lands;—when the clouds shall shed their spring fragrance upon your lawns, and the daisies bless your paths.

You will then be a Squire, with your cane, your lean-limbed hound, your stocking-leg of specie, and your snuff-box. You will be the happy, and respected husband of some tidy old lady in black, and spectacles, -a little phthisicky, like Frank's grandmother, and an accomplished cook of stewed pears, and Johnny cakes!

It seems a very lofty ambition, at this stage of growth, to reach such eminence, as to convert your drawer in the wainscot, that has a secret spring, into a bark for the country people; and the power to send a man to jail, seems one of those stretches of human prerogative, to which few of your fellow mortals can ever hope to attain.

-Well, it may all be. And who knows but the Dreams of Age, when they are reached, will be lighted by the same spirit and freedom of nature, that is "round you now? Who knows, but that after tracking you through the Spring, and the Summer of Youth, we shall find frosted Age settling upon you heavily, and solemnly, in the very fields where you wanton to-day?

This American life of ours is a tortuous and shifting impulse. It brings Age back, from years of wandering, to totter in the hamlet of its birth; and it scatters

armies of ripe manhood, to bleach far-away shores with their bones.

That Providence, whose eye and hand are the spy and the executioner of the Fateful changes of our life, may bring you back in Manhood, or in Age, to this mountain home of New England; and that very willow yonder, which your fancy now makes the graceful mourner of your leave, may one day shadow mournfully your grave!

VII.

THE COUNTRY CHURCH.

HE country church is a square old building of

THE

wood, without paint or decoration—and of that genuine, Puritanie stamp, which is now fast giving way to Greek porticos, and to cockney towers. It stands upon a hill with a little church yard in its rear, where one or two sickly looking trees keep watch and ward over the vagrant sheep that graze among the graves. Bramble bushes seem to thrive on the bodies below, and there is no flower in the little yard. save a few golden rods, which flaunt their gaudy inodorous color under the lee of the northern wall.

New England country-livers have as yet been very little innoculated with the sentiment of beauty; even the door-step to the church is a wide flat stone, that

shows not a single stroke of the hammer. Within, the simplicity is even more severe. Brown galleries run around three sides of the old building, supported by timbers, on which you still trace, under the stains from the leaky roof, the deep scoring of the woodman's axe. Below, the unpainted pews are ranged in square forms, and by age, have gained the color of those fragmentary wrecks of cigar boxes, which you see upon the top shelves, in the bar-rooms of country taverns. The minister's desk is lofty, and has once been honored with a coating of paint;-as well as the huge soundingboard, which, to your great amazement, protrudes from the wall, at a very dangerous angle of inclination, over the speaker's head. As the Squire's pew is the place of honor, to the right of the pulpit, you have a little tremor yourself, at sight of the heavy sounding-board, and cannot forbear indulging in a quiet feeling of relief, when the last prayer is said.

There are in the Squire's pew, long, faded, crimson cushions; which, it seems to you, must date back nearly to the commencement of the Christian era in this country. There are also sundry old thumb-worn copies of Dr. Dwight's Version of the Psalms of David -appointed to be sung in churches, by authority of the General Association of the State of Connecticut.' The sides of Dr. Dwight's Version are, you observe, sadly warped, and weather-stained; and from some

stray figures which appear upon a fly-leaf, you are constrained to think, that the Squire has sometime employed a quiet interval of the service, with reckoning up the contents of the old stocking-leg at home.

The parson is a stout man, remarkable in your opinion, chiefly, for a yellowish-brown wig, a strong nasal tone, and occasional violent thumps upon the little, dingy, red velvet cushion, studded with brass tacks, at the top of the desk. You do not altogether admire his style; and by the time he has entered upon his 'Fourthly,' you give your attention, in despair, to a new reading (it must be the twentieth) of the preface to Dr. Dwight's Version of the Psalms.

The singing has a charm for you. There is a long, thin-faced, flax-haired man, who carries a tuning fork in his waistcoat pocket, and who leads the choir. His position is in the very front rank of gallery benches, facing the desk; and by the time the old clergyman has read two verses of the psalm, the country chorister turns around to his little group of aids—consisting of the blacksmith, a carroty headed school-master, two women in snuff-colored silks, and a girl in pink bonnet-to announce the tune.

This being done in an authoritative manner, he lifts his long music book,-glances again at his little company, clears his throat by a powerful ahem, followed by a powerful use of a bandanna pocket-handkerchief,