You will then be a Squire, with your cane, your lean-limbed hound, your stocking-leg of specie, and your snuffbox.  You will be the happy and respected husband of some tidy old lady in black, and spectacles,—­a little phthisicky, like Frank’s grandmother,—­and an accomplished cook of stewed pears and Johnny-cakes!

It seems a very lofty ambition at this stage of growth to reach such eminence, as to convert your drawer in the wainscot, that has a secret spring, into a bank for the country people; and the power to send a man to jail seems one of those stretches of human prerogative to which few of your fellow-mortals can ever hope to attain.

——­Well, it may all be.  And who knows but the Dreams of Age, when they are reached, will be lighted by the same spirit and freedom of nature that is around you now?  Who knows, but that after tracking you through the spring and the summer of Youth, we shall find frosted Age settling upon you heavily and solemnly in the very fields where you wanton to-day?

This American life of ours is a tortuous and shifting impulse.  It brings Age back from years of wandering to totter in the hamlet of its birth; and it scatters armies of ripe manhood to bleach far-away shores with their bones.

That Providence, whose eye and hand are the spy and the executioner of the Fateful changes of our life, may bring you back in Manhood, or in Age, to this mountain home of New England; and that very willow yonder, which your fancy now makes the graceful mourner of your leave, may one day shadow mournfully your grave!

VII.

The Country Church.

The country church is a square old building of wood without paint or decoration, and of that genuine Puritanic stamp which is now fast giving way to Greek porticos and to cockney towers.  It stands upon a hill, with a little churchyard in its rear, where one or two sickly-looking trees keep watch and ward over the vagrant sheep that graze among the graves.  Bramble-bushes seem to thrive on the bodies below, and there is no flower in the little yard, save a few golden-rods, which flaunt their gaudy inodorous color under the lee of the northern wall.

New England country-livers have as yet been very little inoculated with the sentiment of beauty; even the doorstep to the church is a wide flat stone, that shows not a single stroke of the hammer.  Within, the simplicity is even more severe.  Brown galleries run around three sides of the old building, supported by timbers, on which you still trace, under the stains from the leaky roof, the deep scoring of the woodman’s axe.

Below, the unpainted pews are ranged in square forms, and by age have gained the color of those fragmentary wrecks of cigar-boxes which you see upon the top shelves in the bar-rooms of country taverns.  The minister’s desk is lofty, and has once been honored with a coating of paint;—­as well as the huge sounding-board, which to your great amazement protrudes from the wall at a very dangerous angle of inclination over the speaker’s head.  As the Squire’s pew is the place of honor to the right of the pulpit, you have a little tremor yourself at sight of the heavy sounding-board, and cannot forbear indulging in a quiet feeling of relief when the last prayer is said.