rely as a promising
indication of what his choir would come at some future time to be. It is
a very bad habit, and one which grows, unless repressed. You, my reader,
when you see your children racing on the green, train yourself to regard
all that as a happy end in itself. Do not grow to think merely that
those sturdy young limbs promise to be stout and serviceable when they
are those of a grown-up man; and rejoice in the smooth little forehead
with its curly hair, without any forethought of how it is to look some
day when overshadowed (as it is sure to be) by the great wig of the Lord
Chancellor. Good advice: let us all try to take it. Let all happy things
be not merely regarded as means, but enjoyed as ends. Yet it is in the
make of our nature to be ever onward-looking; and we cannot help it.
When you get the first number for the year of the magazine which you
take in, you instinctively think of it as the first portion of a new
volume; and you are conscious of a certain, though alight, restlessness
in the thought of a thing incomplete, and of a wish that you had the
volume completed. And sometimes, thus looking onward into the future,
you worry yourself with little thoughts and cares. There is that old
dog: you have had him for many years; he is growing stiff and frail;
what are you to do when he dies? When he is gone, the new dog you get
will never be like him; he may be, indeed, a far handsomer and more
amiable animal, but he will not be your old companion; he will not be
surrounded with all those old associations, not merely with your own
by-past life, but with the lives, the faces, and the voices of those who
have left you, which invest with a certain sacredness even that humble,
but faithful friend. He will not have been the companion of your
youthful walks, when you went at a pace which now you cannot attain. He
will just be a common dog; and who that has reached your years cares
for _that_? The other, indeed, was a dog too; but that was merely the
substratum on which was accumulated a host of recollections: it is _Auld
Lang Syne_ that walks into your study, when your shaggy friend of ten
summers comes stiffly in, and after many querulous turnings lays himself
down on the rug before the fire. Do you not feel the like when you
look at many little matters, and then look into the Future Years? That
harness,--how will you replace it? It will be a pang to throw it by;
and it will be a considerable expense, too, to get