A Wayside Sketcher
A School Fight
'In our return journey to Philadelphia, Thackeray referred to a friend whose wife had been deranged for many years, hopelessly so; and never shall I forget the look, and manner, and voice with which he said to me, "It is an awful thing for her to continue so to live. It is an awful thing for her so to die. But has it never occurred to you, how awful a thing the recovery of lost reason must be without the consciousness of the lapse of time? She finds the lover of her youth a grey-haired old man, and her infants young men and women. Is it not sad to think of this?" As he talked to me thus, I thought of those oft-quoted lines of tenderness—
Ah me! how quick the days are flitting;
I mind me of a time that's gone,
When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting,
In this same place, but not alone.