freshness and Snatches from

of the line with every few steps, and leaving
but a single trail in the heavy grass behind us,
each advance revealed to the delighted eye
newer and expanded charms. Now the spirit
took in the meaning of the
sweet fragrance of Morning.
the rural poets came singing their way into
our heart, like golden-zoned bees driving
homeward with their freights of honey. Over
night, the busy spiders, with the instinct of
Penelope, had spun slenderest ropes of very
gossamer, and swung them across from one
grass-spire to another, each rope, like a sus-
pension bridge, heavy with its string of pearly
dews, which the fancy delighted to believe
early passengers.

We frightened a callow bird out of his hiding-place among the tussocks, where he was squatted with upturned bill, waiting in dumb patience for the coming of his provident mother. A lithe and string-like black snake uncoiled himself from the fork of an alderbush, and slid down with a slump, that is in our ears now, into the water. The homely

chewink advertised us of her brisk whereabouts, by her musical monotone in the neighboring thicket of birches. A gay little yellowpoll played an eager air on his bagpipe, as if

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he would frankly ask us how we liked that, so bright and early in the morning. The polyglottal bobolink careered in a sort of drunken delight across the level stretch of meadow, and alighted on a frail rush stem at last, to swing out the rest of the little joy he had not strength to sing.

By and by, the voices of boys could be heard over on the opposite hill-sides, screaming their shrill "Go-long!" to cows that were too slow for their temper. Next, the hissing sound of scythes, grinding for the morning's work down in the mowing. Then a cart, rattling with a great noise over a stony length of the road. And now, cattle lowing to one another from all the hill-sides, and young calves bleating, — and the whole day fairly awake with its sounds of life and activity. Still, along down through the meadow we pursued our devious way, casting and recasting our line in the water, twisting our path just as the little brook twisted its own course, errant and tortuous, that kept whispering and smiling, prattling and laughing to us, till we ached to know of what pleasant secret the sprite would wish to unburden itself to our ears.

How many speckled beauties were ours, as a tribute from the little brook that

morning, a peep into our creel would have readily disclosed; but we found finer things to feed on than trouts in that charmed spot, greatly as we admire and love even them.

Such a morning, three good hours long as we made it, lies in my memory now like the fresh picture of a world of which we feel that, in some previous existence, perhaps, we may once have dreamed. It was every whit itself.

Nothing else could be like it. It would be styled a very cheap pleasure by many, because there was no carriage hire needed to reach it; but such are the only pleasures, let us remember, that are afterwards called up as the green spots of the lifetime. Nothing of this sort can be found up for sale. Money bears no relation to it. High health, deep lungs, an open eye, ready perceptions, and a fresh and innocent heart, these are all the few and simple conditions.

And yet the world hurries to Newport and the Springs for pleasure, and is bored to death with the delights it enjoys in such surfeit! A little idle brook, romping out of the alder thickets and stealing down through the open meadows, shall, for true tranquility and genuine satisfaction, put all their artifices to shame. We never turn away our face from the brook

side and start homewards, without repeating the exquisite lines quoted by gentle Izaak Walton and credited by the Father of Angling to Sir Henry Wotton :

Upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these mountains;
And peace still slumber by these purling fountains,
Which we may every year

Meet when we come a-fishing here."

SHE

OUR AUNT.

HE was just seventy when she died; but we never seemed to think, till then, of her being any older than on the day she was forty. She inherited youth to a most generous degree :— the new morning was not more fresh than the flow of her spirits.

Most people associate Aunts with sharpedged words, and phrases that might have been run in an iron mould; with suspicious supervision, two wrinkles between the eyes, and a voice from which drop the distillations of anything but honey. Addison describes them, in one of the numbers of the "Spectator," as " antiquated Sybils, that forebode and prophesy from one end of the year to the other; and in too many cases they are quite content to answer to the description. It would outrage my feelings beyond account, however, to compare our Aunt with the common run of Aunts who may be catalogued under one or the other of the foregoing descriptions.