Your highest hope is shadowed in a cheerful, boyish home.  You wish no friends but the friends of boyhood; no sister but your fond Nelly; none to love better than the playful Madge.

You forget, Clarence, that the Spring with you is the Spring with them, and that the storms of Summer may chase wide shadows over your path and over theirs.  And you forget that Summer is even now lowering with its mist, and with its scorching rays, upon the hem of your flowery May!

* * * * *

——­The hands of the old clock upon the mantel, that ticked off the hours when Charlie sighed and when Charlie died, draw on toward midnight.  The shadows that the fire-flame makes grow dimmer and dimmer.  And thus it is that Home, boy home, passes away forever,—­like the swaying of a pendulum,—­like the fading of a shadow on the floor!

SUMMER;

OR,

THE DREAMS OF YOUTH.

DREAMS OF YOUTH.

Summer.

I feel a great deal of pity for those honest but misguided people who call their little, spruce suburban towns, or the shaded streets of their inland cities,—­the country and I have still more pity for those who reckon a season at the summer resorts—­country enjoyment.  Nay, my feeling is more violent than pity; and I count it nothing less than blasphemy so to take the name of the country in vain.

I thank Heaven every summer’s day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks.  And from all the tramp and bustle of the world into which fortune has led me in these latter years of my life, I delight to steal away for days, and for weeks together, and bathe my spirit in the freedom of the old woods; and to grow young again, lying upon the brook-side, and counting the white clouds that sail along the sky softly and tranquilly—­even as holy memories go stealing over the vault of life.

I am deeply thankful that I could never find it in my heart so to pervert truth as to call the smart villages with the tricksy shadow of their maple avenues—­the Country.

I love these in their way, and can recall pleasant passages of thought, as I have idled through the Sabbath-looking towns, or lounged at the inn-door of some quiet New-England village.  But I love far better to leave them behind me, and to dash boldly out to where some out-lying farm-house sits—­like a sentinel—­under the shelter of wooded hills, or nestles in the lap of a noiseless valley.

In the town, small as it may be, and darkened as it may be with the shadows of trees, you cannot forget—­men.  Their voice, and strife, and ambition come to your eye in the painted paling, in the swinging signboard of the tavern, and—­worst of all—­in the trim-printed “ATTORNEY AT LAW.”  Even the little milliner’s shop, with its meagre show of leghorns, and its string across the window all hung with tabs and with cloth roses, is a sad epitome of the great and conventional life of a city neighborhood.