he
loveliness of those calm autumn days, when the heats of summer are past,
when the harvest is gathered into the garner, and the sun shines over
the placid fields and fading woods, which stand waiting for their last
change. It is a beauty more strictly moral, more belonging to the soul,
than that of any other period of life. Poetic fiction always paints the
old man as a Christian; nor is there any period where the virtues of
Christianity seem to find a more harmonious development. The aged man,
who has outlived the hurry of passion--who has withstood the urgency of
temptation--who has concentrated the religious impulses of youth into
habits of obedience and love--who, having served his generation by the
will of God, now leans in helplessness on Him whom once he served, is,
perhaps, one of the most faultless representations of the beauty of
holiness that this world affords.

Thoughts something like these arose in my mind as I slowly turned my
footsteps from the graveyard of my native village, where I had been
wandering after years of absence. It was a lovely spot--a soft slope of
ground close by a little stream, that ran sparkling through the cedars
and junipers beyond it, while on the other side arose a green hill, with
the white village laid like a necklace of pearls upon its bosom.

There is no feature of the landscape more picturesque and peculiar than
that of the graveyard--that "city of the silent," as it is beautifully
expressed by the Orientals--standing amid the bloom and rejoicing of
nature, its white stones glittering in the sun, a memorial of decay, a
link between the living and the dead.

As I moved slowly from mound to mound, and read the inscriptions, which
purported that many a money-saving man, and many a busy, anxious
housewife, and many a prattling, half-blossomed child, had done with
care or mirth, I was struck with a plain slab, bearing the inscription,
"_To the memory of Deacon Enos Dudley, who died in his hundredth year_."
My eye was caught by this inscription, for in other years I had well
known the person it recorded. At this instant, his mild and venerable
form arose before me as erst it used to rise from the deacon's seat, a
straight, close slip just below the pulpit. I recollect his quiet and
lowly coming into meeting, precisely ten minutes before the time, every
Sunday,--his tall form a little stooping,--his best suit of
butternut-colored Sunday clothes, with long flaps and wide cuffs, on