tête-à-tête about old times.. The last time you were at home Thanksgiving day-do you remember? When the boys came home from college, or some where, and the married sister, Ann, or Jane, or something else, came too, as proud of the little white-flannel bundle, with blue eyes, that made uncles, aunts, grandfather and grandmother, with its first glance, as ever queen was of her crown? And wasn't that baby a novelty in the old homestead? And was it you or me, that rummaged the garret for the old red cradle they lulled us in, when, fast to the strong moorings of a mother's love, we rocked on the hither shore of time? And who brought down the high chair,' that, in turn, had been the throne for a half dozen of us, less," in turn, as we grew large enough to wield the weapons of table warfare? And who doesn't remember where that chair was tucked away in the garret aforesaid? Over behind the little wheel, that used to hum to the sweet song mother sang, years and years ago. And there's the distaff now, in the chink

of a rafter.

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Do you remember the fine morning we went to the woods after it, and a bright, black-eyed boy, just turned of four, went too ? There he sits now, on the opposite side of the table, 'in the old place,' with whiskers and a beard, and a voice that

would mock a nor'wester. That song! How we tried to get mother to sing the old song we loved so well!

"Boys, I can't sing," says the old lady; "my singing days are over." But she was over-persuaded, as she always was-for to which of us did she ever refuse a boon ?—and how still it was when she began! Her voice was like a fast-failing fountain. She faltered as the old memories came thronging back upon her, and some how her glasses were a little dim, and she took them off to wipe them, and some how all our eyes were a little dim. God bless the old-fashWho of us didn't say it

ioned mothers for ever!

then? Who of us does not breathe it now?

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Well, then came the dinner-the Thanksgiving Dinner. How the pantry and the poultry had suffered to furnish forth' that marriage table—the marriage of the present and the past. It was the old table with the fall leaves, that had succeeded the little predecessor, when there were only father, mother, and one baby. The old strife "to set the chairs " up, is renewed. We are all seated-every chair filled. Filled? Every chair? Ah! but one, or two, o three. God grant it be but one!

not one! That one vacant place!

God grant it be

All see it, all

remember.

There is a pause; a thought and a sigh

How old

for the absent, and the battle begins. reminiscences are revived! and we all get, years nearer the purer realm of childhood and Heaven.

The afternoon wears away. Apples from the trees that were planted when each of us was born, are brought from the cellar, that aforetime was the very ‘blue closet' of unimaginable terrors to the timid of us. And among them, is an apple from FRED's tree, and Fred is- -No body can say it, so every body is silent.

One look at the rooms; the "north room," and the

"south room,' and the "east room." Here are So-and-so's initials on the window - casing. They look dim, but maybe the dimness is nearer the eyes, after all.

The sleigh-bells (there used to be snow in old-fashioned Thanksgivings,) chime impatient at the door. Such bundling, and muffling, and good-bying—the old lady urging us, every one in turn, to keep warm, and tying our comforters'—that's the word-over again, and all that. Away we go, one after another, and the old homestead is quiet again. The branches of the old oak rustle audibly over the roof, in the No

vember wind, and a family is again scattered over the world.

Maybe now, some 'mighty man,' like those of old, who has put away childish things,' and has forgotten he was ever born, may deem this puerile. Well, well, I have no more to say than this: we can all lo much worse than to be children again, for

'Of such as they are, is the Kingdom of Heaven.'

The Old Garret.

SARCASTIC people are wont to say that poets dwell in garrets, and simple people believe it. And others, neither sarcastic nor simple, send them up aloft, among the rubbish, just because they do not know what to do with them down stairs and among folks,' and so they class them under the head of rubbish, and consign them to that grand receptacle of dilapidated 'has-beens,' and despised 'used-to-be's' - the old garret.

The garret is to the other apartments of the home

stead what the adverb is to the pedagogue in parsing every thing they do not know how to dispose of, is consigned to the list of adverbs.

precise reason that I love garrets;

And it is for this

because they do contain the relics of the old and the past-souvenirs of other and happier and simpler times.

They have come to build houses now-a-days without garrets. Impious innovation!

You man of bronze and bearded like the pard,' who would make people believe, if you could, that you never were 'a toddlin wee thing;' that you never wore a rifle-dress,' or jingled a rattle-box with infi

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nite delight; that you never had a mother, and that she never became an old woman, and wore caps and spectacles, and maybe took snuff; go home once more, after all these years of absence, all booted and whiskered, and six feet high as you are, and let us go up the stairs together, into that old-fashioned spacious garret, that extends from gable to gable, with its narrow, oval windows, with a spider-web of a sash, through which steals a dim religious light' upon a museum of things unnamable, that once figured below stairs, but were long since crowded out by the Vandal hand of these modern times.

The loose boards of the floor rattle somewhat as