forgiveness. He set the town clock, from day to day, from his own blundering time-keeper, which was half the hours asleep; the consequence was that it irregulated all the dials in the place, and, in the course of a year, the calendar was found waddling like a lame duck or a drunken porter, full a month behind the sun's course and the country almanac. The last virtue to be carried to his account in this chapter was the delight he took in attending funerals and praying for the departed. He vainly wished that people were not so longlived. So anxious was he to do good and pray for sinners, that he wished all men were miserable and up to their brow in afflictions and sins, that he might by his good services help them out.

I have herein, for the benefit of mankind, extracted from his writings a sermon preached by him over a departed short-breeched lump of mortality.

"The muffling pall Is the drop curtain to this farce of life."

"Death is king absolute. He reigns over all mortality. He. is my subject and I am his. He is even now living among men and dead in the tomb. He is the justice that consigns us all as prisoners to the tomb. He commands-the universe obeys. His subalterns and menials are disease and pestilence. He is the world's field marshal and to his dominions he invokes the world; the recruiting officer of the grave whose legions are never full. At the tap of his drum, we must prepare to obey orders and march Indian file henceno rest this side of the tomb. There is the grand halt of life. We lay upon our arms the night through and at the eternal morning wait further orders.

"He sometimes warns-at times threatens with siekness and disease; sometimes dreadfully alarms by most marvelous escapes. This he does to caution the heedless to remember that they are but dust, and that he is the north wind to sweep them as such out of the pathway of the earth. His

sword is raised, thousands of victims fall; he lets fall his arm and the plague is staid. He is a friend to the poor and the miserable; he brings them the white flag of peace, and carries the wicked hence from their troubling, and the poor are taken from the evil to come. To the rich he is a most unwelcome visitor; but, despising form and fashion, he sallies into his chamber with the familiarity of a friend and takes him away from his lands and his wealth. He is even at times a friend to the physician, for he relieves him at last of the fragments of mortality that have existed as the flaming luminary, whose advice has been futile and useless. It may even be said that these two play into each other's hands, though the merciless master does not even spare his friend. Death strikes wherever he fancies-from the infant a breath old, without sin enough to carry him through three score and ten years of adversity, to the fourscore aged. He seems to favor by either letting live or taking away high and low, princes and peasants, kings and subjects, haste at his bidding. His dominions level all distinction. There is no honor in the dust. The gilded mausoleum may be the bequeathed vanity of some buried victims and the epitaph the echo of the voice within, but they neither feel, nor hear, nor work device. Their labors have ceased; the grave closing over them shuts out the mysteries and follies of the world. Whether they left for a better or inferior world, is darkness. The dead are dumb, and antipodes of the living.

"Death is a radical, yet, leveler as he is, he makes all equal with him. The scull and cross bones are merely emblematical of man--the coat of arms that weak vanity has inscribed on his last carriage. Having no soul, he is at rank oppositionist to human nature, and so reasonably argues that he cannot be resisted. It were in vain for any mortal to cry out. He cries "Hush," and all is still. tongue of scandal ceases its clatter in his kingdom-there

The

no voice is heard, not a whisper, not a breath. The servant is free from his master, and the victim from the pursuerfriends are parted in dust only, the spirits have before sought out the way to the city of refuge. The grave is the mere hollow made by the taking man out of the dust-prophecy is fulfilled when it closes by receiving the ancient deposite. Dust to dust, is a memento song of this good man, whose era commenced with the birth of Adam. The up

right do not fear him; they freely shake hands. The world to them is a journey through which they ride rough shod; the tomb is the inn or resting-place after life's dismal day, where they sleep in quiet till the dawn of the next world's morning. They then arise out of their beds, prepared for a greater issue.

"Men may escape worldly marshals, or the civil debt of ficer-neither friend nor foe, country nor province, nook nor corner of the world, can prevent the arrest of man, from this natural sheriff. His staff of office is everywhere respected. He shows his sign and seal; mortality cringes, bows and replies nothing. He throws cold water on the events of life. He is the grand usherer into "that bourne from whence no traveler returns ;" the harvester, gathering in the harvest and the stubble, and performing all his functions with great strictness. He opens the door to the other world and bids us go in, and 'tis he who raises the curtain of futurity to our view that we may see the pall of the long and gloomy night falling over departed day.

"In this world, he is the only friend whose coming we can depend upon and look for with certainty, and if we regard our interests as we ought, we will be glad when he comes; for if this be the valley and vineyard of preparation, let us take advantage of the sunny times, dig and manure, so that when the fall of life comes on, our labor may not have been in vain-always remembering, that in the grave there is no work nor device. Let us take the stream of peace, and sail

on its current to the eternal ocean, on whose surface no billows roll, nor storms arise, nor dangers affright--on whose shores we find the havens we desire-the havens of peace.'

CHAPTER II.

Containing, among other things, some sideway reflections on old times, not intended to offend any body, and hoping they wont.

Standing where once reared the head of Hans's cot and looking south-easterly, you behold an oblong building, with dark and thick stone walls. In front, rises a square tower, like a block stood on end, and bulging into a cupola, to denote what idea the old Dutchman had of steeples; surmounting this is the cock that never crows: he is either so high that daylight don't get up to him, or else he is a sleepyhead barn-yard booby, fearing to open his mouth, for the frailness of his chickentality. It might have been that even this dissembler of chanticleer, was intended to teach the young ideas to rise early, and with the third cock to begin their avocations; it might have been that old women from this symbol, learned to crow over their husbands, and wherever our ancestors could insert a proverb symbolically, or otherwise, for the benefit of the rising generation, they did it with taste, and this while it answered the end of those who delight in the knowledge of the ways of wind-also served as a primer for the youth. The gable end of the building at the south, looks like an alderman's belly (significantly Dutch) as if in some fierce contest of the mental spirits within, it had been accidently blown up to its present elevation. The appearance of the building is firm, sombre, staid and stubborn; shielded in every part as a Grecian phalanx, to resist the attacks of ages. Here and there, you may see places, where Time's teeth

have in vain passed over, and given up his labor as fruitless, much chagrined; walls like these, as thick as the oblong body of a Zuyderzeean, will hold out against centuries' siege of that sharp-toothed, and rapacious gentleman "old Father." This church is the only remnant of by-gone civilization standing to commemorate the days of Dutch_ancestry, yet so transformed, disguised, befigured and barbarized with paint, Venitian corridors and gilt sign-boards, that it would puzzle a college of architects to divine whether it has been a church, or, is a den of thieves. History and recollection tell us it was once a church. Enemies defiled it for the scandalous purpose of a riding school; enemies barbarized it into a foul prison for the sons of liberty; but it remained for friends, for "flesh and blood," to transpose it into a Post-office. Go, read its gilded signs! You'll find it devoted to a thousand purposes, modernized into a political rendezvous, for all parties, as they successively change, which they do as a man saddled with an intermittent fever or a jack.

I remember it in its last days. The scenes of boyhood were there passed. How well impressed on my memory are the throngs of sturdy Hollanders as they moved within the walls of a Sunday. Well do I remember their good old Sunday looks and clothes to match, that defied scandal, and almost deified them. Now we have a new world, as it were, a sort of upper-crust generation of divinities, who have no more regard for the days that were, than though those days ne'er had been; who never think of looking back upon old friends, seasons, buildings, lest, like Lot's wife, they should be transformed to something they would dread. Everything now-a-days is for show; old things are hated, old men and women are stood in a corner. With Dutchmen, the older the friend the stronger was the attachment. This new age shifts into the "lean and slippered pantaloon ;" old tights are discarded; bow-legs and lean shanks drive men to a variety