The people who lived here had little occasion to hang their walls with pictures. When they wanted something to look at, they had but to go to the window and gaze upon the upper slopes of Mount Lafayette and Mount Cannon, rising in beauty beyond the intervening forest. But every New England woman must have a bit of flower garden, no matter what her surroundings; and even here I was glad to notice, just in front of the door, a clump of cinnamon rose-bushes, all uncared for, of course, but flourishing as in a kind of immortal youth (this old-fashioned rose must be one of Time's favorites), and just now bright with blossoms. For sentiment's sake I plucked one, thinking of the hands that did the same years ago, and ere this, in all likelihood, were under the sod; thinking, too, of other hands, long, long vanished, and of a white rose-bush that used to stand beside another door. On both sides of the house were apple-trees, a few of them still in good trim, but the greater number decrepit after years of buffeting by mountain storms. A phœbe sat quietly on the ridge-pole, and a chipper was singing from the orchard. What knew they of time, or of time's mutations? The house might grow old,--the house and the trees; but if the same misfortune ever befalls phœbes and sparrows, we are, fortunately, none the wiser. To human eyes they are always young and fresh, like the buttercups that bespangled the grass before me, or like the sun that shone brightly upon the tranquil scene. Turning away from the house and the grassy field about it, I got over a stone wall into a pasture fast growing up to wood: spruces, white pines, red pines, paper birches, and larches, with a profusion of meadow-sweet sprinkled everywhere among them. A nervous flicker started at my approach, stopped for an instant to reconnoitre, and then made off in haste. A hermit thrush was singing, and the bird that is called the "preacher"--who takes no summer vacation, but holds forth in "God's first temple" for the seven days of every week--was delivering his homily with all earnestness. He _must_ preach, it seemed, whether men would hear or forbear. He had already announced his text, but I could not certainly make out what it was. "Here we have no continuing city," perhaps; or it might have been, "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity." It should have been one of these, or so I thought; but, as all church-goers must have observed, the connection between text and sermon is sometimes more or less recondite, and once in a while, like the doctrine of the sermon itself, requires to be taken on faith. In the present instance, indeed, as no doubt in many others, the pew was quite as likely to be at fault as the pulpit. The red-eye's eloquence was never very persuasive to my ear. Its short sentences, its tiresome upward inflections, its everlasting repetitiousness, and its sharp, querulous tone long since became to me an old story; and I have always