and equalizes the spirits of the sober country farmer. On that one day, he pauses once more to consider: wife and children about him, horses and cattle enjoying their rest, and he the head and lord of the whole domestic establishment, he is almost conscious of being a patriarch in the land, and his character looms quite grand and columnar in the social land scape. - The fury and fuss of some Sundays elsewhere are in sharp enough contrast with one of these blessed Sabbaths in the country. From the still hour when the sun begins to redden the east, the whole roll of the hours is holy in the contemplation. All objects seem to be clothed in a special Sunday attire, — to look one in the face, as it were, and silently say, "It is Sunday." The people without exception dress themselves tidily and with peculiar care, from genuine respect for the Day itself. Children are held in wholesome, though often in rigid restraint, for the same reason. The very procession of the hours seems slow and solemn, and men's faces wear longer aspects, not as deceitful masks at all, but only out of a decent and ingrained regard for the character and associations of the Day. I HUCKLEBERRYING. CANNOT help thinking that the boy who comes to manhood without knowing something of the simple and healthy pleasures of the Huckleberry Pasture, is hardly as sweet or whole a man for the unlucky omission. Because I believe in my heart that this same huckleberry field-like many simple gratifications that cost nothing and are little thought of at the time is a real pasture-land for the spirit of the boy, whereon it feeds with an eagerness not paralleled by that of any of the experiences which come afterward. Of the recurring delights of the summertime, this one of huckleberrying assuredly belongs at the top of the list. It blossoms all over with the dearest associations, which have their countless fine roots in the very being; and these associations grow, too, along with the growth of the youthful heart. Neither circumstance nor years impair them; they only acquire a new freshness with the lapse of time. It is a secret pleasure of mine to sit and call up again, in musing mood, those happy days when a half dozen of us boys just out of school used to take our baskets and pails, and tramp off a couple of long and dusty miles over a country road for a summer day's huckleberrying. We were in the habit of foraging for this delicious wild fruit in some pastures that belonged to a kind and honest man rest his soul!—who was known to us only as "Uncle Elisha." I well remember the easy gait we struck, when we came near the long and winding lane that led to the good man's little brown one-and-a-half story house, and the gay, childish snatches we shouted, rather than sang, as we trudged along the cart-path across the pastures on our way home again. The wide-spreading chestnut-tree down in the very bottom of the meadow bowl, stands out green and hospitably umbrageous before me now, its lowest limbs kindly holding for us the baskets and pails that carried our frugal dinners. Ah, what a matchless sauce was that which our voracious appetites supplied us with then! I see, too, the very bower by the roadside, made by the wild grape-vine that had seized hold of a promising young apple-tree and compelled it to stand still for the better dis play of its own leafy contortions; the same vine next that moss-spattered stone wall, in whose sequestered shadows we all loved to huddle on our return home at sundown. I remember just as well, too, how we used to lay the woolly mullein leaves over the glossy berries we had picked, and secure them with little twigs of the huckleberry bush, placed in the form of squares, and triangles, and octagons, and stars. The old bars to the pasture, of which there were two pairs, and the last of which, at the head of the lane, we had to climb, were a welcome landmark as we came trooping up out of the berry field; and, next to these, I may truly say, was the low roof of the house of "Uncle Elisha," and the wellsweep that always seemed to me to be poised in the air above it. Up along through that same old lane, our young feet trod a carpet whose like they will never walk over anywhere again;-Wiltons and Axminsters may not be named with that thick and verdant turf which received them with so soft a pressure, after the long day's tramping among the rocks, bushes, and brambles of the berry pasture. Occasionally, too, we used to get a drink of new milk at that same brown house; and it is very certain that, at such times, our industri ous field-service was duly paraded before the eyes of the generous giver, basket after basket. Looking through the vista of memory to the figure of "Uncle Elisha's" wife, as she stood in that low back-door with a bumper of sweet milk for us in her hand, I can endorse every syllable the traveller Ledyard so truly says about Woman, and do it with an enthusiasm entirely unaffected. There was still another field to which we rambled on these fragrant summer-day excursions. Three good miles distant was that, and to reach it we had to cross a long, covered toll-bridge. The little light that showed us our way across came in through the wideapart and narrow windows cut, like loop-holes, in its sides, at which we used to stop and look down with a strange fascination into the swift current of the water. My conscience will never fully acquit me, I fear, of the guilt of having run that toll of a penny on many an occasion. The bridge was tended then by a brother of the revered and scholarly man, since gone to his heavenly rest, who afterwards turned me off his hands, declaring me fit for college. That occurred to me once as a strange coincidence somehow: in the haste and hubbub of this age of great things, the |