I pile my fire with the clean-cleft hickory; and musing over some sweet story of the olden time, I wander into a rich realm of thought, until my eyes grow dim, and dreaming of battle and of prince, I fall to sleep in my old farm-chamber.

At morning I find my dreams all written on the window in crystals of fairy shape.  The cattle, one by one, with ears frost-tipped, and with frosted noses, wend their way to the watering-place in the meadow.  One by one they drink, and crop at the stunted herbage which the warm spring keeps green and bare.

A hound bays in the distance; the smoke of cottages rises straight toward heaven; a lazy jingle of sleigh-bells wakens the quiet of the high-road; and upon the hills the leafless woods stand low, like crouching armies, with guns and spears in rest; and among them the scattered spiral pines rise like bannermen, uttering with their thousand tongues of green the proud war-cry—­“God is with us!”

But the sky of winter is as capricious as the sky of spring, even as the old wander in thought, like the vagaries of a boy.

Before noon the heavens are mantled with a leaden gray; the eaves, that leaked in the glow of the sun, now tell their tale of morning’s warmth in crystal ranks of icicles.  The cattle seek their shelter; the few lingering leaves of the white-oaks rustle dismally; the pines breathe sighs of mourning.  As the night darkens, and deepens the storm, the house-dog bays; the children crouch in the wide chimney-corners; the sleety rain comes in sharp gusts.  And as I sit by the light leaping blaze in my chamber, the scattered hail-drops beat upon my window, like the tappings of an OLD MAN’S cane.

I.

What is Gone.

Gone!  Did it ever strike you, my reader, how much meaning lies in that little monosyllable—­gone?

Say it to yourself at nightfall, when the sun has sunk under the hills, and the crickets chirp,—­“gone.”  Say it to yourself when the night is far over, and you wake with some sudden start from pleasant dreams,—­“gone.”  Say it to yourself in some country churchyard, where your father, or your mother, sleeps under the blooming violets of spring,—­“gone.”  Say it in your sobbing prayer to Heaven, as you cling lovingly, but oh, how vainly, to the hand of your sweet wife,—­“gone!”

Ay, is there not meaning in it?  And now, what is gone,—­or rather what is not gone?  Childhood is gone, with all its blushes and fairness,—­with all its health and wantoning,—­with all its smiles like glimpses of heaven, and all its tears which were but the suffusion of joy.

Youth is gone,—­bright, hopeful youth, when you counted the years with jewelled numbers, and hung lamps of ambition on your path, which lighted the palace of renown; when the days were woven into weeks of blithe labor, and the weeks were rolled into harvest months of triumph, and the months were bound into golden sheaves of years,—­all gone!