fatal day, that compositions on "The Seasons" would no longer be accepted. That was cruelty to authors. He spoke with a smile, but it was a smile of malice. I have never forgiven him. He is living still, a preacher of the gospel. When Saturday night comes, and he finds himself hard put to it for the morrow's sermon (as I have no doubt he often does—I hope so, at all events), does he never remember the day when with the word of his mouth he deprived thirty or forty young innocents of their easiest and best appreciated text? He is righteously punished. Let him preach to himself, some Sunday, from Numbers xxxii. 23, "Be sure your sin will find you out."
Why should n't one write about the seasons, I wonder. There is scarcely anything more important, or more universally interesting, than the weather. Ten to one it was the first thing we all thought of this morning. And the seasons are nothing but weather in large packages—weather at wholesale. Their changes are our epochs, our date-points. But for them, all days being alike, there would be no calendar. It
