A Thanksgiving dinner. All the miserable on earth are to be invited,
--as the drunkard, the bereaved parent, the ruined merchant, the
broken-hearted lover, the poor widow, the old man and woman who have
outlived their generation, the disappointed author, the wounded, sick,
and broken soldier, the diseased person, the infidel, the man with an
evil conscience, little orphan children or children of neglectful
parents, shall be admitted to the table, and many others. The giver of
the feast goes out to deliver his invitations. Some of the guests he
meets in the streets, some he knocks for at the doors of their houses.
The description must be rapid. But who must be the giver of the feast,
and what his claims to preside? A man who has never found out what he is
fit for, who has unsettled aims or objects in life, and whose mind gnaws
him, making him the sufferer of many kinds of misery. He should meet
some pious, old, sorrowful person, with more outward calamities than any
other, and invite him, with a reflection that piety would make all that
miserable company truly thankful.

Merry, in "merry England," does not mean mirthful; but is corrupted from
an old Teutonic word signifying famous or renowned.

In an old London newspaper, 1678, there is an advertisement, among other
goods at auction, of a black girl, about fifteen years old, to be sold.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a
troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.

The race of mankind to be swept away, leaving all their cities and works.
Then another human pair to be placed in the world, with native
intelligence like Adam and Eve, but knowing nothing of their predecessors