Ten years have passed away, and again it is a fireside scene that we have to depict, and a fireside conversation we have to chronicle. The room we now stand in is large and pleasant, and bright with the radiance of merry faces--faces of every age and size, but all marvellously alike in features, as in happiness, from the grave seniors down to the crowing baby, through all the gradations of stature and sobriety that crowd around that well-spread table. The assembly is too large, and the children too near each other in age to allow you to think them all members of one household; and two fathers half checked, half encouraged the merry crowd, and two mothers took sweet counsel together, praising each other’s little ones, and exchanging domestic experiences with each other. We must try and find in these merry faces the traits of those we have known before. Let us see whom we have before us. A man of goodly presence is the elder; grave, it seems, habitually, but with a smile that is like a sunbeam, and which has an electrical effect in the saddest house it beams in; and many, many houses of sorrow does it see, and many mourners are cheered by the words of hope and comfort that flow from these sympathising lips; for you will see, if you look at his apparel, and mark his manner, that he holds a high vocation, no less than a labourer about that glorious vine which has the Eternal Father for its husbandman; a labourer, one who, like the bee, seeks honey from every flower, and from his pulpit, and standing by beds of suffering, and in the dark, close, and fœtid haunts of sin, seeks to have souls for his hire as the labour of his life and the joy of his existence. No mere Sabbath day worker in his pulpit, but one that never tires, that is always ready, and almost always with his harness on his back; like a good knight of the olden time, prompt to succour the distressed. The lady too, who sits beside him, has about her a gentle dignity that is akin to his; but with her blooming cheek and bright eye we can boast no old acquaintance, though when she lays her white hand on his arm and calls him “Halbert,” we are half ashamed to say so much of Halbert Melville’s wife.