A few years more and the scene shifts--shifts materially--for the family are all married and gone, and once more the old couple are where they commenced years and years ago, in the first days of their young manhood and womanhood--alone again in the world, but still faithful to each other, and still doing their duties daily and faithfully. But the old farm is yet on their hands, while their strength is not equal to the task of attending to it. Reluctantly they consider it best to rent the home farm and purchase a neat and commodious cottage in the adjacent town. It was a “corners” not many years since; some time later it became a village, and some four or five years ago it grew ambitious and took upon itself the name of a town. Here they purchase a little home in which to quietly spend the last years of their lives. They are free from worry, free from anxiety, and, as during the years long past, they have no thought that is not shared in common. Old neighbors, as they come to town, call upon them, and their lives are diversified and enlivened two or three times a week by such visits. Their children, most of whom reside within driving distance of their parents, drop in upon them at any time, and thus in perfect happiness and serenity they pass down the sunset slope of life. Their lives and individual characters are towers of strength in the neighborhood for rectitude and uprightness, and the community without a dissent recognizes their true worth. One is almost tempted to wish that their already long lives might be yet prolonged for many years, that they may continue to be as bright and shining lights in the community. But the dreaded day comes at last. The good wife and mother has fallen ill. Daily the town doctor visits her and does all that medical skill can do in such a case, but no resource of science is able to renovate the worn-out human body. Perhaps the most affecting sight one could view in these days would be to see the old husband and partner of sixty long years sit hourly and daily by the bedside, disconsolate and lost, as he sadly views the daily emaciating face of her whom he had chosen in the bloom of youth.