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ith 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. * * * * * GOLDEN WEDDING. 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." 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. You 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 Catawba-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 linger 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
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