s of the world have come unto us,
Cups of sorrow we yet shall drain;
But we have a secret which cloth show us
Wonderful rainbows in the rain.
And we hear the tread of the years move by,
And the sun is setting behind the hills;
But my darling does not fear to die,
And I am happy in what God wills.

So we sit by our household fires together,
Dreaming the dreams of long ago:
Then it was balmy summer weather,
And now the valleys are laid in snow.
Icicles hang from the slippery eaves;
The wind blows cold,--'tis growing late;
Well, well! we have garnered all our sheaves,
I and my darling, and we wait.

A RAMBLE THROUGH THE MARKET.

As a man puts on the stoutness and thicksetness of middle life, he
begins to find himself contemplating well-filled meat and fish stalls,
and piles of lusty garden vegetables, with unfeigned interest and
delight. He walks through Quincy Market, for instance, with far more
pleasure than through the dewy and moonlit groves which were the scenes
of his youthful wooings. Then he was all sentiment and poetry. Now he
finds the gratification of the mouth and stomach a chief source of
mundane delight. It is said that all the ships on the sea are sailing in
the direction of the human mouth. The stomach, with its fierce
assimilative power, is a great stimulator of commercial activity. The
table of the civilized man, loaded with the products of so many climes,
bears witness to this. The demands of the stomach are imperious. Its
ukases and decrees must be obeyed, else the whole corporeal commonwealth
of man, and the spirit which makes the human organism its vehicle in
time and space, are in a state of trouble and insurrection.

A large part of the lower organic world, both animal and vegetable, is
ground between man's molars and incisors, and assimilated through the
stomach with his body. This may be called the final cause of that part
of the lower organic world which is edible. Man is a scientific
eater,--a cooking animal. Laughter and speech are not so distinctive
traits of him as cookery. Improve his food, and he is improved both
physically and mentally. His tissue becomes finer, his skin clearer and
brighter, and his hair more glossy and hyacinthine. Cattle-breeders and
the improvers of horticulture are indirectly improving their own race by
furnishing finer and more healthful materials to be built into man's
body.