Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled--each with the measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly greetings of garrulous and failing age--with the gentle complaint, so patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters--said they--were colder than they are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew! Harmless deception of age!--pleasant coloring that distance gives in time as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is seen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's