a new suit. Then you
think how long harness may continue to be serviceable. I once saw, on a
pair of horses drawing a stage-coach among the hills, a set of harness
which was thirty-five years old. It had been very costly and grand when
new; it had belonged for some of its earliest years to a certain wealthy
nobleman. The nobleman had been for many years in his grave, but there
was his harness still. It was tremendously patched, and the blinkers
were of extraordinary aspect; but it was quite serviceable. There is
comfort for you, poor country parsons! How thoroughly I understand your
feeling about such little things! I know how you sometimes look at your
phaeton or your dog-cart; and even while the morocco is fresh, and the
wheels still are running with their first tires, how you think you see
it after it has grown shabby and old-fashioned. Yes, you remember,
not without a dull kind of pang, that it is wearing out. You have a
neighbor, perhaps, a few miles off, whose conveyance, through the wear
of many years, has become remarkably seedy; and every time you meet it
you think that there you see your own, as it will some day be. Every dog
has his day: but the day of the rational dog is overclouded in a fashion
unknown to his inferior fellow-creature; it is overclouded by the
anticipation of the coming day which will not be his. You remember how
that great, though morbid man, John Poster, could not heartily enjoy the
summer weather, for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him
was a downward step towards the winter gloom. Each indication that the
season was progressing, even though progressing as yet only to greater
beauty, filled him with great grief. "I have seen a fearful sight
to-day," he would say,--"I have seen a buttercup." And we know, of
course, that in his case there was nothing like affectation; it was only
that, unhappily for himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking,
that he saw only a premonition of the snows of December in the roses of
June. It would be a blessing, if we could quite discard the tendency.
And while your trap runs smoothly and noiselessly, while the leather is
fresh and the paint unscratched, do not worry yourself with visions of
the day when it will rattle and creak, and when you will make it wait
for you at the corner of back-streets when you drive into town. Do not
vex yourself by fancying that you will never have heart to send off the
old carriage, nor by wondering where you