anything around which memory could cling.  Well! well! it is so everywhere.  All over the world, change, improvement, progress are the words.  The venerable minister, for his locks were grey, and time had ploughed deep furrows down his cheeks, and draws palpable lines across his brow, was, as my memory paints him, the personification of earnestness, sincerity and truth.  The text and the drift of the sermon I have forgotten, save the little fragment that fixed itself in my memory by the singularity of the figure by which he illustrated his meaning.  He was speaking of the operation of the Holy Spirit upon the human heart, and how gently it won men from their sinful ways.  He said, ’It was not boisterous, like the rush of the tempest; it was not fierce, like the lightning; it was not loud, like the thunder; but it was a still sma’ voice, like a wee cricket in the wa’s.’  I regard the cricket that chirruped in the wall as an institution.  One of the past to be sure, swept away by the current of progress, whose course is onward always; over everything, obliterating everything, hurling the things of today into history, or burying them in eternal oblivion.  In this country there is nothing fixed, nothing stationary, and never has been since the first white man swung his axe against the outside forest tree; since the first green field was opened up to the sunlight from the deep shadows of the old forests that had stood there, grand, solemn, and boundless since this world was first thrown from the hand of God.  There will be nothing fixed for centuries to come.  The tide of progress will sweep onward in the future as it has done in the past.  Onward is the great watchword of America, and American institutions; onward and onward, over the ancient forests; onward, over the log-houses that stood in the van of civilization; over the great fire-places; over the cricket in the wall; over the old house dog that slept in the corner; over the loved faces that clustered around the blazing hearth in the days of our childhood; over everything primitive, everything, my friends, that you and I loved, when we were little children, and that comes drifting along down on the current of memory—­bright visions of the returnless past.  Ah, well! it is best that it should be so.  It is best that the world should move on; that there should be no pause, no halting in the onward march.  What are we that the earth should stand still at our bidding, or pause to contemplate our tears?  Dust to dust is the great law, but so long as a phoenix rises from the ashes of decay, what right have we to murmur?  Time may desolate and destroy, but man can build up and beautify.  True, his works perish as he perishes, but new works and new men are rising forever to fill, and more than fill, the vacancies and desolations of the past.  Go ahead then, world!  Sweep along, Progress!  Mow away, Time!  Tear down temple and stronghold; sweep away the marble palace and log-house! sweep away infancy and youth, manhood and old age; wipe out old