them. With brows wrinkled by care and toil, and heads silvered by
premature age, and great burdens upon heart and brain, they glory
in a life within and before them, by the side of which the life of
childhood is as flavorless and frivolous as that of a fly.

I have been much impressed by a passage in the "Recreations of a
Country Parson,"--which, by the way, is one of the best and
cleverest books of its kind in the English language--in which this
question is incidentally touched upon, and so happily touched
upon, that I cannot refrain from transcribing the whole passage.
The writer represents himself to be seated upon a manger, writing
upon the flat place between his horse's eyes, while the docile
animal's nose is between his knees; and it is the horse that he
addresses:--

"For you, my poor fellow-creature, I think with sorrow as I write
here upon your head, there remains no such immortality as remains
for me. What a difference between us! You to your sixteen or
eighteen years here, and then oblivion!--I to my threescore and
ten, and then eternity! Yes, the difference is immense; and it
touches me to think of your life and mine, of your doom and mine.
I know a house where at morning and evening prayer, when the
household assembles, among the servants there always walks in a
shaggy little dog, who listens with the deepest attention and the
most solemn gravity to all that is said, and then, when prayers
are over, goes out again with his friends. I cannot witness that
silent procedure without being much moved by the sight. Ah! my
fellow-creature, this is something in which you have no part! Made
by the same hand, breathing the same air, sustained like us by
food and drink, you are witnessing an act of ours which relates to