ls himself growing worse for
the reading, I advise to lay it down. It will be very harmless on the
shelf, however it may be in the hand.

I shall lay no claim to the title of moralist, teacher, or romancist: my
thoughts start pleasant pictures to my mind; and in a garrulous humor I
put my finger in the button-hole of my indulgent friend, and tell him
some of them,--giving him leave to quit me whenever he chooses.

Or, if a lady is my listener, let her fancy me only an honest,
simple-hearted fellow, whose familiarities are so innocent that she can
pardon them;--taking her hand in his, and talking on; sometimes looking
in her eyes, and then looking into the sunshine for relief; sometimes
prosy with narrative, and then sharpening up my matter with a few
touches of honest pathos;--let her imagine this, I say, and we may
become the most excellent friends in the world.

_SPRING;_

OR,

_DREAMS OF BOYHOOD._

_DREAMS OF BOYHOOD._

_Spring._

The old chroniclers made the year begin in the season of frosts; and
they have launched us upon the current of the months from the snowy
banks of January. I love better to count time from spring to spring; it
seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by
blight.

Bernardin de St. Pierre, in his sweet story of Virginia, makes the bloom
of the cocoa-tree, or the growth of the banana, a yearly and a loved
monitor of the passage of her life. How cold and cheerless in the
comparison would be the icy chronology of the North;--So many years have
I seen the lakes locked, and the foliage die!

The budding and blooming of spring seem to belong properly to the
opening of the months. It is the season of the quickest expansion, of
the warmest blood, of the readiest growth; it is the boy-age of the
year. The birds sing in chorus in the spring--just as children prattle;
the brooks run full--like the overflow of young hearts; the showers drop
easily--as young tears flow; and the whole sky is as capricious as the
mind of a boy.

Between tears and smiles, the year, like the child, struggles into the
warmth of life. The old year--say what the chronologists will--lingers
upon the very lap of spring, and is only fairly gone when the blossoms
of April have strown their pall of glory upon his tomb, and the
bluebirds have chanted his requiem.

It always seems to me as if an access of life came with the melting of
the winter's snows, and as if every rootlet of g