At last the naturalist came home after long absence to fulfill the long-cherished dream of years of quiet study with wife and children, but found that the mice had eaten his drawings and destroyed the sketches he had left behind.

Then was he dumb with grief and dazed with pain, but it was his brave wife who led him to the gate and thrust him forth into the forest and sent him out upon his mission, saying that there was no valley so deep nor no wilderness so distant but that his thought, turning homeward, would see the light burning brightly for him.

And in those dark days when our land trembled, and a million men from the north tramped southward and a million men from the south tramped northward, and the columns met with a concussion that threatened to rend the land asunder, there, in the battle, midst the din and confusion and blood, women walked, angels of light and mercy, not merely holding the cup of cold water to famished lips, or stanching the life-blood until surgeons came, but teaching soldier boys in the dying hour the way through the valley and beyond it up the heavenly hills.

These all fulfilled their mission and "remembered those in bonds as bound with them." This principle also has been and is the spring of all progress in humanity and civilization.

Our journalists and orators pour forth unstinted praise upon the achievements of the nineteenth century.