36 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



try towns, — those "brood-combs," as Beecher calls them. 

 How many who have been thus sent forth to positions of 

 power through health, or wit, or wisdom, have made it their 

 mission to benefit their birthplace, the church where they 

 learned the fear of God, the school where a better ambition 

 was awakened, the poor above whose level Providence has 

 lifted them, the old homestead and farm where they may 

 show " New-England farming restored " ! Ten years of rest 

 after the hard labor of life, ten years of old age to live over 

 again the life of early years, ten years of reflections and 

 making read}^, and then a peaceful burial at one's birthplace, 

 is a blessing that many have enjoyed in hope, and a few in 

 reality. There is a Scandinavian legend of a boy who used 

 to go down from his father's hut to the rocks by the ocean- 

 side. There he saw the great ships of the sea-kings go by, 

 and his heart swelled within him like the mountain brooks, 

 and he longed to become a viking. He* sought the sea, and 

 became the foremost viking of them all. His name was a 

 terror to both coasts of the channel. He conquered for 

 himself a kingdom in sunny France, and built a lordly palace 

 and pleasure-house among the vineyards and apple-blossoms 

 of the Seine. But the pride of power soon wearied ; flattery 

 lost its charm ; his heart grew sick with public care, the 

 fickleness, the ingratitude, the cowardice, of friends ; and the 

 voices of childhood filled again the dull ear of age. All day 

 long the goats bleated for him ; he heard the sweet, sad sigh- 

 ing of the winds in the hemlocks, the pulsation of the 

 surges against the rocky shores ; he longed for the quiet of 



nature, — 



" The silence that is in the starry sky, 



The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 



He " gave his honors to the world again," came back to the 

 hut of his childhood, ate again the barken bread of Sweden, 

 and drank its bitter beer ; and when the last hour came he 

 was carried down to the rocks by the ocean-side to die. 

 " Bury me not in Egypt," said good old Jacob ; " bury me 

 with my fathers, I would lie in their burial-place." 



