yourself a long way before them; and you talk of problems, and foreign seas, and Latin declensions, in a way that sets them all agape. As for the little country girls, their bare legs rather stagger your notions of propriety; nor can you wholly get over their outside pronunciation of some of the vowels. Frank, however, has a little cousin,-a toddling, wee thing, some seven years your junior, who has a rich eye for an infant. But, alas, its color means nothing; poor Fanny is stone blind! Your pity leans toward her strangely, as she feels her way about the old parlor; and her dark eyes wander over the wainscot, or over the clear, blue sky-with the same, sad, painful vacancy. And yet it is very strange !—she does not grieve: there is a sweet, soft smile upon her lip,—a smile that will come to you in your fancied troubles of after life, with a deep voice of reproach. Altogether, you grow into a liking of the country: your boyish spirit loves its fresh, bracing air, and the sparkles of dew, that at sunrise cover the hills with diamonds;—and the wild river, with its black-topped, loitering pools; and the shaggy mists that lie, in the nights of early autumn, like unravelled clouds, lost the meadow. You love the hills climbing green upon and grand to the skies; or stretching away in distance, their soft, blue, smoky caps,-like the sweet, half-faded memories of the years behind you. You love those oaks tossing up their broad arms into clear heaven, with a spirit and a strength, that kindles your dawning pride and purposes; and that makes you yearn, as your forehead mantles with fresh blood, for a kindred spirit, and a kindred strength. Above all, you love-though you do not know it now-the BREADTH of a country life. In the fields of God's planting, there is ROOM. No walls of brick and mortar cramp one: no factitious distinctions mould your habit. The involuntary reaches True, and the Natural. of the spirit, tend toward the The flowers, the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your intent, The boy grows into manliness, instead of growing to be like men. He claims, with tears almost, of brotherhood, his kinship with Nature; and he feels, in the mountains, his heirship to the Father of Nature! This delirium of feeling may not find expression upon the lip of the boy; but yet it underlies his thought, and will, without his consciousness, give the spring to his musing dreams. -So it is, that as you lie there upon the sunny greensward, at the old Squire's door, you muse upon the time when some rich lying land, with huge granaries, and cozy old mansion sleeping under the trees, shall be yours;-when the brooks shall water your meadows, and come laughing down your pasture 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 around 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 |