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234
LETTERS OF LIFE.

dresses, disclosed the bounty of their fair entertainers.

It was to me an unexpected and affecting proposition, that after the dissolution of our school, its anniversary should still be kept in the consecrated grove. Thither we therefore gathered year by year, brightening the links of memory's jewelled chain. The gravity of life's cares had settled upon some of us. There were no more flower coverings; but in every hand was a vivid evergreen, or a thornless rose, culled from the field of knowledge and of love, which we had together traversed. Still, their charitable society was in existence; and here, in a quiet little nook, was held their annual choice of officers. Considerable variety marked their selection of objects. On one occasion it would be an infant school apparatus for a loved associate, who had gone forth to bear the Gospel to heathen Burmah; then a choice collection of books for a missionary among our own aborigines, or a library for the colony of Liberia, in Africa, which was just lifting its head above the surrounding darkness. An eloquent letter which accompanied a donation of fifty dollars to the widows and orphans of Athens, during the struggle with Moslem tyranny, says:

"We were once members of a happy school, with whose early studies the history of your classic clime was prominently interwoven. To Greece, especially to Athens, our young hearts went forth in willing pilgrim-