I cannot weep for Willy, nor can I weep for the rest; Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the

best.

The first child that ever I bore was dead before he was

born:

Shadow and shine is life, little Annie, flower and thorn. I had not wept, little Annie, not since I had been a

wife;

But I wept like a child, that day; for the babe had fought for his life.

His dear little face was troubled, as if with anger or

pain;

I looked at the still little body,— his trouble had all been in vain.

For Willy I cannot weep; I shall see him another

morn;

But I wept like a child for the child that was dead before he was born.

But he cheered me, my good man, for he seldom said

me nay:

Kind, like a man, was he; like a man, too, would have

his way;

Never jealous, - not he: we had many a happy year: And he died, and I could not weep,- my own time seemed so near.

But I wished it had been God's will that I, too, then could have died:

I began to be tired a little, and fain had slept at his

side;

And that was ten years back, or more, if I don't for

get:

But as for the children, Annie, they are all about me Jet.

Pattering over the boards, my Annie, who left me at

two;

Patter she goes, my own little Annie,

you.

an Annie like

Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her

will,

While Harry is in the five-acre and Charlie ploughing

the hill.

And Harry and Charlie, I hear them, too, they sing to their team;

Often they come to the door in a pleasant kind of dream.

They come and sit by my chair, they hover about my bed:

I am not always certain if they be alive or dead.

And yet I know for a truth, there's none of them left alive;

For Harry went at sixty, your father at sixty-five;
And Willy, my eldest born, at nigh threescore and

ten;

I knew them all as babies, and now they are elderly

men.

For mine is a time of peace; it is not often I grieve;
I am oftener sitting at home in my father's farm at

And the neighbors come and laugh and gossip, and so do I;

I find myself often laughing at things that have long gone by.

To be sure the preacher says our sins should make us

sad;

But mine is a time of peace, and there is grace to be

had;

And God, not man, is the Judge of us all when life shall

cease;

And in this Book, little Annie, the message is one of

peace.

And age is a time of peace, so it be free from pain; And happy has been my life, but I would not live it

again.

I seem to be tired a little, that's all, and long for rest; Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best.

But how can I weep for Willy? he has but gone for an

hour,

Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the

next;

I too shall go in a minute. What time have I to be

vext?

THE ANCIENT MAN.

TRANSLATED BY L. O. FROM THE GERMAN OF JEAN PAUL RICHTER'S MEMOIR OF FIBEL, AUTHOR OF THE BIENENRODA SPELLING-BOOK.

"He is insensibly subdued

To settled quiet. He is one by whom

All effort seems forgotten; one to whom

Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which

He hath no need. He is by Nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy what the old man hardly feels."

T

WORDSWORTH.

HE stream of Fibel's history having vanished under ground, like a second river Rhone, I was obliged to explore

where story or stream again burst forth, and for this purpose I questioned every one. I was told that no one could better inform me than an exceedingly aged man, more than a hundred and twenty-five years old, who lived a few miles from the village of Bienenroda, and who, having been young at the same time with Fibel, must

know all about him. The prospect of shaking hands with the very oldest man living on the face of the earth enraptured me. I said to myself that a most novel and peculiar sensation must be excited by having a whole past century before you, bodily present, compact and alive, in the century now passing; by holding, hand to hand, a man of the age of the antediluvians, over whose head so many entire generations of young mornings and old evenings have fled, and before whom one stands, in fact, as neither young nor old; to listen to a human spirit, outlandish, behind the time, almost mysteriously awful; sole survivor of the thousand gray, cold sleepers, coevals of his own remote, hoary age; standing as sentinel before the ancient dead, looking coldly and strangely on life's silly novelties; finding in the present no cooling for his inborn spirit-thirst, no more enchanting yesterdays or to-morrows, but only the day-before-yesterday of youth, and the day-after-to-morrow of death. It may consequently be imagined that so very old a man would speak only of his farthest past, of his early day-dawn, which, of course, in the long evening of his protracted day, must now be blending with his midnight. On the other hand, that one like myself would not feel particularly younger before such a millionnaire of hours, as the Bienenroda Patriarch must be; and that his presence must make one feel more conscious of death than of immortality. A very aged man is a more pow