delivering the funeral discourse, glow like a ruddy coal of fire? Well,
well, old friends! Pass on, with your burden of mortality, And lay it in
the tomb with jolly hearts. People should be permitted to enjoy
themselves in their own fashion; every man to his taste; but New England
must have been a dismal abode for the man of pleasure, when the only
boon-companion was Death!

Under cover of a mist that has settled over the scene, a few years flit
by, and escape our notice. As the atmosphere becomes transparent, we
perceive a decrepit grandsire, hobbling along the street. Do you
recognize him? We saw him, first, as the baby in Goodwife Massey's arms,
when the primeval trees were flinging their shadow over Roger Conant's
cabin; we have seen him, as the boy, the youth, the man, bearing his
humble part in all the successive scenes, and forming the index-figure
whereby to note the age of his coeval town. And here he is, old Goodman
Massey, taking his last walk,--often pausing,--often leaning over his
staff,--and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot,
and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses.
He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the
thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to
swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's
door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest
age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a
sort of infantine life in our local history, as the first town-born
child.

Behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of an eye, like an
incident in a tale of magic, even while your observation has been fixed
upon the scene. The Main Street has vanished out of sight. In its stead
appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peeping over it, cold