immature youth, and of
senectitude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among the
grounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had last
seen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near the
public road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike,
that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedingly
limpid; and I could watch from the banks every motion of the hungry,
energetic inmates. And now I struck off from the river-side by a narrow
tangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have found out the
place blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretched
round its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at the
foot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. The
spot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, and
looked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines of
graceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beeches
that directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often found
it a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calm
summer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the scene
as it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day through
dripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open space
and the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a
tangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What
had been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thick
wood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open space
had just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the taller
plants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, are
not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of
forests,--both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge
tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly.
It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who
became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he
had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of
water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty
years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the
hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; and
when I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I fo