not kept long in suspense. Xit's struggles soon disengaged his legs from the boots, and he dropped headlong into the moat, and disappeared beneath the tide.

But rescue was at hand. With the utmost promptitude Og dashed into the fosse, and waded out to the spot where Xit had sunk, which was about the middle

of the moat. Though the water quickly reached up to his shoulders, the giant went on until the head of the manikin suddenly popped up beside him. With a shout of satisfaction Og then seized him, held him aloft like a dripping water-rat, and bore him safely ashore amid the laughter and acclamations of the beholders.

From Fraser's Magazine.

CONCERNING

FUTURE YEARS.

surrounds him, like an atmosphere, that he and his children, his views and likings, will be then just such as they are now. He can not bring it home to him at how many points change will be cutting into him, and hedging him in, and paring him. down. And we all live very much under that vague impression. Yet it is in many ways good for us to feel that we are going

round us-advancing into the undefined future, into the unknown land. And I think that sometimes we all have vivid flashes of such a conviction. I dare say, my friend, you have seen an old man, frail, soured, and shabby, and you have thought with a start, Perhaps there is Myself of Future Years.

DOES it ever come across you, my the season of climbing trees. The midfriend, with something of a start, that dle-aged man enjoys the prospect of the things can not always go on in your lot time when he shall go to his countryas they are going now? Does not a sud-house; and the vague, undefined belief den thought sometimes flash upon you, a hasty, vivid glimpse, of what you will be long hereafter, if you are spared in this world? Our common way is too much to think that things will always go on as they are going. Not that we clearly think so, not that we ever put that opinion in a definite shape, and avow to ourselves that we hold it: but we live very much under that vague, general impres-on-passing from the things which sursion. We can hardly help it. When a man of middle age inherits a pretty country-seat, and makes up his mind that he can not yet afford to give up his profession and go to live at it, but concludes that in six or eight years he will be able with justice to his children to do so, do you think he brings plainly before him the changes which must be wrought on himself and those around him by these years? I do not speak of the greatest change of all, which may come to any of us so very soon: I do not think of what may be done by unlooked for accident: I think merely of what must be done by the passing on of time. I think of possible changes in taste and feeling, of possible loss of liking for that mode of life. I think of lungs that will play less freely, and of limbs that will suggest shortened walks, and dissuade from climbing hills. I think of how the children will have outgrown daisy-chains, or even got beyond

We human beings can stand a great deal. There is great margin allowed by our constitution, physical and moral. I suppose there is no doubt that a man may daily for years eat what is unwholesome, breathe air which is bad, or go through a round of life which is not the best or the right one for either body or mind, and yet be little the worse. And so men pass through great trials and through long years, and yet are not altered so very much. The other day, walking along the street, I saw a man whom I had not seen for ten years. I knew that since I saw him last he had gone through very heavy

This can not always go on. To what is it all tending? I am not thinking now of an out-look so grave that this is not the place to discuss it. But I am thinking how every thing is going on. In this world there is no standing still. And every thing that belongs entirely to this world, its interests and occupations, is going on toward a conclusion. It will all come to an end. It can not go on for

troubles, and that these had set very heavily upon him. I remembered how he had lost that friend who was the dear est to him of all human beings, and I knew how broken-down he had been for many months after that great sorrow came. Yet there he was walking along, an unnoticed unit, just like any one else; and he was looking wonderfully well. No doubt he seemed pale, worn, and anxious: but he was very well and carefully dress-ever. I can not always be writing sered; he was walking with a brisk, active step; and I dare say in feeling pretty well reconciled to being what he is, and to the circumstances amid which he is living. Still, one felt that somehow a tremendous change had passed over him. I felt sorry for him, and all the more that he did not seem to feel sorry for himself. It made me sad to think that some day I should be like him; that perhaps in the eyes of my juniors I look like him already, careworn and ageing. I dare say in his feeling there was no such sense of falling off. Perhaps he was tolerably content. He was walking so fast, and looking so sharp, that I am sure he had no desponding feeling at the time. Despondency goes with slow movements and with vague looks. The sense of having materially fallen off is destructive to the eagle-eye. Yes, he was tolerably content. We can go downhill cheerfully, save at the points where it is sharply brought home to us that we are going down-hill. Lately, I sat at dinner opposite an old lady who had the remains of striking beauty. I remember how much she interested me. Her hair was false, her teeth were false, her complexion was shriveled, her form had lost the round symmetry of earlier years, and was angular and stiff; yet how cheerful and lively she was. She had gone far down-hill physically; but either she did not feel her decadence, or she had grown quite reconciled to it. Her daughter, a blooming matron, was there, happy, wealthy, good; yet not apparently a whit more reconciled to life than the aged grandame. It was pleasing, and yet it was sad, to see how well we can make up our mind to what is inevitable. And such a sight brings up to one a glimpse of Future Years. The cloud seems to part before one, and through the rift you discern your earthly track far away, and a jaded pilgrim plodding along it with weary step; and though the pilgrim does not look like you, yet you know the pilgrim is yourself.

mons as I do now, and going on in this regular course of life. I can not always be writing essays for Fraser. The day will come when I shall have no more to say, or when the readers of the Magazine will no longer have patience to listen to me in that kind fashion in which they have listened so long. I foresee it plainly this evening-the time when the reader shall open the familiar cover, and glance at the table of contents, and exclaim indignantly: "Here is that tiresome person again with the four initials: why will he not cease to weary us?" I write in sober sadness, my friend: I do not intend any jest. If you do not know that what I have written is certainly true, you have not lived very long. You have not learned the sorrowful lesson, that all worldly occupations and interests are wearing to their close. You can not keep up the old thing, however much you may wish to do so. You know how vain anniversaries for the most part are. You meet with certain old friends, to try to revive the old days; but the spirit of the old time will not come over you. It is not a spirit that can be raised at will. It can not go on forever, that walking down to church on Sundays, and ascending those pulpit steps; it will change to feeling, though I humbly trust it may be long before it shall change in fact. Don't you all sometimes feel something like that? Don't you sometimes look about you and say to yourself, That furniture will wear out: those window curtains are getting sadly faded; they will not last a life-time? Those carpets must be replaced some day; and the old patterns which looked at you with a kindly, familiar expression, through these long years, must be among the old familiar faces that are gone. These are little things, indeed, but they are among the vague recollections that bewilder our memory; they are among the things which come up in the strange, confused remembrance of the dying man in the last

days of life. There is an old fir-tree, ature to be ever onward-looking; and we twisted, strange looking fir-tree, which can not help it. When you get the first will be among my last recollections, I number for the year of the magazine know, as it was among my first. It was which you take in, you instinctively think always before my eyes when I was three, of it as the first portion of a new volume; four, five years old: I see the pyramidal and you are conscious of a certain though top, rising over a mass of shrubbery; I slight restlessness in the thought of a see it always against a sunset-sky; always thing incomplete, and of a wish that you in the subdued twilight in which we had the volume completed. And someseem to see things in distant years. These times, thus looking onward into the fuold friends will die, you think; who will ture, you worry yourself with little take their place? You will be an old thoughts and cares. There is that old gentleman, à frail old gentleman, wondered dog: you have had him for many years; at by younger men, and telling them long he is growing stiff and frail; what are you stories about the days when Queen Vic- to do when he dies? When he is gone, toria was a young woman, like those which the new dog you get will never be like weary you now about George the Third. him; he may be, indeed, a far handsomer It will not be the same world then. Your and more amiable animal, but he will not children will not be always children. En- be your old companion; he will not be joy their fresh youth while it lasts, for it surrounded with all those old associations, will not last long. Do not skim over the not merely with your own by-past life, present too fast, through a constant habit but with the lives, the faces, and the of onward-looking. Many men of an anx-voices of those who have left you, which ious turn are so eagerly concerned in pro-invest with a certain sacredness even that viding for the future, that they hardly re- humble but faithful friend. He will not mark the blessings of the present. Yet it is only because the future will some day be present, that it deserves any thought at all. And many men, instead of heartily enjoying present blessings while they are present, train themselves to a habit of regarding these things as merely the foundation on which they are to build some vague fabric of they know not what. I have known a clergyman, who was very fond of music, and in whose church the music was very fine, who seemed incapable of enjoying its solemn beauty as a thing to be enjoyed while passing, but who persisted in regarding each beautiful strain merely as a promising in-harness-how will you replace it? It dication of what his choir would come at will be a pang to throw it by, and it will be some future time to be. It is a very bad a considerable expense too to get a new habit, and one which grows unless represssuit. Then you think how long harness ed. You, my reader, when you see your may continue to be serviceable. I once children racing on the green, train your-saw, on a pair of horses drawing a stageself to regard all that as a happy end in coach among the hills, a set of harness itself. Do not grow to think merely that which was thirty-five years old. It had those sturdy young limbs promise to be been very costly and grand when new; it stout and serviceable when they are those had belonged for some of its earliest years of a grown-up man; and rejoice in the to a certain wealthy nobleman. The nosmooth little forehead with its curly hair, bleman had been for many years in his without any forethought of how it is to grave, but there was his harness still. It look some day when overshadowed (as it was tremendously patched, and the blinkis sure to be) by the great wig of the ers were of extraordinary aspect; but it Lord Chancellor. Good advice: let us was quite serviceable. There is comfort all try to take it. Let all happy things be for you, poor country parsons. How enjoyed as ends, as well as regarded as thoroughly I understand your feeling means. Yet it is in the make of our na-about such little things. I know how you

have been the companion of your youthful walks, when you went at a pace which now you can not 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 come 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

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find the pathos and the polish of one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has with such irresistible humor, sometimes approaching to the farcical, delineated humble Scotch life. One passage in the book always struck me very much. We have in it the poet as well as the humorist; and it is a perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages which you have read. I mean the passage in which Mansie tells us of a sudden glimpse which, in circumstances of mortal terror, he once had of the future. On a certain "awful night" the

and, looking out, he saw the next house to his own was on fire from cellar to garret. The earnings of poor Mansie's whole life were laid out on his stock in trade and his furniture, and it appeared likely that these would be at once destroyed.

sometimes look at your phaeton or your | It is curious, and yet it is not curious, to 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 oldfashioned. Yes, you remember, not with out 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 over-tailor was awakened by cries of alarm, clouded by the anticipation of the coming day which will not be his. You remember how that great though morbid man, John Foster, could not heartily enjoy the summer weather, for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him was a downward step toward 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 af fectation; 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. Ah! there is exquisite pathos there as And while your trap runs smoothly and well as humor; but the thing for which noiselessly, while the leather is fresh and I have quoted that sentence is its startthe paint unscratched, do not worry your-ling truthfulness. You have all done self with visions of the day when it will rattle and creak, and when you will make it wait for you at the corner of backstreets 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 will find the money to buy a new one.

Have you ever read the Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith, by that pleasing poet and most amiable man, the late David Macbeth Moir? I have been looking into it lately; and I have regretted much that the Lowland Scotch dialect is so imperfectly understood in England, and that even where so far understood its raciness is so little felt; for great as is the popularity of that work, it is much less known than it deserves to be. Only a Scotchman can thoroughly appreciate it.

"Then (says he) the darkness of the latter days came over my spirit like a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the years to come but beggary and starvation-myself a fallen-back old man, with an out-at-thehirpling over a staff, requeeshting an awmous: elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald brow, Nanse a broken-hearted beggar-wife, torn down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she thought on better days; and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with a meal-pock on his back."

what Mansie Wauch did, I know. Every one has his own way of doing it, and it is his own especial picture which each sees; but there has appeared to us, as to Mansie, (I must recur to my old figure,) as it were a sudden rift in the clouds that conceal the future, and we have seen the way, far ahead-the dusty way—and an aged pilgrim pacing slowly along it; and in that aged figure we have each recog nized our own young self. How often have I sat down on the mossy wall that surrounded my churchyard, when I had more time for reverie than I have now-sat upon the mossy wall, under a great oak, whose branches came low down and projected far out and looked at the rough gnarled bark, and at the passing river, and at the belfry of the little church, and there and then thought of

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