ges before us. Yet it remains
a strange thing to look forward and to see yourself with gray hair, and
not much even of that; to see your wife an old woman, and your little
boy or girl grown up into manhood or womanhood. It is more strange still
to fancy you see them all going on as usual in the round of life, and
you no longer among them. You see your empty chair. There is your
writing-table and your inkstand; there are your books, not so carefully
arranged as they used to be; perhaps, on the whole, less indication than
you might have hoped that they miss you. All this is strange when you
bring it home to your own case; and that hundreds of millions have felt
the like makes it none the less strange to you. The commonplaces of life
and death are not commonplace when they befall ourselves. It was in
desperate hurry and agitation that Mansie Wauch saw his vision; and in
like circumstances you may have yours too. But for the most part such
moods come in leisure,--in saunterings through the autumn woods,--in
reveries by the winter fire.

I do not think, thus musing upon our occasional glimpses of the Future,
of such fancies as those of early youth,--fancies and anticipations of
greatness, of felicity, of fame; I think of the onward views of men
approaching middle age, who have found their place and their work in
life, and who may reasonably believe, that, save for great unexpected
accidents, there will be no very material change in their lot till that
"change come" to which Job looked forward four thousand years since.
There are great numbers of educated folk who are likely always to live
in the same kind of house, to have the same establishment, to associate
with the same class of people, to walk along the same streets, to look
upon the same hills, as long as they live. The only change will be the
gradual one which will be wrought by advancing years.

And the onward view of such people in such circumstances is generally a
very vague one. It is only now and then that there comes the startling
clearness of prospect so well set forth by Mansie Wauch. Yet sometimes,
when such a vivid view comes, it remains for days, and is a painful
companion of your solitude. Don't you remember, clerical reader of
thirty-two, having seen a good deal of an old parson, rather sour in
aspect, rather shabby-looking, sadly pinched for means, and with powers
dwarfed by the sore struggle with the world to maintain his family and
to keep up a respect