have I had visions, clear as that of Mansie Wauch, of how I should grow old in my country parish!  Do not think that I wish or intend to be egotistical, my friendly reader.  I describe these feelings and fancies because I think this is the likeliest way in which to reach and describe your own.  There was a rapid little stream that flowed, in a very lonely place, between the highway and a cottage to which I often went to see a poor old woman; and when I came out of the cottage, having made sure that no one saw me, I always took a great leap over the little stream, which saved going round a little way.  And never once, for several years, did I thus cross it without seeing a picture as clear to the mind’s eye as Mansie Wauch’s,—­a picture which made me walk very thoughtfully along for the next mile or two.  It was curious to think how one was to get through the accustomed duty after having grown old and frail.  The day would come when the brook could be crossed in that brisk fashion no more.  It must be an odd thing for the parson to walk as an old man into the pulpit, still his own, which was his own when he was a young man of six-and-twenty.  What a crowd of old remembrances must be present each Sunday to the clergyman’s mind, who has served the same parish and preached in the same church for fifty years!  Personal identity, continued through the successive stages of life, is a commonplace thing to think of; but when it is brought home to your own case and feeling, it is a very touching and a very bewildering thing.  There are the same trees and hills as when you were a boy; and when each of us comes to his last days in this world, how short a space it will seem since we were little children!  Let us humbly hope, that, in that brief space parting the cradle from the grave, we may (by help from above) have accomplished a certain work which will cast its blessed influence over all the years and all the ages before us.  Yet it remains a strange thing to look forward and to see yourself with gray hair, and not much even of that; to see your wife an old woman, and your little boy or girl grown up into manhood or womanhood.  It is more strange still to fancy you see them all going on as usual in the round of life, and you no longer among them.  You see your empty chair.  There is your writing-table and your inkstand; there are your books, not so carefully arranged as they used to be; perhaps, on the whole, less indication than you might have hoped that they miss you.  All this is strange when you bring it home to your own case; and that hundreds of millions have felt the like makes it none the less strange to you.  The commonplaces of life and death are not commonplace when they befall ourselves.  It was in desperate hurry and agitation that Mansie Wauch saw his vision; and in like circumstances you may have yours too.  But for the most part such moods come in leisure,—­in saunterings through the autumn woods,—­in reveries by the winter fire.