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:

"May pure contents

Forever pitch their tents

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.

66

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.

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. — It was a touch of nature that started tears in the eyes that witnessed such simplicity of affection.

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

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

An Aunt is too apt to be a sort of nightmare in a house; children conceal everything they can from her: but our Aunt was made a repository of all the precious secrets there were on foot. She gave us counsel and made us fun. Her dignity was imbedded in her character, not pinned on to the surface of her gown, or starched into the high crown of her cap. For childish low spirits or moodiness she was an all-cure. She never shed tears, and would not revive sorrows. Her whole life was in living, not in a vague hope that she would do so after present troubles were past. Every anecdote that had currency in her own youth she gayly reproduced for the illustration of ours; every odd phrase she could call up from the recollections of a generation that went before ours, she passed around in our little circle like good coin that had been clipped. Her own school-days were somehow made to fit into our school-days; the beaux of her time found their