A TRANSMITTENDUM.

LAST Wednesday morning my old door-mat disappeared. The goody's one eye twinkled with malicious delight as she informed me of my loss. She added, by way of consolation, "Bad 'cess to it! 'T was always a thrippin' me up." And I have no doubt the majority of the entry would have indorsed her sentiments, if not her brogue; for the mat, although by no means a complete hole, was yet very perfect in its way, and had acquired many of the properties that are supposed to be peculiar to traps. One rent in particular seemed to fit the universal foot, - "foot" in general, and not any particular foot, - for it arrested equally quickly the orangeman and the Sophomore who wears ladies' size. The poor mat has been cursed every hour of the day and night, and now, at last, seeing that it still remained unannihilated, some one has employed violence and has doubtless returned it to its native dust-heap; or, better still, some match-boy, in sympathy with its kindred rags, has put the mat to a similar use with the old sheep-skin which Bryan O'Lynn appropriated, when, as the ballad runs, "he had no breeches to wear."

Now this old mat had a peculiar value in my eyes, for it not only served the usual purpose of mats, but it was a transmittendum, and a very venerable one, too. Long years ago one of those New England boys of the bean-pole structure, who entered college at the age of thirteen, brought the mat with him from his farm-home on Narragansett Bay. It was new then, and had been woven in bright colors by an old Indian squaw, a veritable descendant of King Philip. For a year it lay before the front door of the old farm-house; but it was destined to be wiped by more ambitious feet than those of country callers, and now, for the last time, it had seen the lilacs bloom in the dooryard, and it was no longer to serve the old house-dog for a comfortable lounge. It was to know the feet that frequent a college entry. The sights and sounds of its new experience had little in common with those of its first fair year, although, perhaps, the unsteady steps that were wont to cross it late o' nights did call to memory the little feet that toddled over it when the baby ran out on the front lawn to pick buttercups.

For five decades the mat was passed from one occupant of the room to the succeeding one, until the written record began to read like a chapter in the Old Testament, "And So-and-so bequeaths it unto What's-his-name,' and "What's-his-name bequeaths it unto Thing-a-my," and so they go on bequeathing, until the legacy comes to an end with me. At first this transmittendum had a price. In '32 a Divinity student, who had purchased the mat for a dollar and a half, parted with it, "at a great sacrifice, and because he wanted it to keep with the room," for, two dollars. It was not till eight years afterwards that it ceased to have any mercenary connections, and became a regular transmittendum, and from that time to this it has been priceless.

All who have owned the old mat will lament its loss, not because of itself, - for, what with its rags and its dust, it had become something of an old fossil, - but because, like other old fossils, it called up memories of a past both near and remote. What trains of thought will be roused by the news of its disappearance! Old men will recall the days, far away, when they crossed it, and will wonder at its endurance. Recent graduates will remember its signs of undoubted antiquity, and will laugh when they think of the disasters that it has caused passers-by; and I, - I shall cherish the recollection of its manifold virtues, and shall hold sacred the spot where it lay.