The things we do!

In the faded ink, on the yellow paper that may have crossed and
recrossed oceans, that has lain locked in chests for years, and buried
under piles of family archives, while your friends have been dying and
your head has grown white--who has not disinterred mementos like these--
from which the past smiles at you so sadly, shimmering out of Hades an
instant but to sink back again into the cold shades, perhaps with a
faint, faint sound as of a remembered tone--a ghostly echo of a once
familiar laughter? I was looking of late at a wall in the Naples Museum,
whereon a boy of Herculaneum eighteen hundred years ago had scratched
with a nail the figure of a soldier. I could fancy the child turning
round and smiling on me after having done his etching. Which of us that
is thirty years old has not had his Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the
Life of Youth,--the careless Sport, the Pleasure and Passion, the darling
Joy. You open an old letter-box and look at your own childish scrawls, or
your mother's letters to you when you were at school; and excavate your
heart.


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