Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/92

 uproarious family of children, — nine young ones and two at the breast; regular loud-tongued roysterers are most of them, the terror of squirrels, birds' nests, and stray dogs, but at the same time the hope and pride of Young America, — of Milesian lineage, — chaps who will one day give a good account of themselves, if ever the foreign foe invades the soil of this fair land of ours! — girls that are girls in every sense, with something tangible rather than spring-steel or cotton-paddible to boast of! — cherry-lipped, rosy-cheeked, plump, and fair, destined to family honors by and by, prouder than a queen upon her jewelled throne. No disease lurks there; no consumptive lungs under those breast-bones, and no terrible catalogue of aches, pains, bad teeth, and worse breath; no cramps and qualms and female diseases there, because the house they live in is built on beef and potatoes, instead of hot drinks and fashionable flummery. Now, it will be just as difficult for the children of that poor woman to fall into the popular train of vices characterizing too many American youth, as it will be easy for the children of the first couple to be victimized before they reach their fifteenth year. The coarser type will outlive the more delicate, and when all is over will have been of more real service to the world.

"How the candle flickers, Nellie! how the candle flickers!" said a dying man to his darling wife, the idol of his heart, the beloved of his soul, the pure, the true, the beautiful Nellie, wife of his soul. "How the candle flickers, darling! put it out, — and — go to — bed, weenie. I shall sleep well — to-night — and awaken — in the — morning! Good-night, darling! How the candle flickers!" It was not the candle that flickered, it was his lamp of life burned to the socket; for death was veiling his eyes from the world, at fifty years of age, — mid-life, when he should have been in his prime.

Why was he dying? Why did life's candle flicker ere half-burnt out? Because his had been a life of thought. To embellish immortal pages he had toiled, almost ceaselessly, and wholly unrequited, during long years, and that, too, in gaunt poverty, while those about him whom his brain-toil had enriched and made insolent, fared sumptuously every day, while he was immured in a garret painfully laboring for an ungrateful world, — which usually