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58 were fain to implore him to desist. There is one pathetic story of a dying neighbor to whose bedside he hastened with two other austere friends, and who was so sorely harried by their prolonged exhortations that, with his last breath, he sobbed out, "Let me alone! my spirits are gone!" to the terrible distress and scandal of his wife.

On the whole, Judge Sewall's diary is not cheerful reading, but the grayness of its atmosphere is mainly due to the unlovely aspect of colonial life, to the rigors of an inclement climate not yet subdued by the forces of a luxurious civilization, and by a too constant consideration of the probabilities of being eternally damned. There is nowhere in its sedate and troubled pages that piercing sadness, that cry of enigmatic, inexplicable pain, which shakes the very centre of our souls when we read the beautiful short journal of Maurice de Guérin. These few pages, written with no definite purpose by a young man whose life was uneventful and whose genius never flowered into maturity, have a positive as well as a relative value. They are not merely interesting for what they have to tell;