re
as rosy as at morn; to look far away and descry on the horizon an array
of answering lights; not in one direction only, but leagues away, to
see the fainter ever fainter glow of burning hempherds--this, too, is
one of the experiences, one of the memories.

And now along the turnpikes the great loaded creaking wagons pass
slowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to be
scattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March are
dying down, the sower enters the field and begins where he began twelve
months before.

A round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of the
hemp. The planet has described its vast orbit ere it be grown and
finished. All seasons are its servitors; all contradictions and
extremes of nature meet in its making. The vernal patience of the
warming soil; the long, fierce arrows of the summer heat, the long,
silvery arrows of the summer rain; autumn's dead skies and sobbing
winds; winter's sternest, all-tightening frosts. Of none but strong
virtues is it the sum. Sickness or infirmity it knows not. It will have
a mother young and vigorous, or none; an old or weak or exhausted soil
cannot produce it. It will endure no roof of shade, basking only in the
eye of the fatherly sun, and demanding the whole sky for the walls of
its nursery.

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted;
which must struggle upward, be cut down, rotted and broken, ere the
separation take place between our dross and our worth--poor perishable
shard and immortal fibre. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growth
from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the
time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it
is borne from the fields of its nativity for the long service.

I

The century just past had not begun the race of its many-footed years
when a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout the green
valleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the wilderness, and
constituted themselves a worshipping association. For some time peace
of one sort prevailed among them, if no peace of any other sort was
procurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels with
other backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, and
hot personal disputes among the members--as is the eternal law. So that
the church grew as grow infusorians and certain worms,--by fissure, by
periodical split