EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS. 227 



There, my friend, is a subject for your thoughtful con- 

 sideration. Eighty-seven years, as we poor mortals count 

 years by the swing of the globe, and fifty of them in this 

 narrow valley between two mountains! Eighty -seven 

 peaceful years ! Eighty-seven tempestuous years ! Which 

 had they been ? It matters little whether they who travel 

 this pilgrimage of life travel in lonesome valleys or in 

 crowded city streets. Life every where is calm or stormy, 

 as God gives it, and there are tempests that shake the 

 soul of man or of woman in mountain recesses as fierce 

 as the storms that sweep over us in the deserts that we 

 call social life. 



But I think sometimes that the memories of old age, 

 such as hers must be, are greatly to be envied ; and, after 

 I had paid for our dinner and we were driving along the 

 wild road up the East Branch, I began to imagine what 

 hers perhaps might be, and to contrast them with my own 

 memories of a more brief, but doubtless, in most men's 

 estimation, more eventful life. 



Looking out of her windows in the evening she saw 

 the sunlight shining on the mountain-top as he had shone 

 for fifty years, and the same tall pine-tree on the summit 

 had in all those years been the last purple beacon of each 

 departing clay. The mountains are not so high to her 

 old eyes as they used to be, for heaven has come down 

 nearer to her. It is a blessing of old age, when it does 

 not seem so much that the weary pilgrimage is tending 

 upward toward the land of rest, as that the blessed coun- 

 try is somehow brought nearer, as if it had come clown 

 from God. For John, in his old age, saw the Holy City 

 descending ; and many, like the aged watcher in Patmos, 

 have learned to look upward and say, " Come, Lord," in- 

 stead of saying, "Take me away." And most of all this 



