other indeed was a dog too, but that was merely the
substratum on which was accumulated a host of recollections:
it is Auld Lang syne that walks into your study when
your shaggy friend of ten summers comes stiffly in,
and after many querulous turnings lays himself down
on the rug before the fire. Do you not feel the
like when you look at many little matters, and then
look into the Future Years? That harness—how
will you replace it? It will be a pang to throw
it by, and it will be a considerable expense too to
get a new suit. Then you think how long harness
may continue to be serviceable. I once saw, on
a pair of horses drawing a stage-coach among the hills,
a set of harness which was thirty-five years old.
It had been very costly and grand when new; it had
belonged for some of its earliest years to a certain
wealthy nobleman. The nobleman had been for many
years in his grave, but there was his harness still.
It was tremendously patched, and the blinkers were
of extraordinary aspect; but it was quite serviceable.
There is comfort for you, poor country parsons!
How thoroughly I understand your feeling about such
little things. I know how you sometimes look
at your phaeton or your dog-cart; and even while the
morocco is fresh, and the wheels still are running
with their first tires, how you think you see it after
it has grown shabby and old-fashioned. Yes, you
remember, not without a dull kind of pang, that it
is wearing out. You have a neighbour, perhaps,
a few miles off, whose conveyance, through the wear
of many years, has become remarkably seedy; and every
time you meet it you think that there you see your
own, as it will some day be. Every dog has his
day: but the day of the rational dog is over-clouded
in a fashion unknown to his inferior fellow-creature;
it is overclouded by the anticipation of the coming
day which will not be his. You remember how that
great though morbid man, John Foster, could not heartily
enjoy the summer weather, for thinking how every sunny
day that shone upon him was a downward step towards
the winter gloom. Each indication that the season
was progressing, even though progressing as yet only
to greater beauty, filled him with great grief.
’I have seen a fearful sight to-day,’
he would say, ‘I have seen a buttercup.’
And we know, of course, that in his case there was
nothing like affectation; it was only that, unhappily
for himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking,
that he saw only a premonition of the snows of December
in the roses of June. It would be a blessing if
we could quite discard the tendency. And while
your trap runs smoothly and noiselessly, while the
leather is fresh and the paint unscratched, do not
worry yourself with visions of the day when it will
rattle and crack, and when you will make it wait for
you at the corner of back-streets when you drive into
town. Do not vex yourself by fancying that you
will never have heart to send off the old carriage,
nor by wondering where you shall find the money to
buy a new one.