I determined to search him out and represent the case.  I could not find him; but before I concluded my search, I found that the poor people had been compelled to sell a table and some chairs to pay the rent.  The next day I saw them again, and found them heartily abusing the old man as “a stingy brute,” who would “sell the chairs from under them.”  Yet I observed that they had a new table and three new chairs.  When I asked them how they came by them, they said they had been sent by an unknown hand, which they supposed to be mine.  A thought struck me, and after some trouble I ferreted out the fact, that, although the rich old man had, for reasons connected with the good order of the barracks, always exacted every cent of the rent from each tenant, whatever the consequences, he had many times, as in this case, secretly returned more than it had cost them to pay it.  They were left to believe him a hard man, and often attributed his benefits to societies and persons whose charity would have been stifled by the whiskey-stench of their rooms.

Thus, then, went on his life, until the day when the Golden Wedding was to be celebrated.  That year, the sons, with the vine-dressers, the bottlers, corkers, and all, gathered together and said,—­

“Come, now! let us this year make a wine that shall be like the nectar for a true man’s soul!”

So, with one accord, they gathered the richest grapes, and selected from them; then they made the wine-press clean and sweet, and cast the grapes therein.  One great hiss,—­a spurt of gold flushed with rubies,—­and all that is acrid is left, all that is rich and sweet is borne away, to be labelled “GOLDEN WEDDING.”

And now, as I taste it, it seems to me flavored beyond all earthly wine, as if it were the expression of an humble and faithful man, who had a legitimate object, which he obtained by steadfastness.  The wine-makers maintain, that wine, though long confined in bottles, sympathizes still with the vines from which it was pressed; and when the season of the flowering of vines comes, it is always agitated anew.  Surely the Catawba must ever sparkle afresh, when in it, as now, we pledge the memory of the brave and wise pioneer whose life climbed to its maturity along with the purple clusters which so had garnered the frost and sunshine of a life as well as of the seasons.

THE SILURIAN BEACH.

With what interest do we look upon any relic of early human history!  The monument that tells of a civilization whose hieroglyphic records we cannot even decipher, the slightest trace of a nation that vanished and left no sign of its life except the rough tools and utensils buried in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity.  Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder.