Sixty years ago, they tell me, my grandfather used to loiter here with his gun, while his hounds lay around under the scattered oaks. Now he sleeps, as I said, in the little graveyard yonder, where I can see one or two white tablets glimmering through the foliage. I never knew him; he died, as the brown stone table says, aged twenty-six. Yesterday I climbed the wall that skirts the yard, and plucked a flower from his tomb. I take out now from my pocket-book that flower—a frail, first-blooming violet—and write upon the slip of paper, into which I have thrust its delicate stem—“From my grandfather’s tomb—1850.” But other feet have trod upon this knoll—far more dear to me. The old neighbors have sometimes told me how they have seen, forty years ago, two rosy-faced girls idling on this spot, under the shade, and gathering acorns, and making oak-leaved garlands for their foreheads—Alas, alas, the garlands they wear now are not earthly garlands! Upon that spot, and upon that rustic seat, I am lying this May morning. I have placed my gun against a tree; my shot-pouch I have hung upon a broken limb. I have thrown my feet upon the bench, and lean against one of the gnarled oaks, between which the seat is built. My hat is off; my book and paper are beside me; and my pencil trembles in my fingers as I catch sight of those white marble tablets gleaming through the trees, from the height above me, like beckoning angel faces. If they were alive! two more near and dear friends, in a world where we count friends by units. It is morning—a bright spring morning under the oaks—these loved oaks of a once cherished home. Last night I slept in yonder mansion, under the elms. The cattle going to the pasture are drinking in the pool by the bridge; the boy who drives them is making his shrill halloo echo against the hills. The sun has risen fairly over the eastern heights, and shines brightly upon the meadow-land and brightly upon a bend of the brook below me. The birds—the blue-birds sweetest and noisiest of all—are singing over me in the branches. A woodpecker is hammering at a dry limb aloft; and Carlo pricks up his ears, and looks at me—then stretches out his head upon his paws in a warm bit of the sunshine—and sleeps. Morning brings back to me the past; and the past brings up not only its actualities, not only its events and memories, but—stranger still—what might have been. Every little circumstance which dawns on the awakened memory is traced not only to its actual, but to its possible issues. What a wide world that makes of the past! a great and gorgeous—a rich and holy world! Your fancy fills it up artist-like; the darkness is mellowed off into soft shades; the bright spots are veiled in the sweet atmosphere of distance; and fancy and memory together make up a rich dreamland of the past.