set forth the good points of his beast, even while he confessed that the "heaves" were pretty bad. I was glad, too, to find the youngster in a general way something of an optimist. When I asked him how long the land had been cleared, he pointed to one corner of it, and responded, using the pronoun with perfect naïveté, "We cleared up that piece last fall;" and on my inquiring whether it was not hard work, he replied, in a tone of absolute satisfaction, "Oh, yes, but you get your pay for it." Evidently he believed in Green Mountain land, which I thought a very fortunate circumstance. "Be content with such things as ye have," said the Apostle; and it is certainly easier to obey the precept if one looks upon his own things as the best in the world. My youthful philosopher seemed to consider it altogether natural and reasonable that prosperity, instead of coming of itself, should have to be earned by the sweat of the brow. Perhaps the crow and the cherry-tree are equally unsophisticated. Perhaps, too, men's fates are less uneven than is sometimes supposed. For I could not help thinking that if this boy should retain his present view of things, he
would pass his days more happily than many a so-called favorite of fortune.
On my way back to the inn I met an old man from the lowlands, driving over the mountains for the first time since boyhood. "You have a pretty good farming country here," he called out cheerily,—"a little rolling." He took me for a native, and I hope to be forgiven for not disclaiming the compliment.
As I write, I find myself wondering how my nameless farmer's crop is prospered. In my corner of the world we have lately been afflicted with drought. I hope it has been otherwise on his hillside plateau. In my thought, at all events, his corn is now fully tasseled, and waves in a pleasant mountain wind, all green and shining.
BEHIND THE EYE.
As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.—Matthew Arnold.
Nothing is seen until it is separated from its surroundings. A man looks at the landscape, but the tree standing in the middle of the landscape he does not see until, for the instant at least, he singles it out as the object of vision. Two men walk the same road; as far as the bystander can perceive, they have before them the same sights; but let them be questioned at the end of the journey, and it will appear that one man saw one set of objects, and his companion another; and the more diverse the intellectual training and habits of the two travelers, the greater will be the discrepancy between the two reports.
And what is true of any two men is equally true of any one man at two different times. To-day he is in a dreamy, reflective mood,—he has been reading Wordsworth,