his own industrious hands, what he calls a "jaunting-car-r-r-r." It is a
large wheeled couch on springs. I am a house-prisoner no longer!

I think the first ride I took in it was the most exciting event of my
life. I was not exactly conscious of being mortally tired of looking
from the same porch, over the same garden, into the same grove, and up
to the same quarter of the heavens, for so many months; but when the
change came unexpectedly, it was _transporting_ happiness.

I suppose it may be so when we enter a future life. While here, we think
we do not want to go elsewhere,--even to a better land; but when we
reach that shore, we shall probably acknowledge it to be a lucky change.

Ben drew me carefully down the garden-path. I inhaled the breath of the
tulips and hyacinths, as we passed them. I longed to stay there in that
fairy land, for they brought back all the unspeakably rapturous feelings
of my boyhood. Strange that such delight, after we become men, never
visits us except in moments brief as lightning-flashes,--and then
generally only as a memory,--not, as when we were children, in the form
of a hope! When we are boys, and sudden joy stirs our hearts, we say,
"Oh, how grand life will be!" When we are men, and are thus moved, it
is, "Ah, how bright life was!"

Ben did not pause in the hyacinth-bed with me. He was anxious to prove
the excellence of his vehicle; so he dragged me on in it, until we had
nearly reached the boundary of our grounds, where the two tall, ragged
old cedar-trees marked the extreme point of the evergreen shrubbery,
and _the_ view of the neighborhood lies before us. He stopped there and
said,--