“Are you aware, Dunshunner, that one of your bills falls due at the Gorbals Bank upon Tuesday next?”
“Mercy upon me, Bob! I had forgotten all about it.”
I did not go to the Highlands after all. The fatigue and exertion we had undergone rendered it quite indispensable that my friend Robert and I should relax a little. Accordingly we have both embarked for a short run upon the Continent.
Boulogne-sur-Mer,
12th August 1847.
FIRST AND LAST
BY WILLIAM MUDFORD.
[MAGA. February 1829.]
Take down from your shelves, gentle reader, your folio edition of Johnson’s Dictionary,—or, if you possess Todd’s edition of Johnson, take down his four ponderous quartos; turn over every leaf, read every word from A to Z, and then confess, that in the whole vocabulary there are not any two words which awaken in your heart such a crowd of mixed and directly opposite emotions as the two which now stare you in the face—FIRST and LAST! In the abstract, they embrace the whole round of our existence: in the detail, all its brightest hopes, its noblest enjoyments, and its most cherished recollections; all its loftiest enterprises, and all its smiles and tears; its pangs of guilt, its virtuous principles, its trials, its sorrows, and its rewards. They give you the dawn and the close of life, the beginning and the end of its countless busy scenes. They are the two extremities of a path which, be it long, or be it short, no man sees at one and the same moment. Happy would it be for us, sometimes, if we could—if we could behold the end of a course of action as certainly as we do the beginning; but oftener, far oftener, would it be our curse and torment, unless, with the foresight or foreknowledge, we had the power to avert the end.