“I have been listening,” said Spalding, as we sat upon the rude benches in front of our camp-fire, indulging in our usual season of smoking after our meals, “to the song of the crickets in those rude jams, and they call up sad, yet pleasant memories from the long past; of the old log house, the quiet fire-place, the crane in the jam, the great logs blazing upon the hearth of a cold winter evening, the house dog sleeping quietly in the corner, and the cat nestled confidingly between his feet.  Oh! the days of old! the days of old!  These crickets call back with these memories the circle that gathered around the hearth of my home, when I was young.  Father, mother, brothers, sisters, playmates, and friends.  How quietly some of them grew old and ripe, and then dropped into the grave.  How quietly others stole away in their youth to the home of the dead, and how the rest have drifted away on the currents of life and are lost to me in the mists and shadows of time.  Even the home and the hearth are gone; they

  ‘Battled with time and slow decay,’

until at last they were wiped out from the things that are.  The song of the peepers is a pleasant memory, and comes welling up with a thousand cherished recollections of our vanished youth; but the song of the cricket that made its home in the jams of the great stone fire-place is pleasanter, and the memories that come floating back with his remembered lay are pleasanter still.  He was always there.  He was not silent, like the out-door insect, through the spring month and the cold of winter, piping only in sadness when the still autumnal evenings close in their brightness and beauty over the earth; but he sang always, and his chirrup was heard at all seasons.  In the winter the fire on the hearth warmed him; in the summer he had a cool resting place, and he was cheerful and merry through all the long year.  And this reminds me of an anecdote of a venerable minister, who passed years ago to his rest.  He was a Scotchman, and when preaching to his own congregation at Salem, in Washington comity, he indulged in broad Scotch, which to those who were accustomed to it was exceedingly pleasant.  I was a boy then, and was returning with my father from a visit to Vermont.  We stopped over the Sabbath at Salem, and attended worship in the neat little church of that pleasant village.  There were no railroads in those days.  The iron horse had not yet made his advent, and the scream of the steam whistle had never startled the echoes that dwell among the gorges of the Green Mountain State.  Oh!  Progress!  Progress!  I have travelled that same route often since, more than once within the year, and I flew over in an hour what was the work of all that cold winter day that brought us at night to that neat little village of Salem.  I thought, as I dashed with a rush over the road I once travelled so leisurely, how change was written upon everything; how time and progress had obliterated all the old landmarks, leaving scarcely