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The Watch - Tower.

IN THE VICARAGE.

NO. I.-AFTER WORK.

SEATED in a well-worn Windsor chair, before an old study table, bearing on its once bright surface many a notch and blur, I have just put the finishing touches to a manuscript written on lined paper, and have closed the creased and rusty black leather sermoncase containing it. Half carelessly, half thoughtfully, turning over these dingy leaves, and musing on the crabbed and formal handwriting, which has altered so little while its author has been changing so gradually and surely, I am trying to analyze the difference between the writer of to-day and the writer of almost twoscore years ago. For the ideas I have been slowly working at were first given from the pulpit when I was young, and the yellow, time-worn characters of the manuscript I have closed were recorded by a greygoose quill, while the bold black marks, erasures, and interlineations now disfiguring its pages, have been added this evening by the steel magnum which pens this article. I have, in short, been adapting one of my old sermons to the feelings of the hour, and propose to repeat next Sunday a discourse first delivered more than a generation back. The thin sheets I speak of were ruled with pencil by myself, for neither the blue printed lines, nor the ingenious machine for so perforating paper as to guide the truant pen, were so common in my youth as now, and the carefully arranged divisions in blacklead speak to the care and preciseness bestowed upon these anxiously arranged thoughts. Strange to say, the pencil marks meant to be temporary have survived time and change better than the inkwritten words they support, and are almost as distinct in their faint

individuality as when they flew from the ruler, in that distant little village lodging of mine, in which, by long usage, every incoming curate was expected to reside. There are seasons with all of us when the smallest and least considered of external trifles assert themselves with unwonted prominence, when the stones and the running brooks will make their teachings heard, and when incidents we ordinarily pass by in silence, or utterly ignore, are invested with a weight and significance not their own. Can it be that everything animate and inanimate with which we come in contact has its peculiar lesson; that hidden away in the storehouses of memory are similes and comparisons we have never consciously made; and that when all hearts are opened, we shall each find our own charged in a way we little dream of now? It may be so. It may be that the feeling which makes me symbolize in these pencil-lines tastes and aversions unwittingly conceived, habits unknowingly formed, and life facts of which no cognizance was taken; which makes me see in the faded ink, knowledge laboriously acquired and rapidly forgotten,-it may be that this feeling is but one link in a great chain, and that from the flickering fire-shadows I see dancing over my old carpet, to the arrangement of the musty volumes in the little book-shelves within reach of my hand, there is not a single object in our outer life which has not its secret mission and its hidden story. Wordsworth must have had some such thought as this when he wrote,—

"The eye,-it cannot choose but see;

We cannot bid the car be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.

"Nor less I deem that there are powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come
Without for ever seeking?"

When, therefore, you see a beautiful view for the first time, or are introduced to a new face, or go through some fresh experience, does it not often happen that you seem to have looked at the landscape, talked to the acquaintance, or acquired the special knowledge before? I think so. It is so with me; and though the sermon which has given rise to this train of thought has lain quietly in an old valise-purchased when valises were-long enough for children to become men and women, and for men and women to have grown old, it yet seems that I have noted its shortcomings, strengthened its arguments, and amended its style, in dreamland or in reality, many