the season, and the long vacation had passed, then would come some tall, strapping Ichabod Crane to occupy the throne at the district school during the winter, and we would pack up our little stock of books, tallow our great cowhide boots, and adopt the rôle of pupils. We were quite “man grown” before we graduated at Science Hill, and we remember very distinctly that near the end of our last term we were not a little chagrined by having the rector’s daughter, a pert little miss of perhaps ten years, “go above” us both in the spelling class.

Forty years have wrought great changes even in that secluded region where the air is so pure and everything so joyous that it seems singular that people ever become ill or weary there when we consider that they exist at all in great cities. Much of the somnolence which once lingered about the section has been marred by the advent of the railroad, but sufficient that is old remains to render it the “dearest spot on earth” to us still. How dearly we love to revisit those scenes! how happy we are in walking over the paths we once trod so buoyantly, and in dwelling on old recollections!

We make our excursions quite incognito. Sauntering through the town or lingering in the old burial- ground reading the names engraven on the slabs, we are almost strangers among those who now people our old neighbourhood. But what recks it? If the pine grove is still and neglected where once our laughter echoed so joyously, can not imagination, dipping her pencils in the sunset’s richest dyes, fill out the picture? Certainly it can and does, for Judd and I are a pair of very imaginative as well as very soft-hearted old fellows. We are sometimes a trifle melancholy on these visits, particularly when we think of our old companions. Alas! where are they? Beneath the greensward in the quaint little burial-ground some are sleeping, a part of whom lived and died amid the familiar scenes of youth. Others went forth into the world, were lured on and on by visions of renown and wealth, and returned like poor Slingsby, footsore, weary, and poverty-stricken to their birthplace to

but who died at last, and were gathered to their fathers. Many are scattered about the world still living; more have died in regions far remote from their homes, while a few, a very few, are yet living, like Miriam Lane, “old and garrulous”—volumes incarnate richly stored with legends and anecdotes bearing on the past.

’Tis a simple tale, this one of ours, scarcely worth the telling, perchance; and yet there is something in it. There is hardly a community, however small, that has not its Judd and Trafton, sometimes many braces of them, about whom their acquaintances are ever speculating. We should not forget that there are many “ups and downs” in life, and that the “downs” are usually the more common; Judd’s experience has been wholly with them. There are many things beside prosperity which should endear to us our fellow creatures. Success commands admiration and should receive its due; but honest failure, with its long train of enervating embarrassments and disappointments, should receive our respect and sympathy. A. green spot existing at this advanced day in Judd’s heart, as illustrated by the love he bears the region in which he was born and the associations of his childhood—existing where it would seem such repeated failures and disasters in life as have been his could have given birth to nothing but bitterness—speaks of the goodness and largeness of his soul, and makes him worthy of a better friendship than mine.

But a little longer shall we perplex you; our-candle is burning low, and ere long its weak light will expire, to be relumed no more.