other; with neither poverty nor riches to disturb them, nor the misery of desires beyond their lot, they have kept New England’s festival round the patriarch’s board.  For I am a patriarch.  Here I sit among my descendants, in my old arm-chair and immemorial corner, while the firelight throws an appropriate glory round my venerable frame.—­Susan!  My children!  Something whispers me that this happiest hour must be the final one, and that nothing remains but to bless you all and depart with a treasure of recollected joys to heaven.  Will you meet me there?  Alas! your figures grow indistinct, fading into pictures on the air, and now to fainter outlines, while the fire is glimmering on the walls of a familiar room, and shows the book that I flung down and the sheet that I left half written some fifty years ago.  I lift my eyes to the looking-glass, and perceive myself alone, unless those be the mermaid’s features retiring into the depths of the mirror with a tender and melancholy smile.

Ah!  One feels a chilliness—­not bodily, but about the heart—­and, moreover, a foolish dread of looking behind him, after these pastimes.  I can imagine precisely how a magician would sit down in gloom and terror after dismissing the shadows that had personated dead or distant people and stripping his cavern of the unreal splendor which had changed it to a palace.

And now for a moral to my reverie.  Shall it be that, since fancy can create so bright a dream of happiness, it were better to dream on from youth to age than to awake and strive doubtfully for something real?  Oh, the slight tissue of a dream can no more preserve us from the stern reality of misfortune than a robe of cobweb could repel the wintry blast.  Be this the moral, then:  In chaste and warm affections, humble wishes and honest toil for some useful end there is health for the mind and quiet for the heart, the prospect of a happy life and the fairest hope of heaven.

THE AMBITIOUS GUEST.

One September night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled it high with the driftwood of mountain-streams, the dry cones of the pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashing down the precipice.  Up the chimney roared the fire, and brightened the room with its broad blaze.  The faces of the father and mother had a sober gladness; the children laughed.  The eldest daughter was the image of Happiness at seventeen, and the aged grandmother, who sat knitting in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old.  They had found the “herb heart’s-ease” in the bleakest spot of all New England.  This family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the wind was sharp throughout the year and pitilessly cold in the winter, giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency before it descended on the valley of the Saco.  They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one, for a mountain towered above their heads so steep that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight.