KEEPSAKES.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2218, 25 September 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

KEEPSAKES.

Few things in this weary world are so delightful a« keepsakes. Nor do they ever— to the heart at least nor yet to the eyelose their tender ani powerful charm. How slight, how small, how tiny a memento, worn on the finger or close to th« heart (especially if the person be dead) saves a beloved one from oblivion. No thought is so insupportable as that of entire, total, blank forgetfulness — when the creature that once laughed, and sang, and wept to us, close to our side or in our very anna, is as if her smile', her voice, her tears, ' her kisses, had never been, she and they being swallowed up in the dark nothingness of the dust. A woman has no natural gift more be witching than a pleasant laugh. It is like the sound of flutes on the water. It leaps from her with a clear, sparkling sweetness, and brings to the oppressed by heavy sorrow the feeling of eternal spring-time. Have you ever pursued an unseen fugitive through a dense piece of woods, led «n by a silvery laugh, now here, now there, now lost, now found ?We have ; and we are pursuing that wandering roice, that brown hair, with deep eyes glistening, gleaming, like God's ways, that have profoundeat meaning, down to this day. Sometimes she comes to us in the midst of care, or sorrow, or irksome business, and then we turn away and listen and hear a silvery voice ringing in the room like a tiny bell with power to scare away the evil spirits of mind, How much we owe to that sweet laugh. It is a keepsake of the heart. It turns prose to poetry ; it brings flowers and sunshine into the dark wood in which we are travelling ; touches with light and hope even our dreams, until we almost fancy that spirit voices are wafted earthward through the tremulous air from the wonderful land, through the mystical unknown sea whose white-lipped breakers beat forever against the trackless course of the future. But of all keepsakes, memorials, relies, most dearly most devotedly do we love a little lock of hair. And, oh ! when the head it beautified has long mouldered in the dust, how spiritual seems the undying glossiness of that sole remaining ringlet. • All else gone to nothing, save the soft, smooth, burnished and glorious fragment of the apparelling that once hung in clouds and sunshine over an angel's brow. Ayo, a lock of hair is far better than any picture ; it is a part of the beloved object herself ; it belonged to the tresses that often, long, long ago, may have been suddenly dishel ved, like a shower of sunbeams, over your beating breast. But how solemn thoughts sadden the beauty once so bright, so refulgent. The longer you gaze on it tho more pensive grows the expression of the holy relic. It seems to say almost, upbraidingly, " Weep'st thou no more for me ?" and then, indeed, a tear true to the imperishable affection in which all nature once seemed to rejoice, bears witness that the object towards which it yearned is no more forgotten, now that she has been dead for so many long weary days, months, years, than she was forgotten during an hour of absence, that came like passing clouds between us and the sunshine of her living, her loving smiles,