One day, in Pierre's sight, nine silent figures emerged from the door of old Millthorpe; a coffin was put into a neighbor's farm-wagon; and a procession, some thirty feet long, including the elongated pole and box of the wagon, wound along Saddle Meadows to a hill, where, at last, old Millthorpe was laid down in a bed, where the rising sun should affront him no more. Oh, softest and daintiest of Holland linen is the motherly earth! There, beneath the sublime tester of the infinite sky, like emperors and kings, sleep, in grand state, the beggars and paupers of earth! I joy that Death is this Democrat; and hopeless of all other real and permanent democracies, still hug the thought, that though in life some heads are crowned with gold, and some bound round with thorns, yet chisel them how they will, head-stones are all alike. This somewhat particular account of the father of young Millthorpe, will better set forth the less immature condition and character of the son, on whom had now descended the maintenance of his mother and sisters. But, though the son of a farmer, Charles was peculiarly averse to hard labor. It was not impossible that by resolute hard labor he might eventually have succeeded in placing his family in a far more comfortable situation than he had ever remembered them. But it was not so fated; the benevolent State had in its great wisdom decreed otherwise. In the village of Saddle Meadows there was an institution, half common-school and half academy, but mainly supported by a general ordinance and financial provision of the government Here, not only were the rudiments of an English education taught, but likewise some touch of belles lettres, and composition, and that great American bulwark and bore--elocution. On the high-raised, stage platform of the Saddle Meadows Academy, the sons of the most indigent day-laborers were wont to drawl out the fiery revolutionary rhetoric of Patrick Henry, or gesticulate impetuously through the soft cadences of Drake's "Culprit Fay." What wonder, then, that of Saturdays, when there was no elocution and poesy, these boys should grow melancholy and disdainful over the heavy, plodding handles of dung-forks and hoes?