a road can tell how long the miles appear, how heavily the time hangs; how weary become the feet! As you trudge onward, seeing nothing to give you assurance that you are nearing the goal, your heart sinks for want of hope. You do not know how far you have come; you cannot guess how far you have yet to go. Oh! for a stone or post to tell you that you have accomplished some definite portion of your journey, if it be only one single mile; for then you know the extent of your toil. At such landmarks you sit you down, as on an oasis, and bathe your wayworn feet, and dry your tears, and rise refreshed and strengthened for the next stage on your journey. How infinite is the mercy of Heaven in adapting times and seasons to man's estate and condition! Let us suppose a sudden change, and that the earth occupied two years in revolving round the sun -that the four seasons were doubled in length. How the tedium of opening spring would provoke us! how the glory of summer would pall upon us! how the lingering promise of autumn would make the heart sick! and how terrible would be the dread of the coming winter! But to realize this more forcibly, let us imagine a day of forty-eight hours-twenty-four hours of day, and the same number of night. As it is, many of us talk of killing Time. But in such a case, would not all mankind be in league to put an end to him once and for ever? So intolerable does the bare idea of such an arrangement appear, that the order of things in the inhabited regions near the poles may almost be regarded as a defect in the Great Scheme. These regions are apt to give us the idea of outhouses attached to the Great Building which were never intended to be inhabited except by reindeer and bears. Tell a fashionable cockney of a place where they never draw down the blinds and light the lamps for five months and he will faint. Perhaps the seven months when the blinds are permanently drawn down, and the lamps are always burning, would suit him better; but he would get tired even of that. The fool's

paradise of eternal night-revels would be a pandemonium. Nature has set us an example in the ordering of seasons, and the marking of time, which we have followed in our own small way by instituting minor subdivisions. It may be said, God made years and days, and man made hours and minutes and seconds. It is well that the plan has been thus artificially extended, for we stand in need of the most frequent reminders of the flight of time. Without these bells of warning, clashing for ever around us, the sands of life would steal away like a thief, robbing us of many wholesome seasons of thought and sober reflection. But we take small note of these minor warnings. Carpe diem is a maxim little heeded. A miserly maxim. As if a day were of any account! A youth with many years in store for him throws away a day as a rich man throws away a guinea. There are plenty more. The sun will rise to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and my purse will fill with days as fast as it is emptied.' Weeks! what do they mark but a brief period in our course of toil or pleasure? Months! Do we not sometimes forget whether it is August or September? Years! But here we pause. Days, weeks, months, may preach to us in vain, but years will make us hold and listen especially when we have turned thirty. Before that age most young men are proud of the fact that they are growing older. They hear their seniors prate of their age and experience, and they envy age and experience as, at another period of their existence, they envied whiskers and tail-coats. But when thirty years are passed, and the figures are rapidly leading on to twoscore, a man becomes as unwilling-ay, as unwilling as any woman-to confess that he is as old as he really is. He would like to be thought younger-he would like to be younger.

This is about the time of life when men begin to exclaim

Eheu fugaces anni labuntur!' It has been but a line from Horace hitherto, something to scan, some