a host of recollections:  it is Auld Lang Syne that walks into your study, when your shaggy friend of ten summers comes stiffly in, and after many querulous turnings lays himself down on the rug before the fire.  Do you not feel the like when you look at many little matters, and then look into the Future Years?  That harness,—­how will you replace it?  It will be a pang to throw it by; and it will be a considerable expense, too, to get a new suit.  Then you think how long harness may continue to be serviceable.  I once saw, on a pair of horses drawing a stage-coach among the hills, a set of harness which was thirty-five years old.  It had been very costly and grand when new; it had belonged for some of its earliest years to a certain wealthy nobleman.  The nobleman had been for many years in his grave, but there was his harness still.  It was tremendously patched, and the blinkers were of extraordinary aspect; but it was quite serviceable.  There is comfort for you, poor country parsons!  How thoroughly I understand your feeling about such little things!  I know how you sometimes look at your phaeton or your dog-cart; and even while the morocco is fresh, and the wheels still are running with their first tires, how you think you see it after it has grown shabby and old-fashioned.  Yes, you remember, not without a dull kind of pang, that it is wearing out.  You have a neighbor, perhaps, a few miles off, whose conveyance, through the wear of many years, has become remarkably seedy; and every time you meet it you think that there you see your own, as it will some day be.  Every dog has his day:  but the day of the rational dog is overclouded in a fashion unknown to his inferior fellow-creature; it is overclouded by the anticipation of the coming day which will not be his.  You remember how that great, though morbid man, John Poster, could not heartily enjoy the summer weather, for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him was a downward step towards the winter gloom.  Each indication that the season was progressing, even though progressing as yet only to greater beauty, filled him with great grief.  “I have seen a fearful sight to-day,” he would say,—­“I have seen a buttercup.”  And we know, of course, that in his case there was nothing like affectation; it was only that, unhappily for himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking, that he saw only a premonition of the snows of December in the roses of June.  It would be a blessing, if we could quite discard the tendency.  And while your trap runs smoothly and noiselessly, while the leather is fresh and the paint unscratched, do not worry yourself with visions of the day when it will rattle and creak, and when you will make it wait for you at the corner of back-streets when you drive into town.  Do not vex yourself by fancying that you will never have heart to send off the old carriage, nor by wondering where you shall find the money to buy a new one.