[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":4},["ShallowReactive",2],{"reading-0531":3},"MAY 31\r\nLike a shock of corn fully ripe (Job 5 26).\r\nA gentleman, writing about the breaking up of old ships recently\r\nsaid that it is not the age alone which improves the quality of the   fiber in the wood of an old vessel, but the straining and wrenching of the vessel by the sea, the chemical action of the bilge water,\r\nand of many kings of cargoes.\r\nSome planks and veneers made from an oak beam which had been part\r\nof a ship eighty years old were exhibited a few years ago at a\r\nfashionable furniture store on Broadway, New York, and attracted general notice for the exquisite coloring and beautiful grain.\r\nEqually striking were some beams of mahogany taken from a bark which sailed the seas sixty years ago. The years and the traffic\r\nhad contracted the pores and deepened the color, until it looked as superb in its chromatic intensity as an antique Chinese vase. It\r\nwas made into a cabinet and has today a place of honor in the drawing-room of a wealthy New York family.\r\nSo there is a vast difference between the quality of old people who have lived flabby, self-indulgent, useless fives, and the fiber of\r\nthose who have sailed all seas and carried all cargoes as the servants of God and the helpers of their fellow men.\r\nNot only the wrenching and straining of life, but also something of the sweetness of the cargoes carried get into the very pores of\r\nfiber of character. --Louis Albert Banks.\r\nWhen the sun goes below the horizon he is not set; the heavens glow for a full hour after his departure. And when a great and good man\r\nsets, the sky of this world is luminous long after he is out of\r\nsight Such a man cannot die out of this world. When he goes he leaves behind him much of himself. Being dead, he speaks.\r\n--Beecher.\r\nWhen Victor Hugo was past eighty years of age he gave expression to\r\nhis religious faith in these sublime sentences: \"I feel in myself\r\nthe future life. I am like a forest which has been more than once\r\ncut down. The new shoots are livelier than ever. I am rising toward the sky. The sunshine is on my head. The earth gives me its\r\ngenerous sap, but Heaven lights me with its unknown worlds. \"You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of the bodily\r\n\r\npowers., Why, then, is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my\r\nheart. I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the\r\nviolets, and the roses as at twenty years. The nearer I approach\r\nthe end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.\"",1783499793074]