Some half hour afterward the uncle and his nephew were seated on a solitary lump of rock that jutted just above the sands on the sea-shore, scarce a mile beyond the town of Boston.

The night was almost as bright as day; and had it not been for the silvery rays of the full moon, which seemed to cover the earth with a sheet of snow, one might have fancied, from the luminousness and transparency of the air, that it was the cold blue twilight of an early summer's morning.

The sky was frosted all over with "star-dust," and sparkled like the sea at night in the tropics with its million points of fire. Down the centre of the firmament streamed the broad phosphorescent band of the "Milky Way," with its "firemist" of stars, looking almost as fine and infinite to the naked eye as the minute particles that go to make up the bloom on a butterfly's wing, and seeming as though the curtains of the heavens were parted there, and one could just catch the dazzle of the countless multitude of lights about the Godhead's throne. On either side of this, the bright figures of the more marked constellations shone out in lustrous lines, solemn as the symbols traced by the Unseen Hand in strokes of fire upon the wall; and here and there, some larger star or stray planet arrested the eye, as it was seen shining alone in the pale violet air-a little ball of white light, bright as a glow-worm in a hedgerow. Not a cloud was to be seen; the moon, which had not long risen, hung a little above the horizon, like a big pearl upon some Indian prince's neck, and poured from out her opal urn such a flood of virgin beams that the white lustre came streaming across the ocean to the shore in a narrow rippling rivulet of molten silver, flowing as it were through the parted waters of the sea;

and as the billows fell languidly upon the beach, the very moonbeams seemed to curl over there, and then spread themselves out into a broad, shallow sheet of splendor far along the sands.

The earth itself was almost as lovely as the sky and sea. Though all color had faded from the world, and Nature looked sombre as a sister of charity in her sad-colored garb-though the woods had no more tint in them than black clouds of smoke welling up out of the ground-though the roadways were white as snow-drifts with the moonlight, and the fields like plates of steel, with the cottages glistening in the beams as if they had been cut out of marble, still, what exquisite "value" did the neutral tones and half dusk of the night give to the little specks of light that were seen shining here and there in the distance, now alone from out the windows of some solitary homestead, and now thick as a swarm of fireflies from amid the haze of some far-off village!

The neighboring town of Boston itself, with the moonlight drenching its endless ridges of roofs, so that they appeared to be positively wet with the beams, and the dusky forms of the tall steeples and towers melting, spectral-like, into the cold gray background of the sky, was indeed a noble sight at such an hour. The million windowpanes were like so many squares of burnished gold with the multitude of the lights in the houses, and these were reflected in the tide that washed the peninsular pedestal of the city, so that the water seemed a-blaze with the long bright streaks of fire mirrored in it; and there they kept flashing with every ripple of the waves, till they appeared, now like so many fiery snakes diving deep into the ocean, and now like a flight of rockets shooting downward in long meteor-like trails.

There was hardly a sound to be heard. The

rippling of the waves upon the sands was as gentle as a summer breeze rustling through a forest.

The clatter of the work-day world had ceased; the hum of the town was hushed; the country silent as a tomb. The only noises that came fitfully upon the ear were the occasional barking of some startled farm-dog far away in the country, or the muffled throb and splash of some poor fisherman's oars at work in the offing, or else the bells of the many church clocks of the town tolling the hour, one after another, in a hundred different tones.

"Now, my little man," said Uncle Benjamin, after he had sat for a while silently contemplating the grandeur of the exquisite scene before him, "here at least we shall be secure from interruption; and here, lapped in the very sublimity of creation, let us try and find out which is the right road to worldly happiness."

The little fellow curled his arm about the old man's neck, and looked into his face, as much as to say he was ready and anxious for the lesson.

66

Well, then, Ben, of course you have never asked yourself how many different kinds of pleasure there are of which human nature is susceptible," began the tutor.

"No, that I haven't, I'm sure," was the frank reply; "but, bless me, uncle, I should say, from the specimens we have seen, that there are as many different pleasures as there are men in the world, for each person we visited seemed to find enjoyment in almost the very opposite pursuit to that of his neighbor."

"Ay, my son; but those you saw," said Uncle Benjamin, "were each a type of a large class in life. I showed you, purposely, but one member of each different order of characters among mankind. But had we, instead of picking our way