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It is a compass whose never-failing needle directs us safely across the desert sands of life, and through the dark labyrinths of an evil world, and its precious promises gives us comfort while we bear the burdens and endure the sorrows, pain and anguish incident to human life. Since our organization is founded on the Bible, we should, as Odd-Fellows, become more conversant with it.

Then I tried to get her shod in Liddiard St. Agnes, which is one of those idyllic villages that people write books about, and there I found an Odd-fellows' fete in full swing. The village blacksmith was altogether too harmonious for business, so not being able to cuff his head, like your cousin, I was obliged to walk home. "Really'? Have a cigar if you won't have anything else."

No sooner had they broken one tune into fragments than they took up another, and the car roared and rattled and jarred all the way to the lonely station where the band debarked, and was last seen convoying a straggling Odd-Fellows' picnic down a country road. The incident, trivial in itself, gave rise to serious reflections touching the capacity and use of the red man in modern life.

It is truth blazoned upon the page of history, that if we as Odd-Fellows are true to our standard, to our possibilities and to our Maker, he will lay the suffering of a throbbing world in our arms that we may lay it at the feet of Him who died to redeem it. Let us cherish high hopes, noble aims, and lofty ideals.

Only a few months before his death, we stood again upon the same spot, surrounded by magnificent buildings Odd-Fellows' Hall, the First Presbyterian Church, the great City Hall, and grand and beautiful buildings of every character. "Do you remember my promise made here?" he said. "Have I fulfilled it? Many days of arduous labor and nights of anxious thought that promise cost me.

But the temperance men made a show on the Fourth of July as well as the drunkards, and the Sons of Temperance walked in the procession with the Masons and the Odd-Fellows. Sometimes they got hold of a whole Fourth, and then there was nothing but a temperance picnic in the Sycamore Grove, which the boys took part in as Sunday-school scholars.

We are not Odd-Fellows in the true sense unless we put away all bitterness, malice and selfishness. Common sense of mankind is quite right when it says a man's religion is not worth much if it does not make him good. Have goodness first out of goodness good works will come. Every good work requires every good principle.

If there is one truth in revelation that we can not give its proper setting and due emphasis, then we are not the keepers of God's truth. To my thinking, there are no organizations formed by man that can appeal more confidently to the Word of God for confirmation than the Odd-Fellows. We appeal to sane reason and common sense.

For that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. I shall pass through this world but once. Any good things that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. We can be Odd-Fellows only while we act like honest men." Every Odd-Fellow ought to be a "gentleman."

Exclusiveness in about the same degree characterizes other secret societies. The Constitution of the Odd-fellows' Grand Lodge of Ohio provides that the candidate for membership must be "a free white person possessed of some known means of support and free from all infirmity or disease."