Arkansas State Gazette

BEAUTIFUL SCENERY

The scene amid which we are born and brought up if we remain long enough therein to have passed that early period of existence on which memory seems to have no hold sinks as it were into the spirit of man twines itself intimately with every thought and becomes a part of his being. He can never cast it off any more than he can cast off the body in which his spirit rests. Almost every chain of after thought is linked at some point to the magical circle which bounds his youth's ideas and even when it is latent, and in no degree known, it is still present affecting every feeling and every fancy, and giving a bent of its own to all our words and our deeds. I have heard a story of a girl who was a captive to some eastern Prince, and wore upon her ankles a light golden ring. She learned to love her master devotedly, and was as happy as she could be in his love. Adored, adored, and cherished, she sat beside him one day in all the pomp of eastern state, when suddenly her eye fell upon the golden ring around her ankle, which custom had rendered so light that she had forgotten it altogether. The tears instantly arose in her eyes as she looked upon it and her lover divining at once the cause, asked, with a look of reproach. "would you be free?" She cast herself upon his bosom, and answered "never!" Thus often the links that bind us to early scenes and places- in which we have passed happy or unhappy hours. are unobserved and forgotten. till some casual circumstance turns our eyes thitherward but if any one should ask us whether we would sever that chain, there is scarcely one fine mind that would not also answer "never!" The passing of our days may be checkered with grief and care. Unkindness and frowns may wither the smiles of boyhood, and tears bedew the path of youth. -Yet nevertheless, when we stand and look back in later life, letting memory hover over the past, prepared to light, where she will, there is no period in all the space laid out before her over which her wings flutter so joyfully, or on which she would so much wish to pause, as the times of our youth The evils of other days are forgotten. The scenes in which these days past are remembered, detached from the sorrows that checkered them and the bright misty light of life's first sunrise still gilds the whole with a glory not its own. It is not alone, however, after long years have passed away, and crushed out the gall from sorrows endured, that fine and enchanting feelings are awakened by the scenes in which our early days have gone by and that the thrill of associations is felt in all its joyfulness, acting as an antidote to poisonous sorrows which often mingle with our cup.

[James.