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