the mountains his heirship to the Father of Nature!

This delirium of feeling may not find expression upon the lip of the
boy; but yet it underlies his thought, and will without his
consciousness give the spring to his musing dreams.

----So it is, that, as you lie there upon the sunny greensward, at the
old Squire's door, you muse upon the time when some rich-lying land,
with huge granaries, and cosy old mansion sleeping under the trees,
shall be yours,--when the brooks shall water your meadows, and come
laughing down your pasture-lands,--when the clouds shall shed their
spring fragrance upon your lawns, and the daisies bless your paths.

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, wi