William Peabody was about to answer, it was nonsense for a man only sixty and in sound condition of body and mind to think too much of that, when his eye, ranging across the fields, espied in shadow as it were, through the dim atmosphere, the mist clearing away a little in that direction, an old sorrel horse--a long settler with the family and well-known to all its members--staggering about feebly in a distant orchard, and in her wanderings stumbling against the trees.--"Is old Sorrel blind?" he asked, shading his own eyes from the light. "She is, William," old Sylvester replied; "her sight went from her last New-Year's day." "My birth-day," said the merchant, a sudden pallor coming upon his countenance. "Yes, you and old Sorrel are birth-mates, my son." "We are; she was foaled the day I was born," said William Peabody, and added, as to himself, musingly, "Old Sorrel is blind! So we pass--so we pass--young to-day--to-morrow old--limbs fail us--sight is gone." They sat silently, contemplating the still morning scene before them, and meditating, each in his own particular way, on the history of the past. To William, the merchant, it brought chiefly a recollection how in his early manhood he had set out from those quiet fields for a hard struggle with the world, with a bare dollar in his pocket, and when that was gone the whole world seemed to combine in a desperate league against him to prevent his achieving another. How at last, on the very edge of starvation and despair, he had wrung from it the means of beginning his fortunes; and how he had gone on step by step, forgetting all the pleasant ties of his youth, all recollections of nature and cheerful faces of friends and kinsfolk, adding thousand to thousand, house to house; building, unlike Jacob, a ladder, that descended to the lower world, up which all harsh and dark spirits perpetually thronged and joined to drag him down; and yet he smiled grimly at the thought of the power he possessed, and how many of his early companions trembled before him because he was grown to be a rich man.