e first effective system of hot-house culture for
pines in England, died in 1819, aged eighty-six; and in the same year,
William Marshal, a voluminous agricultural writer and active farmer,
died at the age of eighty. And I must mention one more, in Dr. Andrew
Duncan, a Scotch physician, who cultivated his garden with his own
hands,--inscribing over the entrance-gate, "_Hinc salus_,"--and who was
the founder of the Horticultural Society of Edinburgh. This hale old
doctor died in 1828, at the extreme age of eighty-four; and to the very
last year of his life he never omitted going up to the top of Arthur's
Seat every May-Day morning, to bathe his forehead in the summer's dew.

As a country-liver, I like to contemplate and to boast of the hoary age
of these veterans. The inscription of good old Dr. Duncan was not
exaggerated. Every man who digs his own garden, and keeps the weeds down
thoroughly, may truthfully place the same writing over the gate,--"_Hinc
salus_" (wherever he may place his "_Hinc pecunia_"). Nor is the
comparative safety of active gardening or farming pursuits due entirely
to the vigorous bodily exercise involved, but quite as much, it seems to
me, to that enlivening and freshening influence which must belong to an
intimate and loving and intelligent companionship with Nature. It may be
an animal view of the matter,--but, in estimating the comparative
advantages and disadvantages of a country-life, I think we take too
little account of that glow and exhilaration of the blood which come of
every-day dealings with the ground and flowers and trees, and which, as
age approaches, subside into a calm equanimity that looks Death in the
face no more fearingly than if it were a frost. I have gray-haired
neighbors around me who have come to a hardy old age upon their little
farms,--buffeting all storms,--petting the cattle which have come down
to them from ten generations of short-lived kine, gone by,--trailing
ancient vines, that have seen a quarter of a century of life, over their
door-steps,--turning over soil, every cheery season of May, from which
they have already gathered fifty harvests; and I cannot but regard their
serene philosophy, and their quiet, thankful, and Christian enjoyment of
the bounties of Nature, as something quite as much to be envied as the
distinctions of town-craft. I ask myself,--If these old gentlemen had
plunged into the whirlpool of a city five-and-fifty years ago, would
they have been