The Dreamthorp people are Dissenters, for the most part; why, I never could understand; because dissent implies a certain intellectual effort. But Dissenters they are, and Dissenters they are likely to remain. In an ungainly building, filled with hard, gaunt pews, without an organ, without a touch of color in the windows, with nothing to stir the imagination or the devotional sense, the simple people worship. On Sunday they are put upon a diet of spiritual bread-and-water. Personally, I should desire more generous food. But the laboring people listen attentively, till once they fall asleep, and they wake up to receive the benediction with a feeling of having done their duty. They know they ought to go to chapel, and they go. I go likewise, from habit, although I have long ago lost the power of following a discourse. In my pew, and whilst the clergyman is going on, I think of the strangest things, of the tree at the window, of the congregation of the dead outside, of the wheat-fields and the corn-fields beyond and all around. And the odd thing is, that it is during sermon only that my mind flies off at a tangent and busies itself with things removed from the place and the circumstances. Whenever it is finished, fancy returns from her wanderings, and I am alive to the objects around me. The clergyman knows my humor, and is good Christian enough to forgive me; and he smiles good-humoredly when I ask him to let me have the chapel keys, that I may enter, when in the mood, and preach a sermon to myself. To my mind, an empty chapel is impressive; a crowded one, comparatively a commonplace affair. Alone, I could choose my own text, and my silent

discourse would not be without its practical applications.

An idle life I live in this place, as the world counts it; but then I have the satisfaction of differing from the world as to the meaning of idleness. A windmill twirk

ing its arms all day is admirable only when there is corn to grind. Twirling its arms for the mere barren pleasure of twirling them, or for the sake of looking busy, does not deserve any rapturous pæan of praise. I must be made happy after my own fashion, not after the fashion of other people. Here I can live as I please; here I can throw the reins on the neck of my whim. Here I play with my own thoughts; here I ripen for the grave.

HAVE got a quiet farm-house in the country, a very humble place, to be sure, tenanted by a worthy enough man, of the old New England stamp, where I sometimes go for a day or two in the winter, to look over the farm-accounts, and to see how the stock is thriving on the winter's keep.

One side the door, as you enter from the porch, is a little parlor, scarce twelve feet by ten, with a cosey-looking fireplace, a heavy oak floor, a couple of arm-chairs, and a brown table with carved lion's feet. Out of this room opens a little cabinet, only big enough for a broad bachelor bedstead, where I sleep upon feathers, and wake in the morning, with my eye upon a saucy colored lithographic print of some fancy "Bessy."

It happens to be the only house in the world of which I am bona fide owner; and I take a vast deal of comfort in treating it just as I choose. I manage to break some article of furniture almost every time I pay it a visit; and if I cannot open the window readily of a morning, to breathe the fresh air, I knock out a pane or two of glass

with my boot. I lean against the walls in a very old arm-chair there is on the premises, and scarce ever fail to worry such a hole in the plastering as would set me down for a round charge for damages in town, or make a prim housewife fret herself into a raging fever. I laugh out loud with myself, in my big arm-chair, when I think that I am neither afraid of one nor the other.

As for the fire, I keep the little hearth so hot as to warm half the cellar below, and the whole space between the jambs roars for hours together with white flame. To be sure, the windows are not very tight, between broken panes and bad joints, so that the fire, large as it is, is by no means an extravagant comfort.

As night approaches, I have a huge pile of oak and hickory placed beside the hearth; I put out the tallow candle on the mantel (using the family snuffers, with one leg broke), then, drawing my chair directly in front of the blazing wood, and setting one foot on each of the old iron fire-dogs (until they grow too warm), I dispose myself for an evening of such sober and thoughtful quietude as I believe, on my soul, that very few of my fellowmen have the good fortune to enjoy.

My tenant meantime, in the other room, I can hear now and then-though there is a thick stone chimney and a broad entry between multiplying contrivances with his wife to put two babies to sleep. This occupies them, I should say, usually an hour; though my only measure of time (for I never carry a watch into the country) is the blaze of my fire. By ten or thereabouts my stock of wood is nearly exhausted; I pile upon the hot coals what remains, and sit watching how it kindles,

and blazes, and goes out, —even like our joys! — and then slip by the light of the embers into my bed, where I luxuriate in such sound and healthful slumber as only such rattling window-frames and country air can supply. But to return: the other evening, -it happened to be on my last visit to my farm-house, - when I had exhausted all the ordinary rural topics of thought, had formed all sorts of conjectures as to the income of the year, had planned a new wall around one lot, and the clearing up of another, now covered with patriarchal wood, and wondered if the little rickety house would not be, after all, a snug enough box to live and die in, I fell on a sudden into such an unprecedented line of thought, which took such deep hold of my sympathies, — sometimes even starting tears, that I determined, the next day, to set as much of it as I could recall on paper.

Something it may have been the home-looking blaze (I am a bachelor of-say six-and-twenty), or possibly a plaintive cry of the baby in my tenant's room — had suggested to me the thought of - Marriage.

I piled upon the heated fire-dogs the last armful of my wood; and now, said I, bracing myself courageously between the arms of my chair, I'll not flinch; I'll pursue the thought wherever it leads, though it lead me to the d— (I am apt to be hasty)—at least continued I,

softening — until my fire is out.

The wood was green, and at first showed no disposition to blaze. It smoked furiously. Smoke, thought I, always goes before blaze; and so does doubt go before decision and my Revery, from that very starting-point, slipped into this shape.