was
in Germany: A Mother and two or three of her Sons having a Trial at Law,
were asked what they eat and drank to obtain such an Age, which was four
or five hundred years that they all made up amongst them; they answered,
chiefly by eating the Apple, and drinking its Juice. And I knew an
eminent, rich Lawyer, almost eighty Years old, who was very much
debilitated through a tedious Sickness, on the telling him this Story,
got Pippins directly, sliced them to the number of a dozen at a Time,
and infused them in Spring-Water, and made it his common Drink, till
Cyder-Time came on; also he fell on planting a number of Pippin-Trees in
order to his enjoying their salubrious Quality, and a fine Plantation
there is at this Day in his Gardens a few miles from me. This Practice
of his drinking the Pippin Liquor and Cyder, answered extraordinary
well, for he lived several Years after, in a pretty good State of
Health."

* * * * *

The next name I come upon, in this rainy-day service, starts a pleasant
picture to my mind,--not offset by a British landscape, but by one of
our own New-England hills. A group of heavy, overgrown chestnuts stand
stragglingly upon a steep ascent of pasture; they are flanked by a wide
reach of velvety turf covering the same swift slope of hill; gray
boulders of granite, scattered here and there, show gleaming spangles of
mica; clumps of pokeweed lift sturdily a massive luxuriance of stems and
a great growth of purple berries; occasional stumps are cushioned over
with mosses, green and gray; and, winding among stumps and rocks, there
comes trending down the green hill-side a comely flock of great,
long-woolled sheep: they nibble at stray clover-blossoms; they lift
their heads and look,--it is only the old dog who is by me,--they know
him; they straggle on. I strew the salt here and there upon a stone;
"Dandie" pretends to sleep; and presently the woolly company is all
around me,--the "Bakewell" flock.

Robert Bakewell,[C] who gave the name to this race of sheep, (afterward
known as New-Leicesters,) lived at Dishley, upon the highway from
Leicester to Derby, and not very far from that Ashby de la Zouche where
Scott plants the immortal scene of the tournament in "Ivanhoe." He was a
farmer's son, with limited education, and with limited means; yet, by
due attention to crosses, he succeeded in establishing a flock which
gained a world-wide reputation. His first letting of buc