And I suppose when you and I retire from the stage, and the curtain comes down on the little farce we have been playing, that the great audience will not go home, nor the manager close up the theatre, but that other actors will step into our buskins, and thus the play will be kept up, and men will laugh, and women will weep, and others will love and hate, and do brave deeds and naughty deeds, although the call-boy may never summon us again behind the lights.
Now, I might go on from this point and preach you a sermon, as my brethren in the pulpit will do, upon the brevity of time and the stern realities of life, but I am not going to do anything of the kind. Life is not measured by years, nor by flight of time. He lives most who loves most, and lives longest who appreciates what is best. Some men live longer in a year than others in a lifetime.
December 26, 1868.
[PUBLIC PARTIES.]
AT breakfast, this morning, our first topic of conversation was on the matter of parties. It has been, as you know, a great party week, and Old Blobbs, in a casual kind of way, desired to know my opinion of them. Celeste looked a little uneasy at this request, for there is nothing that so delights that Dear Child as a party crush, and nothing is sweeter to her than the fine disorder of her green silk, after young Gauche has emptied his sherry over it, or old Mrs. Dalrymple, who is chaperoning her two nieces to the marital market, has spilled a plate of escalloped oysters upon it, and that overgrown boy of the Midases, who is out for the first time, has trodden them in and disturbed the integrity of the panier besides. She regards all these things as the veteran does his scars, and loves to talk of them in her "confidences" to her two-and-forty dear young friends, who have just bobbed in after dinner to say "How do you do?" and inquire if it was really true, that bit of scandal about Matilda So-and-So and young Codliver. The company immediately pushed their chairs back. Mignon called the Canary from his cage for its morning meal, and as it flew to its customary place upon her shoulder, and watched with its sharp little black eyes the bread which was being crumbled for it, I thought I would rather talk about those two birds than parties. Blanche sat with her fine eyes half closed, as dear old Rossini used to sit at his table, and listened in a dreamy sort of way. Aurelia had all she could do to keep the baby still by threatening it with her shapely fore-finger, while Old Blobbs took his fifth baked potato, a feat in gormandizing which incurred a glance from Mrs. Blobbs that would have withered any other person and caused a rustle of her black silk (for Mrs. B. will wear her black silk to breakfast), eloquent with promises of something between the curtains which would not be as soothing as a lullaby nor as delicious as a love-song.