A few days afterwards he met his neighbor, and said to him that he had designed to call upon him on New-Year's Day, but that he had discovered a dog in the path, and as he never called where dogs were kept, he had been compelled to lose the pleasure of a visit. He then told the story of his attempt, in the midst of which the neighbor broke into the most prolonged and immoderate laughter, and when Mr. Tibbins had ended, said to him, "My dear sir, that dog is immemorially old and superannuated, and he is blind, deaf, and toothless." "Indeed!" replied Mr. Tibbins. "But he might not have been." "And yet I will confess," he said to the Easy Chair, later, "that the incident is a very pretty sermon upon the deceitfulness of appearances, which I respectfully offer to your acceptance." THE NEW ENGLAND SABBATH There are still villages among the hills of New England--we cannot call them remote hills, because the locomotive darts up every valley and fills the woods upon the highest hill-side with the shrill, eager cry of hurrying life and bustling human society, but even where the steam is heard, softened and far away, there are yet villages nestling in the hills in which also the old New England Sabbath lingers and nestles. The village street, broad and arched with thick-foliaged sugar-maples, is always still. In the warm silence of a summer noon, as you sit reading upon the piazza or in the shade of a tree, the only moving object in the street is a load of hay slowly passing under the maples, drawn by oxen, or a group of loiterers in front of the village store pitching quoits. The creak of the wagon, the ring of the quoits, or the laugh and exclamation of the players are the only sounds, except, indeed, the musical clangor of the blacksmith's anvil, as his quick hammer moulds the sparkling horseshoe or beats out the bar. These are drowsy summer sounds that only emphasize the stillness of the week-day. But the stillness of Sunday is startling. A faint tinkle of cows in the early morning filing to the pasture, the warning shout of the barefooted boy who drives them, are the only sounds that break the Sabbath silence, except, again, the chirp and song of birds in the trees, which are no respecters of days, and which sing as blithely, even in the deacon's maples, on "Sabbath morning" as in the tavern ash on the Fourth of July. The cows pass and all is still. The street is deserted, save by, at intervals, a solitary figure upon some small errand. The sun lies hot upon the pastures and hill-sides. There is no mail on Sunday, no newspaper, no barber to visit. Now and then men in their daily dress are seen at the barn door or in the shed or yard doing their chores. They are bringing wood, milking, feeding the cattle. But all is spectral. There is no sound. Even the wind in summer fears to be a Sabbath-breaker. It is an enchanted realm. Have the blue-laws such vitality? Are we still held by their grim spell?