melody, like the winding horn of the hunter, as they came circling across the still lake of the summer air. And all these sounds commingle mysteriously with other sounds, and again with one another, so that in such a place and at such an hour, the sensitive and contemplative soul lapses into a mood of the profoundest worship.

Trudging thoughtfully home again at nightfall, the sun throwing level beams across the landscape and lodging them in the tops of the trees, and the shadows deepening in the grassy lanes and damp lowland reaches, it rises in every one's thought that this one day out in the pastures has been the crown of all the days of the year. Not often does it indeed come round, whole and entire like this, in a singlę season; but still it holds its fixed place, like the sweet Pleiades in the heavens, in the calendar of every passing year.

Jaded and fagged, unable to go one step further, almost reeling and stumbling into the house, the excursionists finally bring in their berries and set them down on the table, and are ready for bed as soon as they have eaten their frugal supper.

Is there sweet sleep dispensed for the blessed anointing of mortal lids, by any of "the drowsy

syrups of the world," like this which rests on the spirits of the tired huckleberry party?

Can even childhood throw itself into the arms of the drowsy god with a perfecter trust in his ability to bless with the single blessing it is too weary to ask for?

BARN LIFE.

T is the man of the high latitudes chiefly,

IT

who strives to domesticate his sentiments and give them a genuine home expression. The inhabitant of Constantinople does not seek a like realization of his desires with the native of the Swiss Valley, or of the green slopes of English Kent. The dweller among the breezy New England hills nurses a very different sentiment concerning Home from his congener around the bayous of Louisiana, or more directly under the suns of the tropics. Hence the Northern house wears another aspect, and has entirely distinct belongings from that of any other latitude and location. The climatic needs being peculiar, the sentiment that springs out of them must, perforce, correspond.

May it not be accepted as an universal truth, that the love of Home exists nowhere, and is incapable of actual expression, except it is first caught wild from Nature, and shut down under ridge-poles and sheltering eaves and roofs? Is

dens?

attachment to home best bred in caves and Can Nomads be called home-loving? or Crowfeet and Flatheads know by experience of the domestic sentiments and virtues ?

With the Home goes the Barn; that is a matter altogether of course. Hovels do not require barns as domestic complements; but Homes, with low roofs and broad hearths, do. The Barn is as much an object of interest as the dwelling, and the life that swarms and is sheltered in the one bears very close relationship to that which hives in the other. The good husbandman who fodders his sheep and cattle within the snug enclosures of his barn near home, grows more attached to them than if he merely knew they were browsing miles off in the woods, or straggling without aim across vast prairie lands, and here and there pulling at exposed hay-stacks. This love, too, becomes a personal affair, and, by its operation, the profounder love of locality and home is fixed and developed. If the man of New England migrates, it is only for better land and, therefore, a better HOME; but the man of Tennessee and Mississippi moves farther on, that he may own a thousand ACRES, in lieu of his present three hundred.

It is a fair study of the growth of sentiment

and taste, to look about the country and see how farmers place their barns; they may be estimated pretty well by so slight a token. I can go and put my hand on many and many a broad barn-door, that discloses an interior view pat before the home windows. Concerning the use and value of barns, their honest. owners hold the right idea, but happen to be lamentably deficient in taste; and, no doubt, would frankly admit that they cared not a wisp of hay about it. They assume what is true

that the barn is the workshop of the farm establishment, where all labor and profit begins and ends; and hence, like men who love their money-bags best of all things, they want the workshop where they can see it; and even permit the tyrannical sense of smell to become subordinate, where it should have its way unchallenged. Then, too, they would have their place of business as handy to the door as may be; like the shoemaker, with his plaything of a shop right in the L of his house, or the doctor, whose instruments, jars, and saddlebags lie kicking about like ordinary household trumpery.

There are two sorts of barns, now-a-days; the Commercial, and the Picturesque. Mechi, of London, writes overpoweringly of the for