Oh, wonderful! wonderful! and thrice wonderful was the soul of Vicar Clendon seeing that in this mummified body, battered by the assaults of sixty years, it still kept itself fresh and green in the very heyday of perennial youth. In spite of his grubbing among dusty books; in spite of the hardening process of continually celebrating marriages; in spite of the pessimistic ideas which come with old age, he could still feel sympathetic thrills when he heard the sighings of two lone lovers. He should have frowned and looked askance on such youthful foolery; he should have forgotten the days when Plancus was consul, and he wooed Amaryllis with bashful courtesy; he should have preached sermons a mile long on the sin of going to the temple of Venus, but, strange to tell, he did not. This withered old husk encased a fresh young soul, and the venerable clergyman felt a boyish pleasure in the courting of these young men. Is the age of miracles past, when such things can happen--when sober age can sympathize with frolic youth without pointing out the follies of the world, as seen telescopically from a distance of sixty years? No! oh, no! in spite of cynicism, and pessimism, and various other isms, all belonging to the same detestable class, there are still those among us whose souls bloom freshly, though cased in antique frames. "Your father," said Archie Maxwell, after making the acquaintance of the bookworm, "your father, Toby, is a brick." "My father," stated Toby solemnly, "is not a brick, for a brick is hard, and the pater is anything but that. On the contrary, he is as soft as butter. If you wish to express approval of my progenitor, O quoter of slang, say that he is the ninth wonder of the world--which he is." "And why, O utterer of dark sayings?" "Because he is an old man who can see his son in love without calling him a fool." This was true, and Toby appreciated the novelty of possessing such a father; demonstrating such appreciation by being a most attentive son, which exhilarated the old gentleman to such a degree that he became younger every day in appearance: thereby proving this saying of a forgotten sage to be true-- "The body takes its complexion from the soul, not the soul from the body."