till the echoes are awakened. There is but one world--one sinless, sorrowless, painless world--and this is it. Where then were the cares of the great world, which has absorbed this one? Where the jarrings of envy--the justlings of competition--the dread of disappointment--the frenzy of hope--the fever of love--the whole bevy of passions, which form the Corrievrecken of the heart! They were then, like Abraham's posterity, in Abraham's loins; they were possibilities, mere futurities--sleeping undisturbed and undisturbing in the limbs of contingencies. Alas! that ever my soul awoke from this dream!--that ever, one fine summer evening, I discovered that a change had come over my nature--that I had crept unknowingly into youth--that there was a soft delicious fire in my blood, which made me look beyond my humble cottage, with its aged inmates, for gratification and happiness! Oh, the exquisite, the ecstatic delight of this first awakening into the manhood of feeling!--when the passion-flower is just opening--when the nerves are troubled, for the first time, by the sensibilities of sex--when the blooming cheek, the rosy lip, the inviting glance, and the happily-moulded rotundities of the female form, become, for the first time, an object of fearful, of indescribable, of trembling interest! I ask any one of my readers, male and female, Was it not thus with you? Did not your first perceptions of the full compass of your nature come upon you at once? Come, no blushing now--no shuffling--it was even so; but you never liked to speak of it to any one. You thought that, in this respect, you were singular; but now, that you see I have turned king's evidence, you are conscious that what I aver is true. Here, then, I fix my landmark, with the age of puberty; all on this side is school, college, society, the world, care, troubles, and anxieties; all before this was that paradise from which I still pluck, as on this occasion, an apple or two, to refresh you and me as we journey along. Come, now, good-natured reader, and I will tell you a tale or anecdote of this primeval state of my being.