As years steal upon us, and we come to tread the downward way toward the narrow house, our ideas of friends and friendships undergo a change, which change we may not recognize very readily, but still in moments of reflection, we are conscious that it has occurred. As we look back upon the long route we have traveled, we can but think of the “troops of friends” who at one time or other were the companions of the journey, and we ask, “Where are they? What has become of them all?” Some are away in foreign lands, and severed from us forever; some we have estranged from us, it may be by our own faults and shortcomings; some have cast us off, having themselves stepped higher up in the social scale; and some we have ourselves designedly relinquished, not we trust, because they have not kept pace with us in the worldly race, but either because they were such ties as we ought never to have formed, or because through vice or the force of temptation they have fallen too low. Then there are one or two, perhaps, who were in times past the treasure and glory of our life, whom one fatal mistake wrenched from us, in an evil hour, and ever since we have stood aloof ‘like cliffs which have been rent asunder,’ both of us, perchance, retaining the scars which ‘neither frost, nor heat, nor thunder,’ shall wholly do away. It is such remembrances as these which in the autumn or winter of our days, make us wary and watchful over the too scanty remainder of our life’s friendships. Gladly, if we could, would we bridge over that dreary sea which flows between us and the alienated friends of past years; but that cannot be done—never was done yet in human experience—and so, accepting wisdom from the past, we guard the love that is left to us all the more jealously. We come to hate all quarrels and resentments, as the folly and absurdity, and the dreary results of them come home to us in those lone hours when, regretfully confronting the past, we can review the game of life and recall with bitterness the many false moves we made and the sorrows they entail upon us. Well for us that all is not loss—that friendly hands yet aid us in doing and suffering what has yet to be done and suffered, and friendly hearts yet flow with the sympathy we have learned to prize at its just value.—Leisure Hour.