WHE

THRESHOLDS.

HEN I meet a person from the country in the Bedlam of the streets, I am straightway carried back to the orchards and clover-fields, to meadows and running brooks. At once I hear calves bleat in their pens, and cattle low on the hill-side pastures. I roam in big barns, thread path-streaked timber strips, and catch the cheery sound of cock-crow in the morning.

All objects are so suggestive. My friend carries about him the scents of hay and huckleberry pastures, as well as hints of fresh butter and cheese. In him seem to be mysteriously bound up the most delightfully homelike associations, as in the thumbed leaves of some dear old book. The low and broad roof, milk-pans set against the wall in the sun, a row of hives in the sheltered corner of the little garden, apple-trees blushing with blossoms and musical with bees, doves cooing and hens cackling about the yard, winter fires of good oak and

hickory on the hearth,

pictures like these all hang, in my thought, about my country friend, like the very clothes he has on, and I feel as if I must stop him short and ask him how he left the folks at home.

When the country dweller goes about building his house, the first thing he looks for, after digging his cellar, is a door-stone. Well do his far-sighted instincts tell him how smoothly the feet of gladness and grief will wear it; what light spirits are to trip across it as they enter, and what heavy burdens may be carried forth in the coming days of sorrow and separation.

The entrance to a man's house gives to the outside world much of the expression of his domestic life. He comes out on his doorstep in the moist April sunsets to listen to the chirrup of the first robin in the apple-tree, or catch the pipings of the early frogs in the marshy corner of the home lot. He gives open-handed welcomes at this point, and here he bids farewell. The eldest daughter —just married steps over it on the blithe June morning,and the dead child is lifted across in the sad afternoon of October. They all cluster upon it, at the return of the annual Thanksgiving; and in the Sunday mornings of summer they gather there, snapping off the spikes of lilac

blossoms while they wait for the two-horse wagon to drive up and carry them to meeting.

I have, before now, unexpectedly come upon cellars of old country houses that have long ago disappeared from the landscape; the walls fallen in and mantled with weeds; no relic of a chimney standing; the smooth door-stone gone; nettles and chokeweeds growing luxuriantly in the pit; dead and drear silence brooding over the spot:- and I think that neither Marius at Carthage nor Gibbon at ruined Rome could have felt, in their way, the grief of a sadder desolation. It must be a heart unused to its own self that can confront such sights unstirred.

The streak of a path through the grass to the well now choked and dry; the apple-trees stinted, decayed, and blotched with cankering mosses; here and there a stone from the ruined cellar wall lying as it was thrown out; clumps. of white birches and alders crowding down to the brink; no smoke curling above a bright hearth-stone; no faces eagerly pressed against window panes; no feet of children to make little prints about the door; nothing but a silence utterly voiceless all around; — a Coliseum in ruins cannot move the heart like this wreck of what was once a Home. None of

the fallen arches, fragmentary columns, crumbling viaducts, or deserted London bridges could possibly suggest the outlines of a sadder story. The single cat-bird, mewing in the alders then, is more eloquent than the best inspired pens of History. Nature herself laments the end of the little drama, and with leaves and vines and greenest grasses hastens to throw over decay itself an expression of pathetic beauty.

If a Home in ruins excites feelings of such sort as this, how easy to call back to life again the soul of a happiness now buried under the snows of many a winter's absence, which dwelt within walls that are still standing, and hallowed a spot to which the heart will remain loyal so long as it beats in the breast.

But thresholds are not broad, nor are people wont to tarry long upon them:- they are but for passing over. What is to be seen within, what simple sort of life grows and ripens through the summers and winters from attic to cellar and from the front gate to the pasture bars, we will straightway go in and behold for ourselves: and on this threshold of the whole matter let me take you by the hand, gentle reader, and conduct you along.

FIRE ON THE HEARTH.

How

home, and comes back

W little seems the gate, and how low the wall, to the one who went out but yesterday a Boy from again to-day a Man! There are few illusions. with which the years delight to make such cruel havoc as with these of our youth.

Yet the fireplace is just as wide, and the wooden mantel as high, as when the tea-kettle used to sing on the hob in the still winter afternoons, and the old folks sat with the hickory blaze shining straight into their faces. There may have been a revolution in the house, — lifting up the ceiling, pushing back the partitions, and letting in larger windows, -but it is very pleasant to know that by the old hearth the old memories are kept sound and whole; that if they are driven down from the twilight of the garret, from the stillness of the chambers, and even out of the favorite keeping-room, they retreat as by instinct to the hearthstone, where they swarm once more