r what it will bring.'

Reader, do you never feel an intense longing to live over again the
scenes of your youth? to begin at some certain period long gone by, and
taste again the sweets that have passed away forever? It is one of the
bitterest feelings of the heart that years are slipping away from us one
by one; that the delights of our youth have gone, never to return, and
that we 'shall not look upon their like again;' that the days are fast
coming on when we shall say we have no pleasure in them, and that we are
rapidly verging upon the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.' Were there any
future rejuvenation, when we might stand again upon the threshold of
life and look over its fair fields with all the joy and hope of
anticipation, old age would lose all its dreariness, and become but a
brief though painful pilgrimage through which we were to pass to joy
beyond. But since this can never be, old age is the rust which dims the
brightness of every earthly joy, and is looked forward to by youth only
with a shudder.

Hundreds of bold and daring navigators have left their bones to whiten
amid the snows and ice of the arctic regions, lured thither by the
thirst of fame or of knowledge, in the pursuit of science, and in search
of the Northwest Passage. But suppose some more fortunate adventurer
should discover there, even at the very pole itself, a veritable
'fountain of youth and beauty,' whose rejuvenating waters could restore
the elasticity of youth to the frame of age, smoothing away its
wrinkles, and imprinting the bloom of childhood upon its cheeks,
bringing back the long-lost freshness and buoyancy to the soul; would
not the navigators of those dangerous seas be multiplied in the ratio of
a million to one? Should we not all become Ponce de Leons, braving every
danger, submitting to every privation, sacrificing wealth, fame,
everything, in quest of the precious boon? What a hecatomb of mouldering
bones would bestrew those fields of ice! For though not one in ten
thousand might reach the promised goal, the hegira would still go on
till the end of time, each deluded mortal hoping that he might be that
happy, fortunate one. As the dying millionnaire would give all that he
possesses for one moment of time, so would all mankind throw every
present blessing into the scale, in the hope of drawing the prize in
that great lottery.

There is a fountain of youth and beauty open to every soul beneath the
sun: there is a rejuvenati