ing, a peep into our creel would have ly disclosed; but we found finer things ed on than trouts in that charmed spot, ly as we admire and love even them.

ach a morning, three good hours long as made it, lies in my memory now like the picture of a world of which we feel that, me previous existence, perhaps, we may have dreamed. It was every whit itself. ing else could be like it. It would be d a very cheap pleasure by many, because was no carriage hire needed to reach it; such are the only pleasures, let us rememthat are afterwards called up as the green s of the lifetime.

Nothing of this sort can ound up for sale. Money bears no relation . High health, deep lungs, an open eye, y perceptions, and a fresh and innocent t, — these are all the few and simple con

›ns.

nd yet the world hurries to Newport and Springs for pleasure, and is bored to death 1 the delights it enjoys in such surfeit! A e idle brook, romping out of the alder thickand stealing down through the open mead, shall, for true tranquility and genuine sfaction, put all their artifices to shame. : never turn away our face from the brook

side and start homewards, without repeatin the exquisite lines quoted by gentle Izaak Wa ton and credited by the Father of Angling Sir Henry Wotton :

"May pure contents

Forever pitch their tents

Upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these mountains; And peace still slumber by these purling fountains,

OUR AUNT.

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

-ee:

Iost people associate Aunts with sharped words, and phrases that might have been in an iron mould; with suspicious superon, two wrinkles between the eyes, and a ee from which drop the distillations of anyg but honey. Addison describes them, in of the numbers of the "Spectator," as tiquated Sybils, that forebode and prosy from one end of the year to the other;" in too many cases they are quite content answer to the description. It would outre my feelings beyond account, however, to mpare our Aunt with the common run of nts who may be catalogued under one or other of the foregoing descriptions.

She was a great lover of Nature's own things The stay-behind robins knew at whose door they could get free board with lodgings about the barn and sheds- through the weary, dreary winter; and the woodpeckers and snowbirds understood, with no further telling, that the meaty bones, hung at the back of the house, were exclusively for their picking. Children were not more alive, in the dawn of the June mornings, to catch the earliest note of the three o'clock robin, or to find their round nestsfull of eggs snugged away under the leaves. So fresh a heart is childhood's own; but she had it, and she kept it, too, up to the day she became three-score and ten. For even while she lay, one April afternoon, on the bed on which she shortly after died, she lifted her head to greet, as she would a personal friend, the pretty blue jay that flew to the low roof close by and tried to look in at her window. a touch of nature that started tears in the eyes that witnessed such simplicity of affection.

It was

Among the children, while they were coming on and coming up, she was esteemed almost like an own mother. They never felt a twinge of fear in her presence, but rather sought the magnetism of her smiles and the glad contagion of her humor. She was young once more

them; and as they grew in years and in om, she managed, with the help of her n and ready sympathies, to keep pace with , too. It was all very beautiful; I take it me to say that no other family group furnished an Aunt in this respect the parof ours.

n Aunt is too apt to be a sort of nightmare - house; children conceal everything they from her:- but our Aunt was made a sitory of all the precious secrets there were foot. She gave us counsel and made us Her dignity was imbedded in her charer, not pinned on to the surface of her gown, starched into the high crown of her cap. childish low spirits or moodiness she was all-cure. She never shed tears, and would revive sorrows. Her whole life was in livnot in a vague hope that she would do so er present troubles were past. Every anece that had currency in her own youth she ly reproduced for the illustration of ours; ry odd phrase she could call up from the ollections of a generation that went before s, she passed around in our little circle like od coin that had been clipped. Her own 1ool-days were somehow made to fit into our nool-days; the beaux of her time found their