have abundant reason for gratitude that, in the long, intervening years,
I have been blessed beyond my deserving.

It has been our privilege to live in an eventful period, and to witness
wonderful changes since we conned our lessons together. How little we
then dreamed of the steam car, electric telegraph, and telephone! We
studied the history and geography of a world only half explored. Our
country was an unsolved mystery. "The Great American Desert" was an
awful blank on our school maps. We have since passed through the
terrible ordeal of civil war, which has liberated enslaved millions, and
made the union of the States an established fact, and no longer a
doubtful theory. If life is to be measured not so much by years as by
thoughts, emotion, knowledge, action, and its opportunity of a free
exercise of all our powers and faculties, we may congratulate ourselves
upon really outliving the venerable patriarchs. For myself, I would not
exchange a decade of my own life for a century of the Middle Ages, or a
"cycle of Cathay."

Let me, gentlemen, return my heartiest thanks to you, and to all who have
interested themselves in the preparation of the Academy Album, and assure
you of my sincere wishes for your health and happiness.

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, 12th Month, 25, 1885.




EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.

I have been pained to learn of the decease of nay friend of many years,