And away they go well inclined to act up to the injunctions of the ancient song. "_Concinamus, O Sodales!_" Our readers will do well on the present occasion to translate the verb by its English equivalent,--to shout. "_Vox et audiatur!_"--small doubt of that! That deaf-looking old woman by the way-side must be "very deaf indeed" if the sounds of that merriment have failed at least to reach her ears,--though they may get no further; for she looks like one of those in whom all the avenues by which mirth reaches the heart, where they have not been closed at their external outlets by the infirmities of age, are choked up within by the ruins of that heart itself. But the entire progress of these glad hearts to-day is in the nature of a triumph, and all objects in its course are ministers to their unreflecting mirth. Theirs is the blessed age, and this its most privileged day, when the spirit can extract from all things the chyle of cheerfulness. That urchin who is flinging alms (a most gracious act in childhood!) is doing so to the sound of his merry neighbor's trumpet; and yet the act performed and the duty remembered, amid all the heydey and effervescence of the spirits, has not lost its gracefulness for the frolicsome mood by which it is attended. There are men in this world who dispense their charities to the flourish of _their own_ trumpets; and though they are practised performers on that instrument, and play with considerable skill, the effect is unpleasing and the act a mockery. Away go the light-hearted boys! away past the aged and the poor,--as happiness has long since done, and the happy have long continued to do!--awaking the shrill echoes of the road and all its adjacent fields with the sound of their revelry. Every school-boy knows the programme. Flags flying, horns blowing, racing against rival chaises, taunts from the foremost, cheers from the hindmost, all sorts of practical jokes upon each other and upon all they meet and all they pass, and above all, the loud, ringing laugh,--the laugh of boyhood, so unlike all other laughter, that comes out clear and distinct, direct from the heart, stopping nowhere on its way, not pausing to be questioned by the judgment nor restrained by the memory, presenting no hollowness nor flatness to the nicest attention, betraying no under-tone to the finest ear, giving true and unbroken "echoes to the seat where _mirth_ is throned," born spontaneously of that spirit, and excited so often by causes too minute for older eyes to see. And it is in this very causelessness that consists the spell of childhood's laughter, and the secret of youth's unmingled joy. We seldom begin to seek _reasons_ for being gay till we have had some for being grave; and the search after the former is very apt to bring us upon more of the latter. There are tares among that wheat. The moment we commence to distrust our light-heartedness, it begins to evade us. From the day when we think it