he looks very much like you. There was no intention on the captain's part to rob you." The convict gasped and leaned forward eagerly. “Until the receipt of this letter," resumed the warden, “I had opposed the movement which had been started for your pardon, but when this letter came I recommended your pardon and it has been granted. Besides, you have a serious heart trouble. So you are now discharged from the prison.” The convict stared, and leaned back speechless. A certain painful softness tempered the iron in his face. “You have made certain threats against me,” said the warden. “I shall not permit your intentions in that regard—for 'I care nothing about them—to prevent me from discharging a duty which, as from one man to another, I owe you. I have treated you with a cruelty, the enormity of which I now comprehend. The lives of us both have been wrecked ; but your suffering is in the past,-mine is present, and will cease only with my life.” With that the warden, very pale, but with a clear purpose in his face, took a loaded revolver from a drawer and laid it before the convict. “Now is your chance," he said, quietly: "no one can hinder you." The convict shrank away from the weapon as from a viper. “Not yet-not yet,” he whispered, in agony. The convict, whose ghastly pallor, glassy eyes, and gleaming teeth sat like a mask of death upon his face, staggered to his feet. “You have done it at last! you have broken my spirit. A human word has done what the dungeon and the whip could not do. .... I could be your slave for that human word.” He reeled, and the warden caught him and seated him in the chair. “That human word,” he whispered,-“ if you had spoken it long ago,-if-but it's all--it's all right-now. I'll go—I'll go to work-to-morrow.” There was a slightly firmer pressure on the hand that held the warden's; then it relaxed. The weary head sank back and rested on the chair, and a dead man's face was upturned toward the ceiling Heroism and History. NEWTON BATEMAN. HEROISM and history are related as cause and effect. Blot out the heroic periods of the ages, and you pull down all the Alps of historyeliminate the heroic element from human life, and biography would not be worth writing or reading. Take it from science, and there would be none to inspire or lead, and her all-conquering march must end. Take it from invention and discovery, and from the discouragements of preliminary defeat, there would be no rebound; the apocalyptic fires of research and scrutiny would be extinguished, and the arcana of nature would cease to be explored. Take it from the realm of art, and with it would perish all highest and holiest conceptions, all that is loftiest in sublimity and most soul-stirring in grandeur, for these come of that ideal which inspires the heroic in thought and action. Eliminate it from patriotism, and the light would fade from the banners of liberty, and lofty courage and grand disdain of danger and death for Fatherland would become but the remembered virtues of a by-gone time. Remove it from the conceptions of benevolence and philanthropy, and tame and feeble would be the efforts for the relief of suffering, and low would beat the pulses of compassion and pity. Withdraw it as an element in friendship and love, and the glory would fade from those noblest and sweetest of the affections, and what had been transcendent in gracious excellency would sink to the plain of the commonplace and the selfish. All the most illustrious periods of national life-and all that most lists individual lives towards the circle of the everlasting and the divine, is referable to the heroic element in man. All that is high and glorious in history and in life is linked with those mighty events and crucial hours when the spirit of heroism was dominant in the souls of men. All the grand ages of history have been the heroic ages. What is a heroic age? What is heroism? Who are heroes ? A heroic age may be defined, as one conspicuously and predominantly unselfish. It is one in which self-consciousness, individual and national, is pushed out of sight. It is one in which the centripetal power of selfishness is broken by the world-embracing power of love and humanity. It is a period when a grand elevation of feeling, a strange exaltation of soul, and a corresponding dignity and nobility of thought and action, are seen in men. It is an era when men seem uplifted and borne on, by unseen but mighty impulses, and filled with courage and strength and joy, from hidden sources—a time when the actions of men seem extravagant and incomprehensible to those of their own period who see not the “heavenly vision.” Who of us can fully understand the lofty courage and sublime faith that sent the Pilgrim Fathers across wintry seas to the loneliness and desolation of this New World, and that sustained them through perils and hardships and sorrows and losses, the full measure of which will never be known till the revelations of the last day. Yet, but for a love of freedom that caused men to lay life itself, a glad sacrifice, on her altars, ---but for this inspiration of heroism that stamp men as the children of God, indeed, the principles of liberty would not to-day be covering so large a portion of the earth, nor so rapidly advancing to universal dominion. And out of the heroisms and agonisms of the men of the Mayflower has come this Western Republic, this Christian Nation, in the heart of a Continent, and extending from sea to sea ; together with those grand conceptions of civil and religious liberty, of education and government, of morality and righteousness, which have made us what we are, and which, if not departed from, will be the stability of the nation, down the long future. Born of heroism-of Christian heroism-was this matchless government, this imperial heritage of ours. No commonplace men-no selfish and calculating spirits—no mean and small and cowardly souls had part or lot in the architecture of this magnificent national structure. |