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Everywhere is autumn a melancholy season, charged with regrets for that which is departing, with shrinking from what is to come; but under the Canadian skies it is sadder and more moving than elsewhere, as though one were bewailing the death of a mortal summoned untimely by the gods before he has lived out his span.

Let those neat and tidy officers who so love to see a ship kept spick and span clean; who institute vigorous search after the man who chances to drop the crumb of a biscuit on deck, when the ship is rolling in a sea-way; let all such swing their hammocks with the sailors; and they would soon get sick of this daily damping of the decks.

Doctrines which but the span of two human lives before would have brought their enunciators to the stake were now pronounced not impious, but sublime. The first day of the nineteenth century was fittingly signalized by the discovery of a new world.

Our English kin hate a walled town or a stone house, and they would not live within the strong walls, whose wide span was, save for the king's palace, which was built partly of the house of the Roman governor, and these other halls, which went for naught in so wide a meadow, empty and green, and crossed by two paved roads, with grass growing between the stones.

He began to realize that it was no sentimental and love-stricken grief she had felt for Selwyn, but a sympathy akin to his own and to her brother's; and since the disappointment of the hope of fortune must needs have come to Selwyn at last, they made shift to resign themselves, and were wont to talk freely of the dead with that affectionate and immediate interest which seems to prolong the span of a mortal's day on earth, like the tender suffusive radiance of the afterglow of a sunken sun.

"You know those movin' picture boxes ye see down to Keene, where ye turn a handle and a lot of photograph cards fly along like rufflin' the leaves of a book. Why, it just makes things look alive, Mr. Droop. I'm sure those weren't thought of six years ago. They're span spinter new. Why won't they do?" "I ain't got one o' those either," Droop grumbled.

And the span of his life, from the boyhood which he could recall so vividly here among these children, seemed brief to him as a summer's day, only a part of a mighty whole made up of the innumerable lives, the many generations, of his family, his own flesh and blood, come out of a past he could never know, and going on without him now, branching, dividing, widening out to what his eyes would never see.

Now he was back again, with the list, three copies! Oh, thank you, thank you and thank you! Away trotted the handsome span while five pairs of beautiful eyes searched the three printed sheets, that bore oh, marvellous fortune! not one of the four names writ largest in those five hearts. Let joy be ah, let joy be very meek while to so many there is unutterable loss.

In the light of these things, a man should surely dare to live his small span of life with little heed of the common speech upon him or his life, only caring that his days may be full of reality, and his conversation of truth-speaking and wholeness.