As a country-liver, I like to contemplate and to boast of the hoary age of these veterans. The inscription of good old Dr. Duncan was not exaggerated. Every man who digs his own garden, and keeps the weeds down thoroughly, may truthfully place the same writing over the gate,--"_Hinc salus_" (wherever he may place his "_Hinc pecunia_"). Nor is the comparative safety of active gardening or farming pursuits due entirely to the vigorous bodily exercise involved, but quite as much, it seems to me, to that enlivening and freshening influence which must belong to an intimate and loving and intelligent companionship with Nature. It may be an animal view of the matter,--but, in estimating the comparative advantages and disadvantages of a country-life, I think we take too little account of that glow and exhilaration of the blood which come of every-day dealings with the ground and flowers and trees, and which, as age approaches, subside into a calm equanimity that looks Death in the face no more fearingly than if it were a frost. I have gray-haired neighbors around me who have come to a hardy old age upon their little farms,--buffeting all storms,--petting the cattle which have come down to them from ten generations of short-lived kine, gone by,--trailing ancient vines, that have seen a quarter of a century of life, over their door-steps,--turning over soil, every cheery season of May, from which they have already gathered fifty harvests; and I cannot but regard their serene philosophy, and their quiet, thankful, and Christian enjoyment of the bounties of Nature, as something quite as much to be envied as the distinctions of town-craft. I ask myself,--If these old gentlemen had plunged into the whirlpool of a city five-and-fifty years ago, would they have been still adrift upon this tide of time, where we are all serving our apprenticeships?--and if so, would they have worn the same calm and cheerful equanimity amid the harvests of traffic or the blight of a panic?--and if not adrift, would they have carried a clearer and more justifying record to the hearing of the Great Court than they will carry hence when our village-bell doles out the funeral march for them? The rain is beating on my windows; the rain is beating on the plain; a mist is driving in from the Sound, over which I see only the spires,--those Christian beacons. And (by these hints, that always fret the horizon) calling to mind that bit of the best of all prayers, "_Lead us not into temptation_," it seems to me that many a country-liver might transmute it without offence, and in all faith, into words like these,--"Lead us not into cities." To think for a moment of poor farmer Burns, with the suppers of Edinburgh, and the orgies of the gentlemen of the Caledonian hunt, inflaming his imagination there in the wretched chamber of his low farm-house of Ellisland!