This extreme old age to which the agriculturalists of New-Hampshire attain, is perceptible to the most casual observer. Over the whole country we have described, evidences of the truth of this force themselves upon his attention, wherever he goes. The old man of seventy-five years still mows his swath in the summer, and bends his sickle in the autumn, with the elastic vigor of the prime of manhood. The barn rings with the heavy strokes of the flail, swung in alternate succession by the veteran and his grandson. The cozy couple, who could tell you stories of their own experience in revolutionary days, ride each Sabbath morning side by side upon the pillioned saddle to the house of GOD. The simple head-stones in the church-yard also, though they may often record the premature decay of some bright blossom of the social circle, more frequently point out the resting-places of those who were gathered to their graves like the shock of corn that cometh in in its season. In the town of Moultonborough, for example, where the population scarcely reaches to thirteen hundred souls, no less than forty-four persons have died since 1833, _whose average ages were ninety-eight years_. Of these forty-four, twenty-six had exceeded a century, and the youngest of the band was cut off at the premature age of eighty-seven. 'Think of that, Master Brook!' But the oldest of the group, he who was for many years the banner-veteran of our worthies, and whose memory, we opine, will still be foremost for many years to come; he, our hearty Scotchman, whose monument rises by the church-yard gate, he, unshrinking, undismayed, stood erect under the accumulated weight of _six score and seven full-told years_!
Brave old DONALD MCNAUGHTON! thrice honored be thy memory! Year after year didst thou live on in the very greenness of decrepitude; and though old Time filched one by one the glories of thy manhood, it mattered little, so long as listeners would come to thy long stories of the feats of daring at Louisburg and the Plains of Abraham! Thou type of graceful covetousness, thou realization of penurious modesty, it irks me to think that thou, at the last, malgré thy unwearied care and long delay, shouldst have been forced to pass the Lethean stream in leaky Stygian wherry! But Death took thee unawares; and he whom thou hadst so long defied, impatient of the delay, and distrusting perchance his skill to meet thee in open day, stole upon thee in thy midnight slumbers, and carried thee, a poor forked shape, unresisting because unconscious, to the pale kingdom.