other birds flew back into the open win- | again as if lying on waving tulips. He dow from the tops of the trees. A bul- dreamed, again, that he was a hundred finch, whose color had been changed by years old, and that he died as an innoage from red to black, struttod about the cent yearling child, without any of tho room, uttering droll sounds, which it sin and woe of earth; that he found his could not make distinct. The hare pat- parents on high, who brought before him tered about in the twilight, sometimes a long procession of his children, who had on his hind feet, sometimes on all fours. remained invisible to him while he was Every dog in the house bounded forward in this world, because they were transin glad, loving, human glee. But the parent, like the angels. He rose from most joyful of all was the poodle; for he his bed with new teeth and new ideas. knew he was to have a box, with com- The old Fibel was consumed, and a true partments, fastened to his neck, contain- phenix stood in his place, sunning its ing a list of the articles wanted for sup-colored wings. He had risen glorified, per, which it was his business to bring from the inn in Bienenroda. He was Fibel's victualer, or provision-wagon. Children, who ran back and forth, were the only other ones who ministered to his wants. In allusion to his pets, he said: "We ought to assist the circumscribed faculties of animals, by educating them, as far as we can, since we stand toward them, in a certain degree, as their Lord God; and we ought to train them to good morals, too, for very possibly they may continue to live after death. God and the animals are always good, but not so with man." Aged men impart spiritual things, as they give material things, with a shaking hand, which drops half. In the effort to gather up his recollections, he permitted me to quicken his memory with my own, and thus I obtained a connected account of some particulars in his experence. He said he might have been about a hundred years old when he cut a new set of teeth, the pain of which disturbed him with wild dreams. One night he seemed to be holding in his hand a large sieve, and it was his task to pull the meshes apart, one by one. The close net-work, and the fastening of the wooden rim gave him indescribable trouble. But as his dream went on, he seemed to hold in his hand the great bright sun, which flamed up into his face. He woke with a newborn feeling, and slumbered out of no other grave than his own body. The world retreated; heaven came down. When he had related these things, ho at once bade me good-night. Without waiting for the return of his ministering poodle, and with hands folded for prayer, he showed me the road. I withdrew, but I rambled a long time round the orchard, which had sprung entirely from seed of his own planting. Indeed, he seldom ate a cherry without smuggling the stone and burying it in the ground for a resurrection. This habit often annoyed the neighboring peasants, who did not want high things growing on their boundaries. "But," said he, "I can not destroy a fruit-stone. If the peasants pull up a tree it produces, it will still have lived a little while, and die as a child dies." I While loitering in the orchard, I heard an evening hymn played and sung. returned near Fibel's window, and saw him slowly turning a hand-organ, and accompanying the tune by softly singing an evening hymn. This organ, aided by a fragment of a voice, sufficed, in its monotonous uniformity, for his domestic devotion. I went away repeating the song. Beautiful was the orchard when I returned the next morning. And the hoarfrost of age seemed thawed and fluid and to glisten only as morning dew on Fibel's after-blossom. The affection of his animals toward him rendered the morning still more beautiful, in an orchard every tree of which had for its mother the stone of some fruit that he had enjoyed. His animals were an inheritance from his parents, though, of course, they were the great, great, greatgrandchildren of those which had belonged to them. The trees were full of brooding birds, and by a slight whistle he could lure down to his shoulders this tame posterity of his father's singing. school. It was refreshing to the heart to see how quickly the tender flutterers surrounded him. With the infantile satisfaction of a gray-headed child, he was accustomed to hang up on sticks, or in the trees, wherever the rays of the sun could best shine upon them, little balls of colored glass; and he took indescribable delight in this accordion of silver, gold, and jewel hues. These particolored sun-balls, varying the green with many flaming tints, were like crystal tulip-beds. Some of the red ones seemed like ripe apples among the branches. But what charmed the old man most were reflections from the landscape from these little world-spheres. They resembled the moving prospects shadowed forth in a diminishing mirror. "Ah," said he, "when I contemplate the colors produced by the sunshine, which God gives to this dark world, it seems to me as if I had departed, and were already with God. And yet, since HE is IN us, we are always with God." I asked him how it happened that, at his age, he spoke German almost purer than that used even by our best writers. Counting his birth from the end of his century (the new birth described in his dream), he replied: "I was somewhere about two years old, when I happened to hear a holy, spiritual minister, who spoke German with such an angeltongue, that he would not have needed a better in heaven." He could not tell me the preacher's name, but he vividly described his manner in the pulpit. He told how he spoke with no superfluity of words, airs, or gestures; how he uttered, in mild tones, things the most beautiful and forcible; how, like the Apostle John, with his resting-place close to heaven, this man spoke to the world, laying his hands calmly on the pulpit desk as an arm-case; how his every tone was a heart, and his every look a blessing; how the energy of this disciple of Christ was imbedded in love, as the firm diamond is incased in the ductile gold; how the pulpit was to him a Mount Tabor, whereon he transfigured both him. self and his hearers; and how, of all clergymen, he best performed that which is the most difficult-the praying worthily. My feelings grew constantly warmer toward this time-worn man, while I did not require a full return of affection from him any more than I should from a little child. But I remembered that I ought not to disturb the evening of his days with things of the world, and that I ought to depart. I would have him preserve, undisturbed, that sublime position of old age, where man lives, as it were, at the pole; where no star rises or sets; where the whole firmament is motionless and clear, while the Pole-star of another world shines fixedly overhead. I therefore said to him that I would return in the evening and take my leave. To my surprise, he replied that perhaps he should himself take leave of the whole world at evening, and that he wished not to be disturbed when dying. He said that he should that evening read to the end of the Revelation of St. John, and perhaps it might be the end with him, also. I ought to have mentioned previously that he read continually, and read nothing but the Bible, regularly from the beginning to the end; and he had a fixed impression that he should depart on concluding the twentieth and twenty-first verses of the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation of John: "He which testifieth of all things saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen." In consequence of this belief, he was in the habit of reading the last books of the Bible faster. with their humming, as in the warm summer evening they dived into the cups of the linden-blossoms. My joy kindled into a flame. He was alive! But I would not disturb his holy evening. I would let him remain with Him who had surrounded him with gifts and with years, and not call upon him to think of Little as I believed in so sudden a withering of his protracted after-blossom, I obeyed his latest-formed wish. Whenever a right wish is expressed by any man, we should do well to remem-any man here below. I listened to the ber that it may be his last. I took my leave, requesting him to intrust me with his testamentary commissions for the village. He said they had been taken charge of long ago, and the children knew them. He cut a twig from a Christmas-tree, coeval in his childhood, and presented me with it as a keepsake. last verse of his hymn, that I might be still more certain of the actual continu ance of his life, and then tardily I slipped away. To my joy, I still found, in the eternal youth of Nature, beautiful references to his lengthened age; from the everlasting rippling of the brook in the meadow to a late swarm of bees, which had settled themselves on a linden tree, probably in the forenoon, before two o'clock, as if, by taking their lodging with him, he was to be their bee-father, and continue to live. Every star twin I went to the orchard very early in the morning, wishing to look upon the aged man in sleep-death's angel prelude, the warm dream of cold death. But he was reading, and had read, in his large printed Bible, far beyond the deluge, as In the beautiful summer evening, I could not refrain from stealthily approaching the house, through the orchard, to ascertain whether the good old man had ended his Bible and his life together. On the way, I found the tornkled to me a hope. envelope of a letter, sealed with a black seal, and over me the white storks were speeding their way to a warmer country. I was not much encouraged when I heard all the birds singing in his orchard, for their ancestors had done the same when his father died. A towering cloud, full of the latest twilight, spread itself before my short-sighted vision, like a far-off, blooming, foreign landscape; and I could not comprehend how it was that I had never before noticed this strange-looking, reddish land; so much the more easily did it occur to me that this might be his Orient, whither God was leading the weary one. I had become so confused as actually to mistake red bean-blossoms for a bit of fallen sunset. Presently I heard a man singing, to the accompaniment of an organ. It was the aged man singing his evening hymn: "Lord of my life, another day Once more hath sped away." The birds in the room, and those in the distant branches, also, chimed in with his song. The bees, too, joined in could see by the engravings. I held it to be a duty not to interrupt his solitude long. I told him I was going away, and gave him a little farewell billet, instead of farewell words. 1 was much moved, though silent. It was not the kind of emotion with which we take leave of a friend, or a youth, or an old man; it was like parting from a remote stranger-being, who scarcely glances at us from the high, cold clouds which hold him between the earth and the sun. There is a stillness of soul which resembles the stillness of bodies on a frozen sea, or on high mountains; every loud tone is an interruption too prosaically harsh, as in the softest adagio. Even those words, "for the last time," the old man had long since left behind him. Yet he hastily presented to me my favorite flower, a blue Spanish vetch in an earthen pot. This butterfly flower is the sweeter | Fold reverently the weary hands That toiled so long and well; That life-work, stretching o'er long He turned immediately, quite tranquilly to his organ. I parted from him as from a life. He played from his organ beneath the trees, and his face was turned toward me; but to his dim eyes I knew that I should soon become a motionless cloud. So I remained till he began his morning hymn, from old Neander: "The Lord still leaves me living, He hears my early lays." While he was singing, the birds flew round him; the dogs, accustomed to the music, were silent; and it even wafted the swarm of bees into their hive. Bowed down as he was by age, his figure was so tall that, from the distance where I stood, he looked sufficiently erect. I remained until the old man had sung the twelfth and last verse of his morning hymn: "Ready my cause to finish, And come, O God, to Thee; THE GOOD OLD GRANDMOTHER. O softly wave the silver hair From off that aged brow! A varied web has been; These silver hairs stole softly on, Each silver hair, each wrinkle there, How bright she always made her home! The very falling of her step Made music as she went; The song of full content. And now, in later years, her word Her widowed life has happy been, With brightness born of heaven, So pearl and gold in drapery fold The sunset couch at even. O, gently fold the weary hands She's safe within her Father's house, O, pray that thus such rest may come THE HOUR OF SETTING DAY. [The foul spirit of detraction was the origin of these beautiful lines from a pure heart. The authoress was an elderly lady, a widow, Mrs. Brówne, of Munson, Mass., who had thrown upon her the responsibility of a house full of little children, of whom she was the loving grandmother. Weary and heavy-la 'en with her many cares, she was accustomed at evening to retire for a brief period to the seclusion of an arbor for quiet meditation and secret prayer. This seeming neglect of her household duties occasiond unhappy comments from some of her neighbors, which coming to the ears of this humble daughter of God, drew forth from her an apology in these sweet verses. As she wrote it, the expression from every cumbering care," was "from little ones and care." This hymn was the remote cause of another of perhaps equal merit. As detraction originated the one, so selfishness origi nated the other. Dr. Leonard Bacon, of New Haven, applied to the publishers of the hymn book, in which Mrs. Browne's po m first appeared, for permission to copy it for a collection which he was compiling. This being refused, he wrote some lines expressing similar thoughts: The Evening Hour," which we also give, and blow the other. Both are curious instances of a frequent result, in Providence, of evil producing good.] I love to steal awhile away And spend the hour of setting day I love in solitude to shed I love to think on mercies past, I love by faith to take a view Of brighter scenes in Heaven; And when life's toilsome day is o'er, THE EVENING HOUR. DR. LEONARD BACON. HAIL, tranquil hour of closing day! How sweet the tear of penitence, Before his throne of grace; While to the contrite spirit's sense, He shows his smiling face. |