation, the scenes of the Home which existed eighty years before!  We marvel at a word that comes along a cable under the ocean.  Why should we not also wonder at a little word that can sound across the awful stretch of eighty years, through

AN OCEAN OF LIFE,

stormy with fearful disappointments, boisterous with seasons of success, and desolate with the drift, the slime, and the fungus of miserly greed!

Says Dickens:  “If ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor.  The ties that bind the wealthy and proud to Home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of heaven.”

“If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man,” writes Jeremy Taylor, “how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how composed his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how moist his mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises, the diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of unnatural appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of the ambitious.”

It has happened within a hundred years that men of private station have become Kings.  One of the severest trials of their exalted lot has been the disaster which came upon their homes.