preaches a lesson to you not to be lightly set aside. Your turn in the barber-shop of fate, when you, too, will be invited to take the inexorable chair, is sure to come. The avenging shears are waiting to crop you also. "Be wise to-day; 't is madness to defer," cries Dr. Young, in his suggestive "Night Thoughts," a book written for after-dark reflection, the very time when your unhallowed business begins. Think, gentlemen, how party-colored trousers would become such nimble legs as yours! Would iron bracelets ornament a pair of wrists in close proximity to taper fingers such as you exhibit,fingers educated, I am informed, by adepts in reducing size to especial emergencies? Gentlemen, I will pursue no further a course of thought distasteful perhaps to sensitive spirits and unwelcome to household artists like yourselves. I will venture the hope, however, that you will, in all future exploits on my own premises, do me the particular favor to abstain from wanton acts of cruelty to "lifeless and inanimate clay" (to say nothing of marble), -- acts "That make such waste in brief mortality." -- In closing this epistle, let me remind your brotherhood of an observation written years ago by a brilliant and thoughtful French woman, when describing a certain notorious and infamous character who figured a long time since in high Parisian circles: "There are two little inconveniences," said she, "which make it difficult for any one to undertake his funeral oration, namely, his life and his death!" This remark is equally valuable to those of us who move in a lower stratum of society than the archbishop whom Madame was depicting. Take care, gentlemen with fractured reputations, devourers of widows' houses, and breakers and enterers generally, or your own dark records, like that of the great prelate's, may deprive you also of those obsequies which he forfeited by the habitual sequestration of other people's property and the application of it to his own unbridled and selfish uses. Gentlemen, I have no reluctance now in bidding you farewell, and, in doing so, I sincerely wish it may erelong be said of all your tribe individually, what Lucullus in the play observes of Timon: 66 Every man has his fault, and Honesty is his." F "to be wise were to be obstinate, " Underhill has lately lost its incarnation of wisdom. A few months ago we followed to his corner-lot in the windy graveyard all that was mortal (and there was considerable of it) of "old Cap'n Barker Brine," as he was familiarly called by man, woman, and child in our little community. Born with protruded lips and elevated eyebrows, he was for many years our village doubter, oracle, and critic,-our tyrannical master of opinion in all public and private matters; and even now the prelude to any wise commonplace is, "Old Cap'n Brine used to say." He is already a classic in Underhill, and will be quoted for cen |