Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1876 — Friendship. [ARTICLE]

Friendship.

Ths point that we wish to make to, that we should not expect to have the sentiments and actions of our friends and companions always equally satisfactory to us; and after we have once made up our minds that, on the whole, we like a certain person; that we like certain or all of his ways, opinions, tastes, qualities—whatever it to that draws us to him, it to rather foolish to be rejudging him too severely every five days on a new issue. Alter a man u once a member of the National Academy he should not bo subject to the annual weighing in the balance of the Academy’s Hanging Committee. You may say that, after we have known a man well for thirty years—and that is a long lease for a friendship in this mutable world—it fa idle to talk about its being possible for him to surprise or disappoint us. But did you ever hear of “the old man’s disease”—avarice? Do you suppose that an affliction like that eomee to the surface late in life, if the seeds have not been deep in the soil all the time? But that is a hard and cruel question. Let us rather speak of a more pleasing and no less surprising development There was an old woman about whom we once wrote, to prove by an example that it is the disagreeable young folks who make the disagreeable old men and women, and that sweet girls and boys need not be troubled by the nightmare of a sour and crabbed old age. The woman we wrote about had lived out and down three husbands, and was about as unpleasant an old gossip as you might meet in a day’s journey, yet the traits of her age were only the traits of her youth, stripped of whatever charm youth must have lent her. But presently, after we had held up this aged person as a warning and a consolation, what does she do but fall into her secohd childhood, and develop one of the sweetest and gentlest dispositions with which mortal ever blessed his or her neighbor. All she asked was her doll and her prayer-book, and all went merry as a marriage bell. No; we never know our friends. And, curiously enough, while we are gofcg on with our discoveries concerning them, they are making the same observations upon us. and are having the same surprises and disappointments.— Scribner for .February.