Various

“ Ford, who had been an excellent mother, would have liked to give her son a wife fashioned on her own model.
"Oh, come, mother," said he, "that's twaddle. I should be thankful, if I were half as good as Lizzie."
"It's the truth, John, and your conduct—not only the step you've taken, but your talk about it—is a great disappointment to me. If I have cherished any wish of late, it is that my darling boy should get a wife worthy of him. The household governed by Elizabeth Crowe is not the home I should desire for any one I love."
"It's one to which you should always be welcome, Ma'am," said Jack. ”

“ Bruce had gone to Leatherborough on business.
On the fourth evening, at twilight, John Ford was borne up to the door on his stretcher, with his mother stalking beside him in rigid grief, and kind, silent friends pressing about with helping hands.
"Home they brought her warrior dead,
She nor swooned nor uttered cry."
It was, indeed, almost a question, whether Jack was not dead. Death is not thinner, paler, stiller. Lizzie moved about like one in a dream. Of course, when there are so many sympathetic friends, a man's family has nothing to do,—except exercise a little self-control. ”

“ Drake, in a two years' campaign, had grown familiar with death, but could not yet receive him as a bed-fellow, and scrambled up in sickening horror to a day in which there was no breakfast to eat, no arms to clean, no shoes to black, no dress to change, no work of any sort to do, no letters to write or hope for, no books to read, no dinner to prepare, at least till four p.m., when they served out rations,—nothing to fix the eye, or offer subject of thought, but the general and utter wretchedness. ”

“ A lecture-audience will forgive extravagance, but never dulness. They will give a man one chance to interest them, and if he fails, that is the last of him. The lecture-committees understand this, and gauge the public taste or the public humor as delicately as the most accomplished theatrical manager. The man who receives their invitation may generally be certain that the public wish either to see or hear him. Popularity is the test. Only popularity after trial, or notoriety before, can draw houses. Only popularity and notoriety can pay expenses and swell the balance of profit. ”

“ The ill-temper of others does not provoke them; perplexing business never sets their nerves to vibrating; and all their lives long they walk in the serene sunshine of perfect animal health.
Look at Rover there. He is never nervous, never cross, never snaps or snarls, and is ready, the moment after the grossest affront, to wag the tail of forgiveness,—all because kind Nature has put his dog's body together so that it always works harmoniously. If every person in the world were gifted with a stomach and nerves like his, it would be a far better and happier world, no doubt. ”

“ You have my real sympathy, Miss Crowe. Don't despair. We shall meet again."
The train rattled away. Lizzie caught a glimpse of a tall figure with lifted hat on the platform. But she sat motionless, with her head against the window-frame, her veil down, and her hands idle.
She had enough to do to think, or rather to feel. It is fortunate that the utmost shock of evil tidings often comes first. After that everything is for the better. Jack's name stood printed in that fatal column like a stern signal for despair. Lizzie felt conscious of a crisis which almost arrested her breath. ”

“ Last in the brief enumeration of the benefits of the popular lecture, it has been the devoted, consistent, never tiring champion of universal liberty. If the popular lecturer has not been a power in this nation for the overthrow of American Slavery,—for its overthrow in the conscientious convictions and the legal and conventional fastnesses of the nation,—then have the friends of oppression grossly lied; for none have received their malicious and angry objurgations more unsparingly than our plain-speaking gentleman who makes his yearly circuit among the lyceums. ”

“ I have heard people speak of his political life, especially of late years, as if it were a great riddle; and, in eulogies on him since his death, I find men speaking as if he underwent some great revulsion of character when Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861. I think there is no such mystery about it. The secret—if secret it is to be called—of his politics was blazoned in almost every speech he ever made, if people could only train themselves to think that a public man really believes what he says. It was this, that at heart he believed in the people. ”

“ Very different are the idleness of love and the idleness of grief. Very different is it to be alone with your hope and alone with your despair. Lizzie failed to rally her musings. I do not mean to say that her sorrow was very poignant, although she fancied it was. Habit was a great force in her simple nature; and her chief trouble now was that habit refused to work. Lizzie had to grapple with the stern tribulation of a decision to make, a problem to solve. ”

“ Bruce presented himself at Doctor Cooper's, with whom he had a slight acquaintance. To Lizzie he was infinitely courteous and tender. He assured her, in very pretty terms, of his profound sympathy with her in her cousin's danger,—her cousin he still called him,—and it seemed to Lizzie that until that moment no one had begun to be kind. And then he began to rebuke her, playfully and in excellent taste, for her pale cheeks.
"Isn't it dreadful?" said Miss Cooper. "She looks like a ghost. I guess she's in love."
"He must be a good-for-nothing lover to make his mistress look so sad. ”

“ The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a man once knows that he has it and recognizes it for a disease, when he does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if there were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has not attained to this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with the waters of bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes his fireside dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but false as the ravings of fever. ”

“ This last was addressed to a soldier in the Rebel gray, who was proceeding leisurely past, but who, on hearing himself so unceremoniously summoned, turned and came slowly towards them.
"Here is a man," said Drake, passionately, "who is dying, not because it pleases God to take him, but because it pleases you to starve him. We have no wood to make a fire, no food to give him, unless it is this scrap of meal that he cannot swallow; but you can save him, and will, if you are a man, and have a man's heart under that dress." ”

“ These young people, I say, had been roaming. It was plain that they had wandered into spots where the brambles were thick and the dews heavy,—nay, into swamps and puddles where the April rains were still undried. Ford's boots and trousers had imbibed a deep foretaste of the Virginia mud; his companion's skirts were fearfully bedraggled. What great enthusiasm had made our friends so unmindful of their steps? What blinding ardor had kindled these strange phenomena: a young lieutenant scornful of his first uniform, a well-bred young lady reckless of her stockings? ”

“ It is the general experience of lecturers, that, until they have delivered a discourse from ten to twenty times, they are themselves unable to measure its power; so that a performance which is offered at first timidly and with many doubts comes at length to be delivered confidently, and with measurable certainty of acceptance and success. The grand interest of a lecturer is in his new audience, in his experiment on an assembly of fresh minds. The lecture itself is regarded only as an instrument by which a desirable and important result is to be achieved ”

“ If the little folks think these trees grow up in a night, without labor, they know as little about them as they do about most of the other blessings which rain down on their dear little thoughtless heads. Such scrambling and clambering and fussing and tying and untying, such alterations and rearrangements, such agilities in getting up and down and everywhere to tie on tapers and gold balls and glittering things innumerable, to hang airy dolls in graceful positions, to make branches bear stiffly up under loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward! ”

“ Should that babe be more to him than a hundred others who are struggling through life's snares wearily? It may touch him, indeed, cruelly to think it; but is not the soul of the most worthless person of his parish as large in the eye of the Master as this of his first-born? Shall these human ties supplant the spiritual ones by which we are all coheirs of eternal death or of eternal life? And in this way the minister schools himself against too demonstrative a joy or love, and prays God silently that His gift may not be a temptation. ”

“ Death might easily be warded off. She would go to Jack; she would nurse him; she would watch by him; she would cure him. Even if Death had already beckoned, she would strike down his hand: if Life had already obeyed, she would issue the stronger mandate of Love. She would stanch his wounds; she would unseal his eyes with her kisses; she would call till he answered her.
Lizzie reached home and walked up the garden path. Mrs. Ford stood in the parlor as she entered, upright, pale, and rigid. Each read the other's countenance. Lizzie went towards her slowly and giddily. ”

“ Six years, in the space of which I have wandered at random beneath the blue skies of the tropics, yielding myself up indolently to the caprice of Fortune, giving a concert wherever I happened to find a piano, sleeping wherever night overtook me, on the green grass of the savanna, or under the palm-leafed roof of a veguero, who shared with me his corn-tortilla, coffee, and bananas, and thought himself amply renumerated, when, at dawn, I took my departure with a "Dios se lo pague á V." (May God reward you!) ”

“ But, laboring his way from stake to stake of the old dogmas of the Westminster divines, he fastened to them stoutly, and swept round from each as a centre a great scathing circle of deductions, that beat wofully upon the heads of unbelievers. And if a preacher attack only unbelievers, he has the world with him, now as then; it is only he who has the bad taste to meddle with the caprices of believers who gets the raps and the orders of dismissal. ”

“ The next morning Lizzie arose with the early dawn, and came down stairs. She went into the room where Jack lay, and gently opened the door. Miss Cooper was dozing in her chair. Lizzie crossed the threshold, and stole up to the bed. Poor Ford lay peacefully sleeping. There was his old face, after all,—his strong, honest features refined, but not weakened, by pain. Lizzie softly drew up a low chair, and sat down beside him. She gazed into his face,—the dear and honored face into which she had so often gazed in health. It was strangely handsomer: body stood for less. ”