and walking fearfully swift. He wonders where all the old folks are. Once, when a boy, he could not find people young enough for him, and sidled up to any young stranger he met on Sundays, wondering why God made the world so old. Now he goes to Commencement to see his grandsons take their degree, and is astonished at the youth of the audience. "This is new," he says; "it did not use to be so fifty years before." At meeting, the minister seems surprisingly young, the audience young; and he looks round and is astonished that there are so few venerable heads. The audience seems not decorous; they come in late, and hurry off early, clapping the doors to after them with irreverent bang. But Grandfather is decorous, well-mannered, early in his seat: jostled, he jostles not again; elbowed, he returns it not; crowded, he thinks no evil. He is gentlemanly to the rude, obliging to the insolent and vulgar ;-for Grandfather is a gentleman, not puffed up with mere money, but edified with well-grown manliness. Time has dignified his good-manners. Now it is night. Grandfather sits by his old-fashioned fire. The family are all a-bed. He draws his old-fashioned chair nearer to the hearth. On the stand which his mother gave him are the candlesticks, also of old time. The candles are three-quarters burnt down; the fire on the hearth also is low. He has been thoughtful all day, talking half to himself, chanting a bit of verse, humming a snatch of an old tune. He kissed more tenderly than common his youngest grand-daughter, the family pet,before she went to bed. He takes out of his bosom a little locket: nobody ever sees it. Therein are two little twists of hair; common hair: it might be yours or mine. But as Grandfather looks at them, the outer twist of hair becomes a whole head of most ambrosial curls. He remembers the stolen interviews, the meetings by moonlight, and how sweet the evening star looked, and how he laid his hand on another's shoulder. "You are my evening star," quoth he. He remembers "The fountain-heads, and pathless groves, He thinks of his bridal hour. In the stillness of the great slumbering town, while life breaks only in a quiet ripple on all those hundred thousand lips, he hears no noise; but with wintry hands solemnly the church clock strikes the midnight hour. In his locket he looks again. This other twist is the hair of his firstborn son. At this same hour of midnight, once -it is now many years ago-when the long agony was over he knelt and prayed-" My God, I thank thee that I, though father, am still a husband too! O, what have Í done! what am I, that unto me, thus a life should be given, and another spared!" Now he has children, and children's children-the joy of his old age. But for many a year his wife has looked to him from beyond the Evening Star; yea, still she is herself the Evening Star, yet more beautiful; a star that never sets; not mortal wife now, but angel; and he says, "How long, O Lord? when lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, that mine eyes may see thy salvation?" The last stick on his andirons snaps asunder, and falls outward. Two faintly smoking brands stand there. Grandfather lays them together, and they flame up; the two smokes are one united flame. "Even so let it be in heaven," says Grandfather. Dr Priestly, when he was young, preached that old age was the happiest time of life; and when he was himself eighty he wrote, "I have found it so." But the old age of the glutton, the fop, the miser, the hunter after place, the bigot, the shrew, what would that be? Think of the old age of a Boston Kidnapper! It is only a noble, manly life, full of piety, which makes old age beautiful. Then we ripen for Eternity, and the dear God looks down from heaven, and lays his hand on the venerable head : Come, thou beloved, inherit the Kingdom prepared for thee." 66 A DISCOURSE OF THE FUNCTION OF A TEACHER PREACHED MINISTER OF RELIGION IN THESE TIMES. AT THE ORDINATION OF MOSES G. KIMBALL, AS OF THE FREE CHURCH AT BARRE, WORCESTER COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13, 1855. IF the inhabitants of this town were to engage a scientific man to come and dwell amongst you, as Superintendent of Agriculture, and teach you practical farming, it is plain what purpose you would set before him, for which he must point out the way and furnish the scientific means. You would say, "Show us how to obtain, continually, the richest crops; of the most valuable quality; in quantity, the greatest; with the least labour, in the shortest time. Show us the means to that end,” It is plain what you would expect of him. He must understand his business thoroughly; farming as a science -the philosophy of the thing-teaching by ideas, and showing the reason of the matter; farming, likewise, as an art the practice of the thing-the application of his science to your soil-demonstrating by fact the truth of his words, and thus proving the expediency of his thought. Of course he ought to know the soil and climate of the special place; what crops best suit the particular circumstances. He must become familiar with the prevalent mode of farming in the town and neighbourhood, and know its good and ill. He should understand the ancestral prejudices he has to encounter, which oppose his science and his art. It would be well for him to know the history of agriculture-general of the world, and special of this place understanding what experiments have been already tried with profit, what with failure. He should keep his eye open to the agriculture of mankind; ever on the look-out for new animals, plants, roots, seeds, scions, and better varieties of the old stock; for richer fertilizers of the soil -no islands of guano too remote for him to think upon; for superior modes of tillage; and more effective tools, whereby man could do more human work with less human toil. He would naturally confer with other farmers about him and all round the world, men of science or of practice, analyzing soils, enriching farms, greatening the crops. He would stimulate his townsmen to think about their work, and to create new use and new beauty on their estates. He need not be very anxious that all should think just as their fathers had done, or plough and shovel with instruments of the old pattern. But what if he were ignorant and knew no more than others about him, and was yet called "the Honourable Agricultural Superintendent," "the Reverend Professor of Farming," and had been "ordained with ancient ceremonies!" It is plain he could not teach what he did not know. If he knew only the theory, not also the practice, he would be only a half teacher. What if he was lazy, and would not learn? or bigoted, and stuck in some old form of agriculture, and would never depart from it-the Hebrew, from the time when there was no blacksmith in Israel, and men filed them ploughshares out of lumps of cold iron? or the Catholic form, in the days of Gregory VII., or Innocent III.? or the Reformed agriculture, from Luther's and Calvin's time? or the Puritanic, from the age of New England Cotton and Davenport? What if he took some ancient heathen author, Cato, Varro, Virgil, or Columella, as an infallible guide, and insisted that no crop, however seemingly excellent, could be good for anything unless won from the earth in that old-fashioned way; or declared that no blessing would fall upon a man's field unless he were a professing follower of Elias the Tishbite, and broke up ground with a team not less than four and twenty oxen strong! What if he were perverse and cowardly, and saw the great errors in the common mode of farming-the theory wrong, the practice imperfect and knew how to correct them, doubling the harvest while halving the toil, but yet would never tell his better way lest he should hurt the feelings of the people, be thought " radical" and "revolutionary," a "free-thinker," " and should lead men to doubt whether it were best to plough and sow at all; or lest they should deny that bread could feed men, or even be raised out of the ground? What if he were silent for fear he should spoil the sale of acorns and beech nuts by introducing wheat and Indian corn? What if he knew a perfect cure for the disease which makes the potato gather blackness, but would not tell it lest the bountiful supply should hurt the market of some men who had whole acres of onions and cabbages looking up for a high price? What if he knew of better breeds of swine, horses, and horned cattle; better grains, fruits, flowers, vegetables; of better tools to work with, superior barns and houses to store or to live in, and yet kept it all to himself, fearing that he should be called hard names by such farmers as preferred pounding their corn with pestle and mortar to grinding it in a water-mill? What if he spent his time in abusing the soil, declaring it capable of no good thing, ruined, lost, depraved, declaring it was impossible to make any improvement in husbandry, that neither material nor human nature would admit of another step in that direction; and took pains to defend the worst faults of the popular agriculture, insisting that the poorest farms were actually the richest, that tares were indispensable to wheat, the field of the sluggard the best symbol of good farming; and flamed out into elegant wrath against all who dared have better farms and larger crops than their fathers rejoiced in! What could you say to all that? But on the other hand, what if your Superintendent of Farming went manfully to his work, studied the soil and put in fitting crops, pointed out improvements to be made in fencing, draining, ploughing, planting, harvesting; introduced better varieties of cattle and of plants; set the people to think about their work, and so made the head save the hands; taught the children to observe the magnificent beauty of New England flowers and trees, and taught them the great laws of agriculture, whereby "each bush doth put its glory on like a gemmed bride,” and in |