208 HORSE PORTRAITURE. 



To one whose frame has been racked with pain, the nerves 

 vibrating with a metallic harshness, until the opiate so 

 magically changes the feelings, and the bed of suffering is 

 turned to the couch of the sybarite, without a crumpled 

 rose-leaf to mar its luxuriousness, to such a one I could 

 oner a metaphor or two that would portray my feelings. 

 It is as when the child sinks on its mother's breast to 

 slumber, smiling at the rustling of the angel's wing that 

 is to watch it through life, and is whispering bright words 

 describing the beauties of their joint home in Paradise ; 

 or as, when the strong swimmer, vainly wrestling in his 

 agony, till the limit of human endurance is reached, sinks 

 under the gurgling wave, down, down, without pain, the 

 music of the sirens in his ears, and he floats in choral 

 depths fully realizing that he is at last at rest ; or as, when 

 the good Christian throws off the armor in which he has 

 battled, and sees the golden gates open, and the glory 

 that surrounds the awful throne making his final pathway 

 bright, thronged with the loved and lost that have pre- 

 ceded him o'er the " silent river," and the ties that bound 

 mm to this beautiful world become as the glossy filaments 

 tnat sparkle on the dewy meadow in the morning sun- 

 beams. 



The friend to whom I am indebted for the pleasure of 

 my visits which are made semi-annually lives in a neat 

 cottage, surmounting a gentle eminence at the foot of the 

 lake which I have so poorly described. I first made his 

 acquaintance in the forests of Northern Maine, where we 

 became associated in a hunting expedition. Many a moose 

 and caribou fell at the report of his rifle, and I never met 

 any one who was so passionately attached to the sports of 

 the field. Small and fragile in form, it was astonishing 

 how nerve and spirit supplied the place of bone and 

 muscle, as he was the hardiest and most untiring of any 

 one in the camp. Day after day, he would don the snow- 



