aid Mr. Wigglesworth,
perplexed and displeased at sentiments which controverted all his
notions and feelings and implied the utter waste, and worse, of his
whole life's labor. "Would you forget your dead friends the moment
they are under the sod?"

"They are not under the sod," I rejoined; "then why should I mark the
spot where there is no treasure hidden? Forget them? No; but, to
remember them aright, I would forget what they have cast off. And to
gain the truer conception of death I would forget the grave."

But still the good old sculptor murmured, and stumbled, as it were,
over the gravestones amid which he had walked through life. Whether he
were right or wrong, I had grown the wiser from our companionship and
from my observations of nature and character as displayed by those who
came, with their old griefs or their new ones, to get them recorded
upon his slabs of marble. And yet with my gain of wisdom I had
likewise gained perplexity; for there was a strange doubt in my mind
whether the dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have
not as much real comfort in them--leaving religious influences out of
the question--as what we term life's joys.

THE SHAKER BRIDAL.

One day, in the sick-chamber of Father Ephraim, who had been forty
years the presiding elder over the Shaker settlement at Goshen, there
was an assemblage of several of the chief men of the sect. Individuals
had come from the rich establishment at Lebanon, from Canterbury,
Harvard and Alfred, and from all the other localities where this
strange people have fertilized the rugged hills of New England by
their systematic industry. An elder was likewise there who had made a
pilgrimage of a thousand miles from a village of the faithful in
Kentucky to visit his spiritual kindred the children of the sainted
Mother Ann. He had partaken of the homely abundance of their tables,
had quaffed the far-famed Shaker cider, and had joined in the sacred
dance every step of which is believed to alienate the enthusiast from
earth and bear him onward to heavenly purity and bliss. His brethren
of the North had now courteously invited him to be present on an
occasion when the concurrence of every eminent member of their
community was peculiarly desirable.

The venerable Father Ephraim sat in his easy-chair, not only
hoary-headed and infirm with age, but worn down by a lingering disease
which it was evident would very soon transfer his patriarchal staf