GROWING OLD.

Ir is the solemn thought connected with middle life, says the late F. W. Robertson, that life's last business is begun in earnest; and it is then, midway between the cradle and the grave, that a man begins to marvel that he let the days of youth go by so half-enjoyed. It is the pensive autumn feeling; it is the sensation of half sadness that we experience when the longest day of the year is past, and every day that follows is shorter, and the light fainter, and the feebler shadows tell that nature is hastening with gigantic footsteps to her winter grave. So does man look upon his youth. When the first gray hairs become visible, when the unwelcome truth fastens itself upon the mind, that a man is no longer going up hill, but down, and that the sun is always westering, he looks back on things behind. When we were children, we thought as children. But now there lies before us manhood, with its earnest work, and then old age, and then the grave, and then home. There is a second youth for man, better and holier than his first, if he will look on and not back.

OLD age has no terrors for Victor Hugo, who is said to have acknowledged that passing from thirty-nine to forty was the most trying time in his life. "But," said a friend, "I should think it a great deal better to be forty than fifty." "Not at all," replied Hugo; "forty years is the old age of youth, while fifty years is the youth of old age."

AN aged Christian was once asked, by some thoughtless people, why he deprived himself of so many worldly pleasures. "It is all very well," said they, "to serve God, but you ought to serve yourself too." "That is the very thing," replied he, "that I am trying after; for I have long since found out that I get ten times more in obeying God than in obeying my own evil heart.”

COMFORT IN OLD AGE.-A cheerful, tottering, poor old man, of eighty-one, said, "Thank God, I have my wits and my limbs. I never was in prison, and I am not going to hell. I am the Lord's. So while I see everybody in this busy world looking keenly as they do, after their own, the sight helps me to believe, and I am comforted in the faith, that Jesus is looking after me, and he will take me soon.' -T. Collins.

BRINGING FORTH FRUIT IN OLD AGE.-Such was the desire of that holy man, the Rev. John Eliot, to do his Master's work, that on the day of his death, in his 80th year, he was found teaching the alphabet to an Indian child at his bedside. Why not rest from your labors now?" said a friend. "Because I have prayed to God to make me useful; and now that I can no longer preach, he leaves me strength enough to teach this poor child his alphabet." This good man was very justly called The Apostle to the Indians.

I was told of a poor peasant on the Welsh mountains who, month after month, year after year, through a long period of declining life, was used every morning, as soon as he awoke, to open his casement window towards the east, and look out to see if Jesus Christ was coming. He was no calculator, or he need not have looked so long; he was no student of prophecy, or he need not have looked at all; he was ready, or he would not have been in so much haste; he was willing, or he would rather have looked another way; he loved, or it would not have been the first thought of the morning. His master did not come, but a messenger did, to fetch the ready one home. The same preparation sufficed for both; the longing soul was satisfied with either. Often when, in the morning, the child of God awakes, weary and encumbered with the flesh, perhaps from troubled dreams, perhaps with troubled thoughts, his Father's secret comes presently across him, he looks up, if not out, to feel, if not to see, the glories of that last morning when the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall arise incorruptible, no weary limbs to bear the spirit down; no feverish dreams to haunt the vision; no dark forecasting of the day's events, or returning memory of the griefs of yesterday. -Fry.

COMPUTING AGE.-An old slave, who could neither read nor write, was asked how old he was. He did not know, but said he could tell how long he had been the Lord's child. He brought out a bottle into which he had dropped a pebble every Christmas since his conversion. It contained fifty-one pebbles.

APPROACH OF OLD AGE.-Old age, says the proverb, is a courtier: he knocks again and again, at the window and at the door, and makes us everywhere conscious of his presence. Woe to the man who becomes old without becoming wise. Woe to him, if this world shuts the door without the future having opened its portals to him.

-Tholuck.

GLORIOUS OLD AGE-IF FOUND IN THE WAY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS!-How beautiful the old age of Jacob, leaning on the top of his staff; of John Quincy Adams, falling with the harness on; of Washington Irving, sitting, pen in hand, amid the scenes himself had made classical; of John Angell James, to the last proclaiming the Gospel to the masses of Birmingham; of Theodore Frelinghuysen, down to feebleness and emaciation, devoting his illustrious faculties to the kingdom of God. -Talmage.

OF DYING.

THE GREAT MYSTERY.

THE following beautiful passage is taken from Timothy Titcomb's "Preachings upon Popular Proverbs":

"The body is to die; so much is certain. What lies beyond? No one who passes the charmed boundary comes to tell. The imagination visits the realm of shadows-sent out from some window of the soul over life's restless waters-but wings its way wearily back with no olive-leaf in its beak as a token of emerging life beyond the closely bending horizon. The great sun comes and goes in heaven, yet breathes no secret of the ethereal wilderness. The crescent moon cleaves her nightly passage across the upper deep, but tosses overboard no message and displays no signals. The sentinel stars challenge each other as they walk their nightly rounds, but we catch no syllable of their countersign which gives passage to the heavenly camp. Shut in! Shut in! Between this and the other life there is a great gulf fixed, across which neither eye nor foot can travel. The gentle friend, whose eyes we closed in their last sleep long years ago, died with rapture in her wonder-stricken eyes, a smile of ineffable joy upon her lips, and hands folded over a triumphant heart; but her lips were past speech, and intimated nothing of the vision that enthralled her."