of a Roman Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and northward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of "Hovey's Root-Cutter," or of the law of primaries, laying down rules of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods; and this, considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean line, or in vine-growing,-keeping clear of the newspapers, I make no doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon.

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles, as if we were doing tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences. But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. He dreaded the weevil in his beans, and we the club-foot in our cabbages; we have the "Herald,” and he had none; we have "Plantation-Bitters," and he had his jug of the Biblian wine.

M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers "De Re Rustica" with Cato, and seems to have

This mention, of course, excludes the Senator's formule for unguents, aperients, cattlenostrums, and pickled pork.

† CXXXIV. Cato, De Re Rusticâ.

had more literary tact, though less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confidence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject. Life, he says, is a bubble, and the life of an old man a bubble about to break. He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this world. ("Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam proficiscar e vitâ.") Therefore he writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by which she may manage the farm.

And a very respectably old lady she must have been, to deal with the villici and the coloni, if her age bore suitable relation to that of her husband.

The

ripe maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced cannot fail to strike one. Thus, Xenophon gained at strength in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties; Cato lived to be over eighty; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculum at eighty, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left very much to establish our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore, if he had not fallen under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.

The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil, whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did he died at fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vegetables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties; and Martial, whose "Faustine Villa," if nothing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the sixties.

Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who had written on the same subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits: he had written four hundred books!

Of Columella we know scarcely more than that he lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture. In his chapter upon Gardening he warms into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer's life as sound like a lawyer's address before a countysociety on a fair-day. Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it; and Fabricius and Curius Dentatus; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their periods, since Columella's mention of them is about all we know of their farming.

He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately continue to do, the "good old times," when men were better than "now," and when the reasonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres. But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in grandiose, Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,) with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible conditions: "Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat hæc sibi advocanda : prudentiam rei, facultatem impendendi, voluntatem agendi." Or, as Tremellius says, "That man will master the business, qui et colere sciet, et poterit, et volet."

This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. That "facultatem impendendi” is a tremendous bolster to farming as to anything else; it is only another shape of the "poterit," and the "poterit" only a scholarly rendering of pounds and pence. As if Tremellius had said,—That man will make his way at farming who understands the business, who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to bleed freely.

With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advises a man to slip upon his

farm often, in order that his steward may keep sharply at his work; he even suggests that the landlord make a feint of coming, when he has no intention thereto, that he may gain a day's alertness from the bailiff. The book is of course a measure of the advances made in farming during the two hundred years elapsed since Cato's time; but those advances were not great. There was advance in power to systematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no very noticeable gain in methods of culture. Columella gives the results of wider observation, and of more persistent study; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop of lentils as well with Cato as with Columella; a man would house his flocks and servants as well out of the one as the other; in short, a man would grow into the "facultatem impendendi" as swiftly under the teachings of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of Tiberius.

It is but dull work to follow those teachings; here and there I warm into a little sympathy, as I catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend Curculio; here and there I sniff a fruit that seems familiar,-as the fraga, or a morum; and here and there comes blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name of some home-flower, a lily, a narcissus, or a rose. The chief value of the work of Columella, however, lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance given to different crops, under Roman culture, and to the raising of cattle, poultry, fish, etc., as compared with crops. Knowing this, we know very much that will help us toward an estimate of the domestic life of the Romans. We learn, with surprise, how little they regarded their oxen, save as working-animals, — whether the milkwhite steers of Clitumnus, or the dun Campanian cattle, whose descendants show their long-horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forum. The sheep, too, whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, were regarded as of value chiefly for their wool and milk; and it

is surely amazing, that men who could appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of Cicero should have shown so little fancy for a fat saddle of mutton or for a mottled sirloin of beef.

I change from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil back to some pleasant Idyl of Tibullus, and from Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about the Sabine Hills; I stroll through Pliny's villa, eying the clipped box-trees; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court; I watch the tall Roman girls

"Grandes virgines proborum colonorum" marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with curds and fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes over me a confusion of times and places.

-The sound of the battle of to-day dies; the fresh blood-stains fade; and I seem to wake upon the heights of Tusculum, in the days of Tiberius. The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander monuments of the Empire are not built; but there is a blotch of cliff which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and beside it a huge hulk of building on the Capitoline Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward are the gay turrets of the villa of Mæcenas, and of the princely houses on the Palatine Hill, and in the foreground the stately tomb of Cæcilia Metella. I see the barriers of a hippodrome, (where now howling jockeys make the twilight hideous); a gestatio, with its lines of cherry-trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of olive-orchards covers the hills behind. Vines grow

upon the slope eastward, "Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem,"

twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their support

ing-poles (pedamenta). The figs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and the villicus, who has just now come in from the atriolum, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to apply a few loads of marl (tofacea) to the summer fallow, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, for barley.

案

Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with three asses loaded with cabbages and asparagus. Villicus tells me that the poultry in the fatteningcoops (as close-shut as the Strasburg geese) are doing well, and he has added a soupçon of sweetening to their barley-gruel. The young doves have their legs faithfully broken, (“obteras crura,") and are placidly fattening on their stumps. The thrush-house is properly darkened, only enough light entering to show the food to some three or four thousand birds, which are in course of cramming for the market. The cochlearium has a good stock of snails and mussels; and the little dormice are growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial banquet.

Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep unusually fine, and free from burrs. The new must is all a-foam in the vinaria; and around the inner cellar (gaudendem est !) there is a tier of urns, as large as school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.

If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm-chariot, or curriculum, which is, after all, but a low, dumpy kind of horse-cart, and take a drive over the lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn what news is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is all quiet upon the Rhine? How is it possibly with Germanicus? And what of that story of the arrest of Seneca ? It could hardly have happened, they say, in the good old days of the Republic.

"Locus ad hanc rem desideratur maxime calidus, et minimi luminis, in quo singulæ caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusa pendeant aves, sed ita coarctatæ, ne versari possint." — Columella, Lib. VIII. cap. vii.

And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, the Roman pastoral dream is broken. The Campagna, the olive - orchards, the columbarium, fall back to their old places in the blurred type of Columella. The Campanian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of Varro. The turrets of the villa of Mæcenas, and of the palaces of Sylla and the Cæsars, give place to the spires of a New-England town, southward of which I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a soldiers' hospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier perils

than ever environed the Roman Republic,- perils out of which if the wisdom and courage of the people do not find a way, some new Cæsar will point

it with the sword.

Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in the sky; and a lee set of dark-gray and purple clouds is folding down over the eastern horizon,-against which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever. It means that the rain has stopped; and the rain having stopped, my in-door work is

done.

THE reader whose eye is arrested by my title will doubtless anticipate a romance on that ever-old, ever-new theme of a certain god with a torch leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths, until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by tin, — of the tin-wedding entering into the refiner's fire, and, by sure transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer silver,― of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in human life's great crucible,

"Transmute, so potent are the spells they know,

Into pure gold the silver of to-day."

You

Perhaps, reader, you are not altogether to be disappointed; and yet, for the present, it is only a glass of sparkling wine I wish you to take with me. will please read on that delicate strip of paper around the bottle's neck the name in gilt, -"Golden Wedding." At once you grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in Catawha-land-by the way, Gerritt Smith's gardener is a nephew of Schiller! — was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his darling plant, in whose juice inger and sparkle the light and joy of

-

many faded days. But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding. Let me take you as the clairvoyants say to a large, sooty, toiling city in the West. From street to street you shall go, and see but little to excite your admiration, unless you are a constant believer that work is worship. But here, in the centre of the city, is a noble old mansion with its beautiful park around it, which a traveller who saw it once compared to a pearl on the breast of a blacksmith. Here it was that the Golden Wedding took place.

Who that was there can ever forget it? In my own memory that throng of the worthy, the beautiful, the gay of a great city will stand as the one fulfilment which Fate has given me of many Oriental promissory dreams, most of which she has failed to honor. In that great company you might have traced all the circles of that city's growth, as you may trace a tree's history in its rings. That lady there was the first white baby born here, where now over two hundred thousand human beings reside. Here are the pioneers who filled the first log-huts on the city's site, until they overflowed through the roofs. And here is an inner

pass

circle of children, and an outer one of grandchildren, about the two who are the heart of this beautiful celebration. Can that lovely, erect, blooming lady be a bride of fifty years? Looking at her, one would say it is a great and unnecessary mistake of ours to grow old. But more closely must we look at that quaint old man by her side. Lately he has ed away; but every day of his long life left a trace worthy to be noted well. His eighty years and twenty-five days of life comprise an epitome of the history and growth of a great community. Not so would you at first interpret that plain old man; though, to a knowing eye, that eye, clear with looking at the duty that lies nearest, that mouth, telling of patient, unimpulsive energy, that broadness about the brow, would be guaranties of a marked life.

And now for my story, which you must let me tell in a rambling way; for any systematic biography of that man would be like putting one of his own Catawba vines into your herbarium.

I introduce you to a fair-haired, handsome youth, on the deck of a small steamboat, which is bearing him to his fortune in the great West. He is penniless. His father was wealthy; but in the war he was a Tory, and, in the confiscation of his property, his sin was visited upon his son. But he was not the boy to repine, with youth and the great West before him. And now as from the steamer's deck he sees a fine landscape with a few loghouses on it, he believes that it is one day to be a great city, and concludes to stop there. So he is put ashore with his trunk.

He has already determined to study law. He goes to the one judge who resides there, and is taken as a student into his office. More log-houses are built; a court-house is erected; and presently that institution at sight of which the shipwrecked Englishman fell on his knees and thanked God he was in a Christian land -the gallows-made its appearance. So the young man had a fair practice. The records of the West, if they are ever written, will testify how often whim

sical Fortune thrusts her favors on men against their will. This very judge with whom our youth studied law became environed with pecuniary difficulties, and wished once to satisfy a claim of a few hundred dollars by deeding away a sheeppasture of a few acres, which was of no sort of use to him. But when he went to get his wife's signature to the conveyance, she burst into tears; she knew, she said, that the pasture was worthless; but she had in her childhood heard there the tinkling of the bells of her father's sheep; it was very foolish, she knew, but now that they had all passed away, the bells over in the pasture tinkled on in her memory, and she hated to give it up. The kind husband would not insist, but went sadly to his work. It was not long before the sheep-pasture was worth a million dollars! Sentiment, you see, is not always an unproductive article.

But this case was scarcely so curious as that which presently thrust a goodly capital on the hands of our young lawstudent. His first case in the court was that of a horse-thief, whom he induced a jury to acquit. When he came to his client for a fee, the scapegrace whispered that he had nothing on earth wherewith to pay the fee except two old whiskey-stills and a horse. When he heard this last word, the lawyer's conscience gave him a twinge. After a moment's reflection, he said, "You will need the horse; and you had best make him take you as far as possible from this region of country. I must be satisfied with the whiskey-stills." It was not for a long time that he thought even to inquire about the stills. When he did so, he found them in possession of a man who implored him not to take them away, and promised to pay something for them. Finding that he could not do this, he begged our hero to accept as payment for them a few acres of barren land, which, with great reluctance, he agreed to do. Erelong the tide of emigration set westward, and this land is to-day worth two million dollars!

But his subsequent life showed that