recall with gratitude to some Benign Power that has given me a moderate measure of worldly success, a modest competence, and a reasonable assurance of the esteem of my fellows; a happy home, and hopeful children whom it shall be my chief care to teach to shun the errors that have been my bane.

I have thought much also of that benevolent destiny that has protracted an existence as a family, unbroken through so many years; that gave to us in our early years the benefit and advantage of parental restraint and care, and has given to you the opportunity of seeing the practical result of your anxiety and toil, and the establishment of your children in reputable positions in widely disassociated spheres of life.

As time passes on, the burden of existence becomes more grievous: these anniversaries, once so bright and festal, grow ominous with shadows, and have a deep, sad and solemn significance. Laden with the inexpressible pathos, the yearning regrets, the farewells of the past, its melancholy and its external pain, they also point with prophetic augury to the future, near or far, when anniversaries shall be no more. How happy they who live so that they are not afraid to die! - I trust that we may know many returns of this ancient festival, but more than that, I hope that when on some future Thanksgiving, the last sur

vivor of us all recalls the vivid memories of those who have gone before, no grief may dim his vision save that which separation always brings, and that he may confidently and gratefully anticipate the hour which shall summon him to join a reunited family in a brighter world than this: a world which shall seem as the glorious wakening from a fevered dream, where sorrow has no dominion, where distance cannot separate, where time cannot chill, and the tragic limitations of earthly being are forever unknown.

The references here to "a reunited family in a brighter world, where sorrow has no dominion”, and "time cannot chill", are reversions to the Calvinistic sermons impatiently heard on Thanksgivings in youth in New England, and must not be taken as expressing his own state or belief.

The death of Garfield, his kinsman, aroused in Ingalls the realization of the futility of earthly power and grandeur. In a letter to his father were these expressions penned :

To one unaware of the tragedy of July, it would seem incredible that within three months, the chosen ruler of a great nation had been buried amid the grief of all the civilized world, and that the trial of his assassin was proceeding in sight of the Capitol from which the remains of

the victim were so lately borne to their last repose. The moralist and the philosopher might find abundant food for thought, nor could the cynic restrain his sneer at the spectacle presented by the thoughtless theory of ambitious aspirants who have so readily transferred their allegiance to the new President who sits in the Council Chamber so lately vacated by the dead. The emptiness of fame, the hollow mockery of friendship, the vanity of ambition, the worthlessness of power, the insignificance of man, never had a more striking illustration. "The King is dead! Long live the King!"- And yet, notwithstanding the wretchedness of humanity, and the evils of human life, there is something attractive about existence. When digestion is good and the nerves neither too lax nor too tensely strung, it is pleasant to eat a good dinner, to get a little drunk, to smoke a good cigar, to talk with bright men and women, to drive in the woods, to stroll in the sun, to get into a row occasionally if you can be on top, to sleep and wake, to play with children, to read good books, and wonder what life means, and to what it leads, how we got here and where we are going; a perplexing riddle which has not been solved.

This was the blind beating of the immortal in man against the bars of the earthly prison of this

life with its vexing and distracting limitations. Of the same nature is the "everlasting interrogatory" of Job. The same problems troubled the Preacher of Wisdom, who saw "in human enquiry no attainment, in the succession of events no advance, in the succession of human generations no continuity", and who saw the tragedy of Life in the "Coming of the Evil Days", when "The years draw nigh,

When thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them:

Or ever the sun

And the light,

And the moon,

And the stars,

Be darkened,

And the clouds return after the rain:

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble,

And the strong men shall bow themselves,

And the grinders cease because they are few,

And those that look out of the windows be darkened,
And the doors shall be shut in the street;

When the sound of the grinding is low,

And one shall rise up at the voice of a bird,

And all the daughters of music shall be brought low;

Yea, they shall be afraid of that which is high,

And terrors shall be in the way:

And the almond tree shall blossom,

And the grasshopper shall be a burden,

And the caperberry shall burst:

Because man goeth to his long home,
And the mourners go about the streets:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed,
Or the golden bowl be broken,

Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,

Or the wheel broken at the cistern:

And the dust return to the earth,

As it was;

And the spirit return unto God

Who gave it".*

* Dr. Moulton's version. Quoted from his Ecclesiastes.

V.

As his years increased a sense of death abode with Ingalls. And so it does with every reflecting man. It is said that Egyptians of the upper class kept memory and thought of death ever present by the exhibition at feasts of a human skeleton. To the Anglo-Saxons death is the King of Terrors, but to that people has been given that fortitude with which death is contemplated in quiescence and with tranquillity. In this mood Ingalls wrote his wife near the close of the year 1890:

The clouds are steamy and still. The world is so lovely at its best, and life so delightful, that I dread the thought of leaving it. I have seen and