A few months later, going to visit a discharged convict for whom the association had built a shop far up in the city, Friend Hopper took a fatal cold. It was a long and painful sickness, but he restrained his tendency to groan by singing, and said: “There is no cloud. There is nothing in the way. Nothing troubles me.” His heart was with his past work. His son-in-law wrote: “Reminiscences are continually falling from his lips, like leaves in autumn from an old forest tree; not, indeed green, but rich in the colors that are of the tree, and characteristic. I have never seen so beautiful a close to a good man’s life.” On the last day he said: “I seem to hear voices singing, ‘We have come to take thee home.’” And again he spoke low to his daughter, “Maria, is there anything peculiar in this room?” “No; why do you ask that question?” “Because,” said the dying patriarch, “you all look so beautiful; and the covering on the bed hath such glorious colors as I never saw. But perhaps I had better not have said anything about it.”
His last act was characteristic. Calling for his box of private papers he took out one and asked to have it destroyed, lest it should do some injury. He confided to his eldest daughter as a precious keepsake a little yellow paper, fastened by a rusty pin; it was the first love letter of his first love, her mother, written when she and he were fourteen years old, children in school. Love of justice and love of love in his last breath!
Truth is the source of every good to gods and men. He who expects to be blest and fortunate in this world should be a partaker of it from the earliest moment of his life, that he may live as long as possible a person of truth; for such a man is trustworthy. But that man is untrustworthy who loveth a lie in his heart; and if it be told involuntary, and in mere wantonness, he is a fool. In neither case can they be envied; for every knave and shallow dunce is without real friends. As time passes on to morose old age, he becomes known, and has prepared for himself at the end of his life a dreary solitude; so that, whether his associates and children be alive or not, his life becomes nearly equally a state of isolation.—Plato.
WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE INEBRIATES?
Synopsis of a lecture delivered on Saturday, April 12, in the National Museum, at Washington, D. C., by Dr. W. W. Godding, in charge of the Government Hospital for the Insane at Washington, D. C.
The profound interest which I feel for this subject is in sympathy with certain words of Terence: “I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me.” This sentiment is to be commended to the scientists of the Christian era. Entitled, then, to the grave consideration of humanity, is the miserable inebriate. The study of this subject has both a biological and anthropological bearing. The former defines the protoplasm—the wonderful beginning of existence—the subject in hand demonstrates the destructive oxidation of the soul in the presence of alcohol, the deterioration of vital energy, and a misspent life. Again, the anthropologist studies man in his present and primeval existence, delving into burial mounds and bone cases to spell out the lessons learned by each succeeding generation in the great struggle for existence.