Morning journal and courier., 1885-01-17
S you can learn from all the metaphysi

as you can learn from all the metaphysi | eians.
 It needs not to say that he learned the old | lesson of love at the same time, or even be- | fore he learned his letters among the ferns. 1 So began his life. At seventeen he came out l from his vile home into the crowded world. | There is no space to tell of his method of farming his new farm. He went at it with the experience of the boy who had cleared a forest and rolled rocks out of the meadow with semi mi-starvation, carried on with slow, steady determination. Starting as a day laborer, he achieved in six years or so a superintendent's position with a living salary. Then he went back to the old farm and married Harriet, who had waited for him, and brought her to the city.
 Fifty years went along and neither he nor she ever again saw the north country. He accumulated property, and they were good members of their social circle, regular in daily life and Sunday church going. They had changed and yet had not changed. Their young lives had been devoid of romance, and there was no romance or senti- ment in growing rich and growing old Practically they had forgotten their youth. Certainly they never thought or talked of it. I said their youth without romance. Yet beyond doubt the forming period in their lives had been when the unspeakable beauty of a boys and girls love hollowed those
 
 there was any romance in young love on the silver lake in the mountain moonlight They did not know that there was any TO- nance when he lay in the ferns at her'feet and listened while she taught him that boy spells boy, and girl spells girl, and lowe spells love. Therefore there was no romance about it. It was simple matter of fact They lived matter-of-fact lives when poor, and the same when rich and when surround ed with all the luxuries and elegancies which great wealth commands. They lived, in short, very much as many rich people live who have few resources for mental occupa- tion, who are not given to much reading or much thinking-in fact, just living along, and keeping at the old daily routine of enl- p1oymeuts. How many there are who live in this way, having neither past to enjoy in retrospect, nor future to enjoy in pros pect, only comfortable in the monotonous present.
 He was growing feeble. His brain was weary or worn. It hurts the brain to use it forever on one line of employment. His had been used for nothing but business work a half century, and whether in memory, judgment or looking to the future no thought had occupied it except thought of property buying and selling and getting gain He had not for years been at three minutes distance from telegraph station nor thirty minutes away from Wall street. His idea of a sum mer vacation was to go to hotel where stock bulletins were always kept up and stock ope rations were the day and evening subjects of discussion. No wonder that there came time when he began to grow strangely silent, sometimes as if drowsy, sometimes morose. Then he suddenly seemed to forget every thing, and neither spoke nor wrote, nor weut to his private telegraphic instrument. For he had made his house and even his bedroom an annex to his office and the exchange, and had lived practically day and night in the street.
 They said his brain was done with work and his end was near. Still he walked and rode around, but never alone. One day he riding with his wife in the carriage along an uptown road, silent, unobservant apparently in a stupor, when suddenly he exclaimed, ''How sweet the ferns smell in this sunshine, Harriet" She turned to him and saw that his eyes were closed. She took him home and after that he lay week after week quiet, but apparently without knowing or noticing anything or anyone. But some times they saw smile spread over his pale face if pleasant thoughts were in the old brain. After months of this, one evening ill the twilight he reached out his hand to her and said, "How sweet the ferns are Hattie'' Then he seemed perplexed about it and said ''How sweet the ferns were, Hattie'' and then after little he came into his right mind
 If, in the other life, which is alongside of this our life, close to us, but invisible to us, there are, as we are taught by some serious teachers, angels appointed to each of us, who are sometimes able to influence our thougllts 1t would seem sometimes as if those angels held in their hands the ghosts of things that gone, the shades of lost objects of delight, and somehow made us sensible of their nearness. Did his angel and her angel hold in their hands fragrant ghostly ferns gathered long ago, with subtle odors, sensi- ble not to the actual sense, but quite so to the mental sense? Or did they bring fronds that grew in elysian fields which bear odors like those that are here associated with our purest recollections? Why not? There are rivers there, and why not golden rod on their banks and fragrant hints and ferns! It must have been from heaven with attendant benediction, that the odor of the ferns came often to him. For now they two, old man and old wife, lived again together for many weeks and even months the young life. All it's old unrecognized romance and all it's sim pie delight and happy peace of mind came back to them. They talked now of every tree and rock and flower bed, of every odor of field and forest. You know we cannot describe an odor; we can only say how sweet or disagreeable it was; but always their say ing was, EEDo you remember how the air was full of the fragrant everlasting that Septem- Der day when we did so and so;" and they talked over the old stories; and now she found them in books and read them to him. and the truth that was in them seemed now very true. For were they not both rapidly nearing the world whereof they had talked much and thought so much, and were they not soon to see Moses and David and Zac- cheus and Bartimeus? For year or more they were as happy as two children, happy as they had been when children; happier, I think, for their old hearts went rioting around in the memories of those days, and all the pains of them were gone. Once in the summer time he said he wished when he should be dead, she would send and get great deal of sweet-scented fern and cover him with it. And she did so, and two three years after that she died. Do you be- ieve there will be ferns in heaven, sweet ferns, whose odors fill the air and help to memories of young life here? The old song of the church says: ''There cinnamon and sugar grow; there nard and balm abound" If they reach heaven, and ferns grow there, they two will be found often on some fern bank. To them that would add much to what Gregory called ''the sweet solemnity of those who are come home from the sad labor ]