will. When I pay off the debt I owe Peter Wood, I will see what we
can do about some new books. Put on your shawl now, Pearl, and hunt
up old Brindle, it is milking time, and she is not in sight."

"Grandpa, are you sure you feel better this evening?" She plunged
her fingers in his thick white hair, and rubbed her round, rosy
cheek softly against his.

"Oh! yes, I am better. Hurry back, Pearl, I want you to read to me."

It was a bright day in January, and the old man sat in a large
rocking-chair on the porch, smoking his pipe, and sunning himself in
the last rays of the sinking sun. He had complained all day of not
feeling well, and failed to go to his work as usual; and now, as his
grandchild tied her pink calico bonnet under her chin, and wrapped
herself in her faded plaid shawl, he watched her with a tender,
loving light in his keen gray eyes. She kissed him, buttoned his
shirt collar, which had become unfastened, drew his homespun coat
closer to his throat, and springing down the steps bounded away in
search of the cow, who often strayed so far off that she was
dispatched to drive her home. In the grand, peaceful, solemn woods,
through which the wintry wind now sighed in a soothing monotone, the
child's spirit reached an exaltation which, had she lived two
thousand years earlier, and roamed amid the vales and fastnesses of
classic Arcadia, would have vented itself in dithyrambics to the
great "Lord of the Hyle," the Greek "All," the horned and hoofed
god, Pan. In every age, and among all people--from the Parsee
devotees and the Gosains of India to the Pantheism of Bruno,
Spinoza, and New England's "Illuminati"--nature has been
apotheosized; and the heart of the blacksmith's untutored darling