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GOING HALVES.
Drawn by S. Evtinge, Jr]          [See Going Halves, page 238.

IV.

he long-expected month of June came at last, and the weather was most propitious, for the month of May had been a very dry month, and the dry weather continued, which was of great consequence to Hugh, as his timber had been cut late and was green, while the success of his crop depended upon a good “burn” to consume the roots and leaves, and have a good bed of ashes to plant on.

It was a time of great interest with the children,—the burn,—and indeed with all of them, as their bread depended upon it. By daybreak they were astir; indeed, Billy had been up and out of doors two or three times in the night to see if it was daylight. They hastily despatched their breakfast, and then moved everything in the camp over the brook, lest, it being a dry time, the fire should run into the woods. Most terrible conflagrations have been, and are still in the eastern parts of Maine, caused in this way. When all was prepared, Hugh and Elizabeth and William, each with a firebrand, approached the edge of the clearing that was driest,—being that which was cut in the winter,—and waving the brands over their heads till they blazed, flung them among the dry leaves. In an instant forked tongues of flames sprang up, and the fire, fanned by a light breeze that came up with the sun, roared and ran with the speed of a race-horse before the wind. The children clapped their hands and danced about for joy. The parents looked gravely on, for there was danger of its running. But happily the greater part of the fuel was in a few hours reduced to ashes without damage, and Hugh, walking over it the next morning, after it had cooled, joyfully pronounced it a good burn.

But the children were not so well satisfied with the result as their parents. It had been a great and glorious jubilee amid the monotony of their lonely life, and they could not feel at all satisfied that it should last no longer. The forest in its original state had been thickly peopled with wild animals of various kinds, of which the greater portion yet remained. When the fire was well kindled, Hugh told the children to go to the farther end of the clearing and they would see some fun; and to keep them out of the track of the fire, their mother went with them. No sooner had the flames and smoke begun to drive through the timber, than its inhabitants took the alarm, and such a scampering as there was! It was a curious sight to behold. There were raccoons, woodchucks, rabbits, skunks, porcupines, partridges, foxes, and field-mice in armies “on the clean jump,” all running for dear life to gain the shelter of the forest, while a great gray wolf, which had been taking a nap beneath the fallen trees, brought up the rear.

Hugh, who, in expectation of some such guest, had brought his gun with him, fired, and the ball cut through his backbone; still the hard-lived savage, bracing himself upon his forefeet, while his hind parts were useless, snarled, and showed his teeth till Hugh despatched him with blows from the breech of the gun. “Take that, and that, and that, my gentleman,” said Hugh. “You are the fellow that chased the horse the other night.”

The flight of the smaller animals, and the death of the wolf, had put the children almost beside themselves with mingled terror and wonder, and when the spectacle passed away so rapidly, it produced a corresponding depression. They walked round the wolf,—first at a respectful distance, for they were afraid he might come to life; and Billy moving his tail with a stick, it made Abigail run and scream as though he was after her. But gradually they grew bolder, till Billy finally kicked him, and Abigail threw dust in his face.

“Why, mother,” said Billy, sitting down disconsolate at the door of the camp, “I thought it would have lasted two or three days.”

“And I too,” said Abigail; “I thought it would be so handsome to see it burn in the dark nights.”

It was now somewhat difficult to decide what to do with the land. The proper way would have been for Hugh to go upon the land in the latter part of May, and begin to cut down trees, and so to continue through the month of June. Then the trees and the stumps would have “bled” (or given out their juices) freely, and have become, in the long, hot summer, exceeding dry; and also, as the trees would then have been in full leaf, the leaves would have remained on, and, being dry, would have made the fire burn very much better. The stumps of the trees, too, would have bled so freely that they would not have sprouted so much the next year. Then, by setting his fire in the autumn, Hugh could have burnt cleaner, and the land would have been in excellent order for sowing with winter rye, or (early in the spring) with grain or with corn; whereas—though by the dryness of the spring he had got a good burn—it was now the 10th of June, and late to plant corn, as, the country being covered with forest, the frosts came early in those days.

But the fact was, they were almost starving for bread, and, having now a piece of land of his own, Hugh had become tired of going great distances to work for food, and of bringing it home on his back; so he determined, although it was late, to force a crop, and, with his usual good judgment, he succeeded. He made the holes with a stake, the children dropped into them the corn and pumpkin-seeds, and he covered them with his foot. Part of the ground he sowed with peas, and on some spots, where it was very mellow, and without many roots, he planted potatoes, because he said that it was not good to have all your eggs in one basket, and that, if one crop failed, the other might do something. The ground was naturally warm, and, being covered with a thick coat of hot ashes, forced the crop along, and they were soon assured of a bountiful harvest. Hugh, the moment his seed was in, went into the woods to fell trees for the next year’s burn, that he might have it ready at the proper time. The cow—now having in addition to the grass an abundance of “browse” from the trees which Hugh was cutting, and which were now in full leaf—began to increase her gift of milk, so that the children had abundance, and the parents often came in for a share.

The little money Hugh had from time to time received for his labor was husbanded to the utmost extent for use in case of sickness or accident, and also to enable them to obtain what seemed to be the foundation of all progress with them, a yoke of oxen. The wife and Billy would go to the brook, or through the woods to the Presumpscot River, and catch fish. They got sometimes meat from the Indians in exchange for milk; raccoons and partridges were also plentiful in the woods; and Hugh, who always took his gun with him into the woods, would often shoot a partridge or porcupine, or come across a ’coon in a hollow tree.

Every effort was made by Billy and his mother either to procure food or to do without it, in order not to oblige the father to leave his labor in the woods, as every tree cut was so much towards a harvest the next year. Elizabeth even learned to use an axe, and, as she was possessed of the strength of a man, assisted her husband to no small extent in chopping. Billy also had a light axe, and now began to chop a little. As Hugh had no grindstone, but had to go nearly a mile, to Captain Phinney’s, to grind his axe, Elizabeth would take William and go there and grind one axe while he was chopping with the other.

As it was now almost impossible to work in the woods by reason of the black-flies, midges, and mosquitoes, (Hugh coming home some nights as bloody as a butcher from their stings,) he went to Portland to work. It was determined between them before he set out, that, if they got out of provisions, William or Abigail, who could now ride a horse, was to let him know, in order that none of the money he earned might be expended without absolute necessity; otherwise he was to remain at his labor.

Though so poor themselves, they often found opportunity to exercise hospitality. The brooks and streams in the neighborhood were the resort of beavers and muskrats; hedgehogs, of which the Indians also make great use, were abundant in the hard-wood growth, as they feed on the bark of trees; and salmon and other fish were numerous. This attracted the Indians, who had a sort of summer-residence at Gambo, a few miles off, where they had a cornfield, and they were often camping by the brook below the house. Elizabeth often treated them to a drink of milk, though in so doing she sometimes pinched herself, or gave them food or a piece of tobacco, or spun for the squaws a little thread, which they valued very highly, it being much better than deer-sinew for stringing their beads and working their moccasins; and when overtaken by storms, they often spread their blankets at her fire. The Indians, with whom it is always a fast or a feast, were not by any means backward, when they had been successful in hunting or fishing, about returning these favors. She also obtained from them a great deal of valuable information about the preservation of food, and shifts whereby to get along in emergencies. As for William and Abigail, they went back and forth to the Indian wigwams, and played in the brook with their children, and slid down hill with them, in the winter, on pieces of birch-bark, and ate with them, if they happened to be eating,—for the savages are not regular about their meals, but eat when they are hungry or when they can get food,—and would no more hesitate to ask food from one old Indian squaw, who was often at the camp after thread, than from their mother, and thus were on the best of terms with all the Indians round.

One morning, in the latter part of July, Ayres’s wife came into the camp in great agitation. Though a very kind, prudent, and industrious woman, she was timid, and had a nervous apprehension of Indians. “Have you heard the news?” said she, dropping into her seat and clasping her hands over her bosom, and then asking for a drink of water.

Elizabeth gave her the water, and then inquired, “What news?”

“Why, about the Indians!”

Going to the door, Elizabeth told the children they might go down and play with the Indians; and when they were out of hearing she said to her visitor: “Now tell your news. I was afraid the children would hear and tell it all over again to the Indians.”

“Well, I expect we are all going to be murdered;—I do. I feel as if I was murdered now.”

“Who is going to murder us?”

“Why the Indians,—these skearful, scalping savages that are down here to the brook now; and you’ve sent your children there, right into the very jaws of destruction. I don’t believe they will ever come back. They say some king or other has died in Europe, and that has made war between the Austrians and Prussians (I believe it’s Prussians,—if it ain’t, it’s no matter), and the Prussians have got the French to help them; and the English, they say, will take up agin the French, because the English king is a relation to the Germans, and has land there; and then of course the Colonies will be brought in, as they always are, and then the French will stir up all the Indians in Canada, and the whole tribe of Eastern Indians; and there will be drafting men, and calling out the militia, and expeditions to Canada, and men will have to leave their families and go to cruel war, and your husband will have to shoulder his gun, and leave you and these children and the babe that’s yet to be born, and march, and we shall have a bloody mess of it. We are going to move into Portland right off to-day; and so I’ve just run in a minute to bid you good by, and must go right home and pack up. But you will go,—of course you will; you won’t stay here to be murdered by the raging savages. When we get there my husband will tell Hugh, and he will come back and take you off to-morrow. My man didn’t want to go, but I told him I would take the children and start right off afoot before I would stay to be murdered by the raging savages; and if he didn’t want to see me dead and in my coffin, he would go this very day.”

While Mrs. Ayres was thus going on, wringing her hands at every word, Elizabeth sat before her with her knitting-work, as unconcerned as though there had not been an Indian in the universe, patiently waiting for her to get out of breath, which she did at length, winding up with a sort of groan, and the inquiry, “Ain’t you almost scared to death?”

“Not a bit of it,” replied Elizabeth, who now coolly proceeded to dissect her neighbor’s intelligence. “Where did you get this news?”

“My man got it in Portland.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know; but it is just as I tell you.”

“Does he believe it himself?”

“Nobody can tell what he believes; he ain’t afraid of anything.”

“Did he read it, or see it posted in any handbill, or did he only hear it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have the General Court or selectmen done anything about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t believe a word of it; for, in the first place, if there was anything in it, Hugh, who is in Portland, would have known it and been here before this time. If there was prospect of war with France, the Governor would know it, and put people on their guard against the Indians the very first thing. I suppose there is some trouble brewing in Europe, that in time may bring on a war, and some people who have nothing else to do have made a great story out of it.”

“Then you ain’t a going?”

“Not I! We’ve worked too hard to get here to run away on a rumor.”

“Well, I’m sorry for you, and your husband, and your innocent children. You are a hard-hearted woman, to feel and talk so lightly at such a time, when the sword is hanging over us, and the raging savages are to be let loose upon us.”

“I suppose,” said Elizabeth, a little provoked by this accusation, “it is because I am not nervous.”

“Well, you will have the worst of it; your children will never come back; they will be killed or carried to Canada, and sold to the Frenchmans.”

“But,” said Elizabeth, who sat where she could look out of the door, “they are coming now, and one of the ‘raging savages’ with them.”

“Then I’ll go! for I’ve never been brought up to keep company with Indians”; and thus saying, Mrs. Ayres flung out of the door in a huff, without bidding her neighbor good by,—the very purpose for which she came.

The “raging savage” was Molly Sakbason, one of some Passamaquoddies who were camping in the neighborhood. She had a basket in her hand, and a pappoose on her shoulders; William had hold of one side of the basket, while Abigail was striving to reach the baby’s face with a bulrush. Elizabeth, as she looked upon the party, said aloud, “Well, Ayres’s wife is kind-hearted, and I am sorry to lose the only woman I could speak to without going a mile. It was so nice to put my shawl over my head and run in there. But I pity the man who has such a wife in an Indian country.”

The squaw had brought a fish in the basket, and wanted, in exchange for it, some thread, which Elizabeth got her wheel and spun,—coarse and strong, as the Indians preferred to have it. In the mean time the squaw, taking her child from her back, set it upon its board against the logs, while she watched with great interest the spinning; and the children, getting some milk in a pewter porringer, fed the child with a spoon. Elizabeth then dismissed her visitor with the present of a needle, which greatly delighted her, the Indians preferring our needles to their own, which were made of a small bone found in the deer’s foot.

The McLellans now had green peas in abundance, which were a great addition to their store, and potatoes; but the latter they resolutely abstained from eating, as they could not pull up a hill without destroying many half-grown ones, and thus diminishing their winter’s stock. About a mile to the south was a sandy plain, where the fires had destroyed the growth, and a great abundance of blueberries grew. To this spot the wild pigeons resorted in great numbers. Knowing the importance of securing such a seasonable supply, Elizabeth determined to learn to use the gun; so, having loaded it, she mounted the horse with William, and proceeded to the place. The birds being so numerous that she could scarcely miss, they returned loaded with game, and continued this profitable sport as long as the pigeons remained; after which, Elizabeth, by this time an expert shot, killed many of the raccoons which were improving the moonlight nights in eating the corn.

The middle of October was now come, and Hugh came home to his family. It was a most joyful meeting in all respects. Not only were they full of satisfaction to be once more together, but Hugh brought home the money he had earned, not having had to expend a dollar for the support of his family, and finding them better off for provision than they had ever been before, with a noble crop all ready for harvesting. But he had neither barn, cellar, nor garret in which to store his crop, nor cart to haul it on. He at once made a sled for the horse, on which, by light loads, he dragged home his harvest. He then made a crib of logs for his corn, and, digging a pit in the ground below the reach of frost, he put his potatoes there, covering them with timber, over which he put earth, and leaving an entrance in one end, which he carefully covered with brush and waste, that it might be both well protected and easy of access in winter.

In the course of the summer, Elizabeth, going through the woods, and finding that there was to be great abundance of beech-nuts and acorns, bought a pig, which lived very well upon grass and the roots he found in the woods, till the frosts, in the fall, caused the beech-nuts and the acorns to drop, when he became fat, and fit for the knife, without any other feeding.

Elizabeth received with heartfelt satisfaction the well-earned praises of her husband for her excellent management during his absence, and they had many a pleasant talk around the fire in respect to the expedients she had resorted to in order to procure food for the family without drawing on his wages, while Hugh laughed heartily at her exploits in shooting.

Hugh could now look fairly forward to an unbroken winter of work at home, and he improved his time to the utmost. Having at command some ready money, he bought a grindstone, of which, it will be remembered, he stood much in need. He then cleared a road from the southeast part of his land to an old mast-path that ran to the county road at Stroudwater, and cut spars and logs, and made his sleds, and then, in the latter part of the winter, went to Saco, and engaged his brother James and the Pattersons (into whose family James married) to help him haul. They came with their cattle, built a camp in the woods, and hauled till spring, while he continued cutting; and when the warm weather put an end to logging, he found himself better off than he had ever been before in his life, and at liberty to do what he loved best of all,—give himself to farming, without hiring out to work.

There was one man who had watched the progress of Hugh and Elizabeth with great interest, and conceived for them a sincere affection, which was as warmly returned,—Captain Phinney; and he now came down to congratulate them on their good fortune, and spent a sociable evening with them. Hugh, according to the usage of that day, wished to offer him some spirit, but the only metal article they possessed was one pewter porringer, while they had not a cup or a tumbler, being all obliged to drink from the same dish. At supper they had neither wheat-bread nor butter nor tea nor coffee to offer their friend, but only pea-soup with pork boiled in it, and potatoes, and milk to drink, and a corn-cake baked on a board before the fire. But, for all that, Captain Phinney told his wife when he came home, that, as sure as Hugh McLellan lived, he would be a rich man, and ought to be, and that his wife was equal to him.

Hugh next burnt over the ground he had cleared in June, and planted a much larger field of corn than before. The piece he planted the last year was of no use for tillage, as it was too full of stumps and roots to be ploughed, and, besides, neither oxen nor plough could be had. Only the burnt land, where the sod was destroyed, and which was full of ashes, was available.

“Well,” said Elizabeth, who always looked at the advantages rather than the disadvantages of their situation, “if we were in Ireland now, poor as we are, without cattle to plough the ground, or manure to put upon it, and somebody would give us the use of a piece of land, it would not be worth taking, while here, (blessed be God!) with nothing but an axe, a sharp stake, and a firebrand, a poor man can raise bread for his family.”

As Hugh could cut abundance of wild hay in the woods, he bought half a dozen sheep, and, making a pasture of the land planted before, turned them into it, together with the cow; and the grass which came up there, with the sprouts from the stumps, gave them a good living. In order to avoid the great labor of going so far to mill, he dug out a large rock-maple log for a mortar, and made a pestle, and tied a rope to the top of it and fastened it to the limb of a tree, the spring of which helped to lift the pestle, which was the hardest part of the work. Part of the flour was fine enough for bread, and the rest they boiled and ate with peas and beans. They had now a good prospect for a crop, but in the mean time their scanty supply of corn was so nearly gone, that they had bread but twice a week, and lived principally on pea-broth and game, with milk. But the Indians made game scarce, and the time spent in hunting interfered seriously with the labor absolutely necessary for the crops. Often, while getting hay, they could have no breakfast till Hugh shot a partridge, or William caught a fish in the brook. It is true they had a little money, and might have bought corn, but they were hoarding this to purchase a yoke of cattle and farming tools. Therefore they endured with Spartan fortitude the hardship of short living and scanty clothing, and in the autumn they succeeded in their purpose. Hugh, leaving his wife and William to get in the harvest with the horse, went to Saco, where he worked for a month, and returned, bringing with him a yoke of oxen, large for that day, and broken to work in the woods. Great was the rejoicing when the cattle came, and Mrs. McLellan said that nothing they afterwards attained ever caused such general delight. Ever after that memorable day, and when they could count their cattle by scores, they always had in the herd a Star and Golding; and it was said that Uncle Billy, no matter what his oxen’s names were, always called them, when he drove, Star and Golding. Hugh said, getting that yoke of cattle seemed to be the turn of his fortune; that he then had something to work with, and everything seemed to go easier afterward, though the purchase of them brought him down again to the last dollar.

As he had now cattle, he determined to erect a better dwelling than the old rotten camp, where the snakes lived in the logs, and ran over the floor. In anticipation he had peeled some hemlock-bark for the roof in June. Had it been winter, he might at once have hauled logs to the mill and got boards and plank in abundance, but there was no road passable for wheels; but he wanted to get out of the old camp before another winter, and thus was compelled to make the best of his circumstances. And, after all, the house was a great improvement upon the old camp. The walls of the camp were built of round logs, these were of hewn timber; the chinks between the logs in the camp were large enough to run your arm through, and were stuffed with moss and clay; but the timber of the house was hewed to a “proud” edge, and dovetailed together at the ends, and it was as tight as a churn; the camp had no floor, but this had a floor of hewn timber; the walls of the camp were but three logs high, and had settled by decay, so that you could only stand erect in the middle, (and a good part of the middle was taken up by the fire,) while this was ten feet high, with a chamber, the floor of which was also laid with hewn timber. The camp had but one room, no window, a hole in the roof for a chimney, no oven, so that the bread was baked in the ashes, covered with an iron pot, or on a stone at the fire, while the pot hung by a chain from a pole laid on two crotches; the house had three rooms below, with partitions of bark and blankets hung up for doors, a fireplace and oven of stone laid in clay mortar, and a chimney made of sticks of split wood, laid cob-fashion and plastered inside and out with clay to keep them from catching fire, with a crane to hang the pot on. The roof was covered with hemlock-bark, lapped and nailed as shingles are, and perfectly tight; and there were windows with stone shutters, and two with squares of oiled paper instead of glass. As there was a general apprehension of trouble with the Indians, the windows were made small, and the door was of oak timber with iron hinges, and with a wooden latch on the inside, having a string to lift the latch from the outside; and when the string was pulled in and the bars put up, it would have been no easy matter to force an entrance. The house being built of such thick stuff, and sheltered by the woods on the north and west, with brush piled up around it, into which the snow drifted in the winter, their great fires rendered it perfectly comfortable in the coldest weather.

Into the great kitchen, which extended the whole length of the house, and, after the confinement of the camp, seemed a king’s palace, Elizabeth moved with great glee. She instantly set off for Portland, and brought home her loom, which, having no room to set it up in the camp, she had left at Jeanie Miller’s; indeed, the camp was so low that she could only spin on the large wheel when the fire was cold, and after the children had gone to bed. In the summer-time she had been wont to take the wheel outdoors under the shade of the trees, and, putting the baby in a blanket, fasten it to the branch of a beech, where it swung in the wind, while she would spin and sing to it, or, taking hold of the branch, would gently sway it up and down, and rock it to sleep; sometimes she would fasten a string to it, by pulling which the children could rock it, or Abigail would sit on the grass and knit and rock the baby. But she had now ample room in the corner of the large kitchen for her loom, wheels, and all her other things. In the opposite end of the kitchen was a log with notches cut in it for steps, up which the children clambered to bed. In the camp they had slept on the ground; but Hugh now hewed out some birch joists, and planed them, and made bedsteads for both parents and children; Elizabeth wove ticks and stuffed them with beech-leaves, which made excellent beds.

These different matters occupied them till snow came; Hugh then went into the woods, and, hiring another yoke of cattle to go with his, and putting the horse with them, he spent the winter in hauling spars and logs.

For the next two years he continued to clear land, logging in the winter, and gradually bettering his condition. He had now four oxen, hens, hogs, sheep, two cows, and a heifer that he was raising. He had corn and wheat, potatoes, turnips, and cabbages, for he could now plough his land. He also bought pewter plates, and iron spoons, and knives and forks, and they had coffee on Sabbath mornings. They also had flax and wool, and they were better clothed, for they raised all they lived on; and his winter’s logging brought him ready money.

William was now eleven years old, very large of his age, and began to manifest a most wonderful aptitude for hunting and shooting,—every spare moment being spent in this manner. Children reared in hardship develop early, and his growth in this direction was greatly hastened by his constant intercourse with the Indian children. The Indians take great pains to instruct their children in the arts of the chase, upon which their existence depends, and put weapons adapted to their age into their hands the moment they are capable of using them. In all these instructions William shared. The older Indians, pleased with his preference for their company and pursuits, made him bows and arrows, some blunt at the point, and others headed with flint, and taught him how to use them, predicting that he would be a great warrior. He practised incessantly with the Indian children till he could kill with his arrows squirrels, rabbits, skunks, and even porcupines. He persuaded his father to put a handle into the old tomahawk which he had found so long since in the camp; and sticking it into his belt, with his bow and a wooden knife and an eagle’s feather, he marched through the woods, imagining himself Bloody Hand, or Leaping Panther, or some other great brave of whom he had heard. His uncle James, coming over from Saco to pay them a visit, asked William, as the family were seated after supper before the door, to let them see how well he could shoot. They looked on in astonishment to see him knock a bumble-bee off a thistle with a blunt arrow at forty yards, and a squirrel from the top of a beech with a sharp-pointed one. His uncle declared that such a talent for shooting ought to be encouraged, especially in such times as those, when it might come into play; and said that he had a light gun he would give him when he was a few months older. Nothing could have given William greater pleasure than this, and he looked eagerly forward to the time when he should receive it.

Hitherto, Hugh had limited his lumbering operations to getting out spars for merchantmen, and logs to be manufactured into boards and planks, great quantities of which were shipped from Portland to Europe and the West Indies. But as he had now cattle of his own and provisions for his family, he determined to cut and haul the masts for the king’s ships, great numbers of which he had upon his land, of the largest size and the best quality.

A few words of explanation may here be necessary. Though Portland was now rapidly rising from its ashes, and ships were built, and there was a large export trade, and it had been settled a hundred years before, yet so often had it been laid in ashes, and its inhabitants driven off or destroyed by the savages, that all this period had been occupied in carrying settlements nine miles from the sea-coast. But it must not therefore be concluded that these forests had not been penetrated by white men, and their riches known and prized. There was but little danger in lumbering compared with settling,—merely going into the woods for a short time to cut and haul timber, with a body of hardy men, unencumbered by women or children, all in a body, armed to the teeth, and as ready to fight as to eat. There was also less danger in lumbering, because it was pursued only in the winter, when the Indians left the coast to hunt farther back in the country. Hence there were many early logging-roads cut through the woods in various directions, which, suitable for lumbering in the winter when the snow made all level, were impassable in summer, except on foot or horseback. One of these roads, now much overgrown, it having been disused since the Indian troubles in 1722, ran near Hugh’s lot. This road he cut out, and extended it to a swale where some masts of great size grew, one of which, as Grannie declared, was so big that a yoke of cattle were turned around upon the stump without stepping off. This tree stood near where a carpet-factory has since been built.

Although the trees marked with the broad arrow could not be appropriated by the owner of the soil to his own use, the English government paid him a bounty, and, if he saw fit to cut and haul them, liberal pay for his labor. The government found its account in this, for the masts were more valuable than those obtained from Sweden or Norway, and the bounty was an encouragement to the settlers to preserve them, even if they did no more. For though the authorities could prevent the owner of the soil from making use of them, and punish him if he did, detection was difficult, and it could not prevent him from clearing the land around them, when the wind would tear them up by the roots, or from setting a fire that would very likely kill them in burning his other land. Indeed, they were in constant danger from the fires running through the woods, lightning, and tempest, and the commissioners were always ready to employ the settlers to cut them. Still the market never was overstocked. The trees were of immense size, many more than five feet in diameter, very difficult to handle and to haul with the small cattle then raised; and while the job also required some outlay of money, the inhabitants were poor and scattered; and thus thousands of trees marked with the broad arrow stood for half a century in the forests, against which no axe was uplifted. But the inducements for enterprise were great; money was scarce, lumber of all kinds brought money, and when the masts were at the ship’s tackles the cash was ready. Hugh felt himself equal to the task, and with him to decide was to execute. All through the first of the winter he was in the woods from dawn of day till the stars appeared in the sky, and sometimes by moonlight or firelight in the evening. But they were happy days,—the happiest of his life; he had a frame of iron, and labor was a delight; every blow struck was for himself, his children, and his homestead. Stripped to the waist, his sinewy arms bare to the elbow, and the perspiration standing in drops upon his face, the blows fell fast and heavy, till the enormous column, tottering and trembling for a moment, fell to the ground, flinging the broken branches high in the air, and with a noise like distant thunder. Nor was his work always solitary; sometimes of a pleasant afternoon Elizabeth would come down, and, sitting on a root in the sun, knit her stocking; sometimes a party of Indians on their way to Portland or Saco would sit down by his fire, eagerly accepting the pipe he offered, and, as they smoked in silence, gaze evidently with dissatisfaction upon the havoc he was making in the forest, which was rapidly diminishing the game, and with it their means of living. Then, in sullen dignity wrapping their blankets around them, they would say: “White man cut much trees. Much trees, much moose, much bear; no trees, no moose, no bear,—Indian starve.” No wonder they thus felt; for many years the whites had been confined to a little rim of settlements along the coast, and often had been entirely driven out and their dwellings burnt. At intervals they had penetrated a few miles, and cut a few masts and logs; but now, as the Indians travelled, they passed the mills of Colonel Gorham, on the Presumpscot, and the clearing of Captain Phinney, who had now turned many acres of forest into cultivated fields. Other settlers were building camps, and the sound of falling trees was heard on every side. A shade of anxiety would cross Hugh’s face while he followed with his eye their forms stalking away with noiseless tread, for he saw that his work did not please them, that their methods of life and his could by no means go on together, and that the work which put bread into his mouth took it from them.

Elijah Kellogg.

IX.

I have an apology to make: the old adage of “A new broom,” &c., rather applies to my case, I am afraid. I started out, in my first Lesson, with a long tirade against tricks performed by aid of apparatus, and yet I find, on looking over my articles, that I too have given Legerdemain the go-by. However, in future, I will try to confine myself to such sleights as are executed entirely by manual dexterity. In fact, it is only right that I should; for the first lesson in magic that I ever took was a very neat piece of Legerdemain, and, although that was a good many years ago, I remember it as well as if it were yesterday, and will now describe it for the benefit of my readers.

Two hickory-nuts were laid on the ground,—it was in the country I first became acquainted with the art,—and each covered with a straw hat. The performer—a bright English lad of about sixteen, whom I regarded as something superhuman—then pronounced the following mysterious words: “Chiddubiddube, chiddubiddubi, chiddubiddubo, hey, presto, pass!”—and, lifting the hats, discovered the nuts both under one hat. Of course I was astonished, never having seen anything half so wonderful in my life, and for some moments I was unable to speak. Being blessed, however, with “the gift of gab,” I soon recovered myself, and my first remark was in the form of a request. “Do it again.” He did it again, and kept doing it again, several times, without making it any clearer to me. Strange as it may appear to my readers of to-day, I did not attribute it to any “new physical force,” or consider the person who was exhibiting for my amusement a “medium.” On the contrary, I regarded the matter more in the light of a joke, and remarked to my comrades, in rather an obscure way, “Ain’t it funny?” They all agreed that it was funny, and then, the performer declining either an explanation or repetition of the trick, we separated.

The next day, as I was going across a field, I came on my English friend trying to catch a bird. “I’ve been the last hour,” he said, “trying to get that bird; but although he has kept just about here for that time, I have not been able to come near him.”

“If I catch him for you, will you tell me how you made those nuts” (I am afraid I said “them nuts”) “get under the hat?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “and half a dozen tricks besides.”

The result of which pledge was, that he got the bird, and I the secret of the trick, which I will now give to you, my readers.

Compared with many that I have since learned, the trick is very simple, but still is quite clever. The whole secret of it is in the manner of taking hold of the rim of the hat.

Fig. 1.

Supposing the two nuts to be placed at a distance of two or three feet from each other, we pick up one hat and place it over one of the nuts. In picking up the hat, however, we are careful to take it by the rim, letting the forefinger and little finger go outside the rim, and the second and third fingers under it, as shown in Fig. 1; the thumb remains perfectly passive, having nothing at all to do. In placing the hat over the first nut, the fingers that are under the rim grasp the nut, which is then palmed, and when the other hat comes to be placed over the second nut, the first one is laid alongside it by the same two fingers.

was a very popular trick, but, like most other things, having had its day, died out, and is now seldom exhibited. It is, however, a good one, and, when properly performed, cannot but astonish, as everything connected with it is apparently so fair.

A large champagne bottle is produced, and, after having been well rinsed with water in presence of the audience, the performer proceeds to pour from it any liquor that is desired, and in unlimited quantities. After the demands of the audience are satisfied, the bottle is broken to show that there is no preparation about it.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3.

To perform this trick, you have a bottle made of block tin, the interior of which is divided into five sections, as shown in the accompanying diagram. These partitions occupy the whole of the inside of the bottle, excepting the space marked “A,” and terminate in tubes in the neck of the bottle. Having made sure that they are perfectly tight, in fact air-tight, with the exception of the openings at the end of the tubes, a little hole is bored through the side of the bottle into each partition, and these holes are so arranged that the tips of the thumb and fingers will just cover them, when the bottle is held in the hand, as in Fig. 3. Finally, the bottle is painted dark green, and varnished so as to look as much like glass as possible. Now, if the different partitions are filled with liquor, and these little holes are kept closed, no fluid will escape when the bottle is reversed. If, however, the performer raises one finger, the liquor that is in the compartment under that finger will run out of the neck of the bottle, so that the bottle is completely under the control of the “magician,” who can at his pleasure cause any liquor to flow from it. When you wish to exhibit the trick, first fill the partitions each with a different kind of liquor, by means of a pear-shaped funnel, or one with a long, small point to it, taking care to have the holes which are on the sides of the bottle closed with a bit of wax.

All this of course you do before coming out to your audience. Your bottle being prepared, you come forward, and, holding it up, inform your audience that you will first proceed to rinse it out, so as to satisfy them that it contains nothing. Place an ordinary funnel in the neck of it, and, taking a large pitcher with very little water in it, proceed to pour some of the water into the bottle; it will run into the space A, and when that is filled, you pour it out again into the pitcher. You now ask the ladies and gentlemen what liquor they would like, and then pour from your bottle what they may desire. As your glasses are very thick, and literally hold but a thimbleful, there will seem to come more liquor from your bottle than actually does come.

In order that no one may call for a liquor with which you are not provided, you say, when first about offering to allay their thirst, “Now, gentlemen and ladies, what can I give you,—brandy, whiskey, gin, sherry, Madeira, port?” thus suggesting to them the liquors you can supply, and one of which they will probably call for. If there is a call for “Madeira,” you give “sherry,” which now-a-days passes current for it. If they ask for “rye whiskey,” you pour out “Bourbon,” which will be accepted, and so on,—acting on the plan of the bookseller’s clerk, who, on being asked for Fox’s “Book of Martyrs,” which he did not happen to have, offered “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as the nearest thing to it.

To finish the trick, you make an excuse to pass behind your table, and, in so doing, exchange your bottle for a genuine glass one. In the neck of this you have a tin tube holding about a wine-glassful of strong solution of Epsom salts, with which you fill the glass or glasses of those who are next served, and then, suddenly pretending to discover that something is wrong, you call for a hammer, with which you break the bottle, thus convincing the audience that there is no preparation about it.

A kettle is sometimes made on the plan of this bottle, so as to furnish tea, coffee, and milk, the holes for the fingers being in the handle, which communicates with the partitions and the tubes from which the liquor flows, terminating in the spout. It is not, however, half so effective as the bottle trick, and the kettle is much more expensive.

It has just occurred to me, that I have again broken my promise of keeping to sleight-of-hand tricks; but my readers must excuse me, for, being of the stage, stagy, I naturally think first of what I am most familiar with. And, after all, it is about those tricks that are publicly exhibited that most curiosity is felt; so I will conclude this article with another favorite of Professor Anderson,—how I hate that title of Professor, which every man, be he corn-doctor, barber, or learned in the sciences, now bears,—and in my next will positively—I came near writing, “for this night only”—describe nothing but “sleights.”

or the wonderful disappearance of a human being from a table completely isolated from the stage, used to create immense excitement. With a “Sphinx” table, this trick would be very easily performed, but it was exhibited long before the “Sphinx” was thought of; and an explanation of it may not be uninteresting.

The table used was about four feet high, and five or five and a half long, with a cloth on it, falling in front and at the sides to about the depth of eighteen inches. Before commencing the trick, this cloth was raised, in order that the audience might see there was no drawer, and that the frame of the table, which was only four inches deep, would not admit of a person being concealed beneath it.

A boy was now placed on it and covered with a huge “extinguisher.” This was raised in a few moments and he had disappeared. Where had he gone? Not out of the top of the extinguisher, nor through the table into the stage, as in either case he would have been seen. Where then had he gone? He went into the table. But how could he do that, when there was no drawer?

I will tell you. Under the table was a false bottom, attached to it by some strong canvas, which, whilst supporting it and connecting it with the top, permitted it to fall to within an inch of the bottom of the cloth which covered the table. In fact nothing less than a “bellows-table,” which I described in my Fourth Lesson, only made on a large scale, and square instead of round. In the top of the table is a trap large enough to admit of the person who is to disappear passing through.

When Anderson performed this trick, he managed it in this way. When his son first mounted the table, there was a cloth round it, reaching from the top of it down to the stage. As soon as the boy was covered with the extinguisher, he passed through the table (both the top and false bottom being provided with traps) into and under the stage. His father now removed the cloth and commanded him to disappear. The extinguisher was raised and he was gone. “Where are you?” his father would ask. “Here, sir,” he would answer, entering the front of the theatre, to which he had in the mean time gone.

Again he mounted the table, which, this time, had not the long cloth around it. Again he was covered, and now his father would command, “Begone from the table, and appear in the gallery.” The extinguisher was lifted off, the boy was gone (into the table); but as this was always the last trick, and the curtain now fell, the audience dispersed without stopping to inquire whether or not the boy was in the gallery, taking it for granted that, if he obeyed one part of the command, he surely would the other.

P. H. C.

Blanche Maresquelle was a little French maiden. Her father had just come with his family to settle in America, and had bought a fine residence on the banks of the Hudson, just above New York. Blanche liked her new home very much, although everything was so strange to her. But she had a taste for the beautiful, and from morning till evening she found so much to admire that she had no time to be homesick. If she had been shut up in the close streets of the city, I dare say it would have been otherwise. It was an unfailing delight to this little girl to sit beneath the shade of a large elm on her father’s grounds, where she could see far up and down the pretty river, and across to the opposite shore, and watch the steamers and sloops and boats gliding hither and thither. And her constant companion in these pleasant hours was her next-door neighbor, Nellie White.

Nellie was a nice child, bright and quick, and withal very amiable and polite, and the two little girls were very happy together. Their parents were pleased with the companionship for several reasons. One was that it would help each of them in acquiring the language of the other. Blanche would teach Nellie French, and Nellie would teach Blanche English; though you would not suppose there was much teaching going on if you heard their jabbering. Bad French and broken English seemed the order of those long summer hours. Nevertheless they did learn quite rapidly.

“Now, Blanche,” said Nellie one day, “won’t you tell me a story, all about yourself, and where you used to live. And tell it, please, in French, just to see how much of it I can understand.”

Poor Nellie! she little knew what she asked. It was such a study for her to listen, and try to catch the meaning, that before many minutes she gave up in despair.

“O Blanche, my dear Blanche,” she exclaimed, “I can’t understand! Do speak English, will you?”—little thinking that this would be quite as severe a study for her little foreign friend. However, Blanche undertook it, and with a queer mixture of the two languages she made out to tell a very pretty story. As my little readers, I fear, would fail to understand the medley, I will render it for their benefit into correct English.

“The year before we came to this country,” said Blanche, “my father, mother, and I made a visit to Switzerland. Father had a brother there who was curate of a little church in Andermatt, a village just at the foot of the St. Gothard Mountain. My uncle lived in a tiny cottage, too small to accommodate visitors, and so papa took lodgings at the hotel. I wish you could just see this hotel. The mountain behind the house rose higher than the highest church-tower I ever saw, so that some of the rooms were all the time darkened with its shadow. It was a two-story wooden house, the roof covered with great stones, as all the roofs in that neighborhood were.”

“That’s funny,” interrupted Nellie. “What for?”

“To keep it from being blown off,” replied Blanche. “The people have to protect their houses so in a great many parts of Switzerland, for such awful winds sweep down the mountains, and rush through the valleys, that, if they did not, they wouldn’t have a roof to shelter them half the time. Right by the side of the hotel a little stream poured down over the wildest bed of rocks you ever saw, making a great tumult as it tumbled along. Sometimes we found beautiful stones and crystals among the pebbles that were washed down by the torrent from the mountain. A stone bridge crossed this river just beyond the house, which we had to go over when we went to my uncle’s, and—”

“Who ever heard of a stone bridge!” exclaimed Nellie.

“You have wooden bridges here, I know,” said Blanche, “and they seem just as strange to me as stone bridges would to you. But almost everywhere in Europe, where the streams rush down from the mountains with great force, and at some seasons of the year are swollen into great rivers, they have to build very strong bridges, or else, you see, they would often be swept away. We could stand on this bridge and look up the narrow ravine to where the water seemed just like a silver thread running down the mountain-side, and then, turning round, could watch it tumbling and boiling along until it disappeared in the channel it had worn around the next hill. If we could have traced it far enough, we should have seen where it joined with another stream, and then fell down, down, in three narrow, steep cascades, and poured its waters under the famous Devil’s Bridge, of which you have heard, I suppose. This wonderful spot is only a little way from the village of Andermatt.

“The valley in which this little village is built is so shut in by hills, that the days are very short at all seasons of the year. It takes the sun an hour or two in the morning to climb over the high mountain towards the east, and it disappears behind the western hills very early in the afternoon. It seemed strange to us, but it was delightful there nevertheless, and mamma and I had such charming walks, and gathered such quantities of beautiful flowers!

“The first night we arrived there, after we had taken supper, we sat down by the window to enjoy the strange, wild scenery, when a group of children came along and stopped before the house. The largest of these was a girl about twelve years old. She was very pretty, although her dress was mean, and her light hair, braided in two long, straight queues, hung down in most ungraceful style below her waist. She had a basket in each hand, one filled with violets and roses, and the other with carvings and little crystals.

“When they saw us at the window, they commenced singing a hymn. It sounded sweetly to me as they sung it then; and I heard it so often afterwards that I couldn’t help learning it. So I will sing it for you.

“Papa said, when he heard the hymn, he knew they must be good children, and he would buy something of them. So we went down and got a beautiful bunch of flowers and one or two of the little toys. The girl said her name was Marie, and that she had no father or mother, but lived with her uncle, and the other children were her cousins. She said her uncle was a mountain guide, and in the winter carved these toys for them to sell to the travellers who were always passing through the village. We all liked the child, she was so polite, and had such a sweet way of speaking; and when she went away, I said, ‘Come again.’ ‘Yes, miss,’ she answered, in a soft, gentle voice, with a pleasant smile on her face. But I need not have invited her, for our landlord told us that Marie and her cousins came regularly every morning and evening during the summer season to sing and sell their flowers. And quite a sum of money they earned in this way; for two diligences, one from Italy and the other from Germany, met there at the foot of the mountain daily, and brought many travellers, who were always willing to expend a trifle for the children’s wares. We found this true; for, during the three months we were there, we scarcely missed seeing Marie a single day, and before the summer was out had become quite well acquainted with her, and had really learned to love her very much. We pitied her too, because she was an orphan. She used to sing an ‘Orphan’s Hymn,’ in a very sad, touching way. The first time I heard it was the morning after our arrival. Marie sang it alone, and her voice waked me long before it seemed to be daylight. But I told you that our rooms were darkened by the shadow of the mountain, so that daylight did not reach us at a very early hour. This was the song:—

“Why, those are nice hymns,” said Nellie,—“just as nice as we sing.”

“Yes, and why shouldn’t they be?” asked Blanche. “They showed, papa said, that the child had been piously brought up. O, some of those Swiss people are very good! We met a good many in my uncle’s parish who were. They were poor; but that was nothing. Papa says we often find the most strong and simple faith among the poor.

“One day mamma and I went out to walk with our baskets on our arms. We always carried these to hold the flowers or curiosities we might gather. We were just crossing the bridge when we overtook Marie.

“ ‘Where do you live?’ asked mamma.

“ ‘Won’t you come and see?’ she replied. ‘It is a pretty place, and you can get beautiful flowers near by. You can’t see it from here, for it is round the other side of that hill.’

“So we followed her over a rough road, scrambling over rocks and hills, until, on the other side of what I should have called a mountain, we came in sight of their little cottage. We noticed a garden by the side of it, but we saw no flowers in it; and when we asked her where she got her flowers to sell, she answered: ‘Up there, and there, and there,’ pointing to several hills in different directions. ‘They are all wild-flowers,’ she said, ‘and we have to get up very early in the morning to get them fresh. There are the children picking now for this evening. Don’t you see them?’

“We looked up where she pointed, and saw some little specks away up on a shelf in the side of the hill. Really, they looked more like rabbits than children.

“ ‘Do you let those little things climb away up there?’ asked mamma. ‘I should think it would be too dangerous.’

“ ‘O no, madam, they are used to it,’ said she. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go up? There are beds of violets there.’

“So she led the way along a very narrow and steep footpath, that wound round and round the hill. She went as nimbly as a squirrel; but we were not used to such rough climbing, and found it quite tedious. But we were well paid when we got there. It was just before sunset, and we stood where we could look through a cleft of the hills, and see the sunlight falling on the great St. Gothard, and it was a magnificent spectacle. The top of the mountain had on its cap of snow and ice, which it never lays aside, morning or night, summer or winter. A little way down from the white peak, the clouds were resting, and the sun shining upon them made them look like an immense mantle of delicate white gauze. And we saw something very strange that evening, which, mamma said, we might not have seen once in a hundred times. It was the diligence, which was due at the village in about an hour, growing, as it were, right out of this fleecy cloud. Did you ever see a ship at sea grow out of a fog? I have. First the bow appears, then one mast, then another, as though the vessel were being made by magic right there in mid-ocean. Well, so this diligence came. All at once, while we were looking, a horse put his head out of the cloud; then came his forefeet, then the rest of his body; then a pair of horses followed, and another, and another; then the driver; and at last the great vehicle itself. But it didn’t look very large to us there. The horses looked like dogs, and the diligence not much larger than a baby’s carriage. We stood and watched it as it came down the steep, zigzag road. It seemed sometimes as if it would pitch right over those frightful precipices. And, really, it is quite dangerous riding over the mountain passes, although the roads are finely built, and kept in excellent order. They are obliged to have so many horses, and if the first one makes a false step, all is over. But accidents seldom occur. Both horses and drivers are used to their business, and are very careful.

“After we had enjoyed this scene, Marie called our attention to another large mountain near by. ‘Do you see all those little houses up there?’ she asked. ‘They are châlets.’ ”

“What are those, pray?” inquired Nellie.

“Why, they are the summer residences of the Alpine shepherds. The shepherds, in the summer-time, take their flocks and herds from the valleys up to the mountains for pasture. In the winter-time they cannot live there, on account of the winds and snows.”

“ ‘I used to live up there,’ Marie said, ‘with my father and mother, till a dreadful avalanche came, and crushed our little cottage, and father and mother and little baby within it; and since then I have had no home.’

“ ‘Where were you when the avalanche came?’ inquired mamma.

“ ‘I will tell you about it,’ she said. ‘It was a beautiful afternoon in the month of June, and I had come down the hill to bring some flowers, and a nice little cheese my mother had made, to a lady who lived in a large house, or castle, which you see away up there,’ pointing to a steep, rocky ledge behind us. ‘I used often to go there, for Lady Maud was very kind to me. She taught me to read and sew. I was just coming out of the gate with one of the maids, who was going down to the village, when we heard a terrible crashing noise, like a sharp peal of thunder. We both jumped. ‘What a loud clap of thunder!’ said she; and yet, when we looked around and up, there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. The sky was clear and blue, and the sun shone brightly. ‘Oh! oh!’ cried the maid the next minute, ‘a slide! look there!’ I turned about, and there we saw the avalanche pouring down the side of the mountain, right towards the hamlet where I lived. And we could hear it, too,—the dull, heavy sound,—as it rolled along. ‘O my father! my mother!’ I screamed. ‘My darling little Sophie! What shall I do? what shall I do?’—and I screamed, and ran about as if I was crazy. The girl tried to soothe and quiet me, but I could not keep still, for we could do nothing but just look and see the destruction coming.”

“What makes an avalanche?” asked Nellie.

“On those high mountains,” said Blanche, “the snow never melts entirely away, but every year brings more, until it gets piled up like houses and mountains of itself. The slightest movement on those heights, such as a traveller stamping his foot heavily, or speaking with a quick, loud voice, so as to cause a sudden motion of the air, or a bird flying quickly over, will loosen a small bit of snow from the mass. This, if no bigger than a nut, rolling down, becomes every moment larger and larger. Then it breaks off other pieces, and these rush on, growing all the time, until the mass becomes very large and heavy, and it keeps falling and increasing, bearing down trees, rocks, and everything in its course. You see the little houses of the shepherds cannot stand before these dreadful slides, but are carried away, and the poor people are often killed, and their sheep and cattle destroyed. An old shepherd told us once, that on the highest mountains, where there is nothing but ice and snow, where no human being dwells, avalanches occur daily; and the people who visit these dangerous heights tread as lightly as possible, and are almost afraid to speak, lest a flake of snow should be disturbed, and they carried down with the avalanche.”

sang Nellie, “and cast my lot far away from those horrid mountains.”

“But the Swiss people love their mountain-homes dearly,” replied Blanche. “Papa says they seem to feel a reverence and affection for their native hills, such as children feel for their parents. Well, it seems that avalanche buried Marie’s home and parents. When the spot was visited afterwards, there was not a trace of them to be found, but a great rock, as big as a church, covered the place where the cottage stood. She tried to point out the very rock, but I don’t know whether I saw the right one or not.

“ ‘And what did you do then?’ asked mother.

“ ‘My uncle took me to his house,’ said she. ‘He is a very good man, and they are all kind; but I can’t help crying sometimes for my own dear father and mother. My oldest sister is married, and lives in Germany, and one of my brothers is in the army. The other one drives the diligence from Airolo,—that’s on the other side of Gothard,—and I see him once in a while. I do all I can to help my uncle and aunt. I take care of the children, and pick flowers to sell, and search for crystals in the brooks; and strangers are very kind to me, and buy of me a good deal. Every Saturday afternoon we go to the curate’s house to read and say the catechism.’

“ ‘The curate is my uncle,’ said I.

“ ‘He is a very kind man,’ she replied, ‘and takes a great deal of pains to teach me. I don’t know how to thank him enough.’

“By this time we had got our baskets heaping full of flowers, for we had been picking while we were talking, and the little ones had helped us too. O, such flowers!—the lady-slipper, small sunflower, violets and roses, harebells and geraniums,—and they grew in such abundance! I never saw anything like it. We couldn’t bear to leave them, but night was coming, so we came down from the hill, and Marie and the children walked to the hotel with us. Papa asked my uncle about our little ‘Violet Girl,’ and he told us the same story; and the long and short of it is, that father and mother made up their minds to take her to bring up. She came to America with us, and—”

“What! Is she the little girl I have seen at your house? I thought she must be your sister,” exclaimed Nellie.

“Why? She does not look like me.”

“No, but then she is so nice!”

H. E. B.

Little Pussy went on in the sort of life we have described two or three years longer, helping her mother at home, and going across the lots and through the woods to the distant academy; and gradually she grew taller and larger, till one day her father woke up and said to her mother, “Wife, our Pussy is growing into a real handsome little woman.”

Now Pussy heard the remark as she was moulding up some little biscuit in the next room, and she smiled to herself.

“Am I pretty, I wonder?” she said to herself. So that evening she strolled down into the meadow, where the brook spread out in one place into a perfect little looking-glass, set in a green enamelled frame of moss and violets, and waving feathers of fern-leaves. Here she sat down on the bank, and began to consider herself in the water. Looking in, she saw a pair of eyes just the color of the blue violets which were fringing the bank, a pair of rosy cheeks, a fair, white forehead, and some long curls of brown hair. Pussy considered awhile, and then she gathered some violets, and crows-foot, and drooping meadow-grasses, and wove them into a garland, and put it on her head, and peeped into the brook again to see how it looked.

“She is pretty,” said old Mother Fern to Miss Hepatica. “She is pretty, and she has come now to the time when she may as well know it. She will begin now to dress herself, and brush out her feathers, as the bluebirds and robins do in the spring-time.”

Pussy walked home with the garland on her head, and at the door she met her father.

“Why, how now?” he said. “You look as your mother used to when I went a-courtin’. Girls always get the knack of fixin’ up when their time comes.”

And that night the father said to the mother, “I say, wife, you must get Pussy a new bonnet.”

“I’ve been braiding the straw for one all winter,” said the wife. “Last fall we picked and sorted the straw, and got the very nicest, and I have enough now done to make a nice straw hat. I will soon have it sewed, and then, when you drive over to Elverton, you can get it pressed in Josiah’s bonnet factory.”

“And I’ll buy her a ribbon myself,” said the father.

“No, no, father; after all, it would be better to let me have the wagon and the old horse, and take her over to Worcester to choose for herself. Girls have their own notions.”

“Well, perhaps that ’ere’s the best way, mother. I tell you what,—that child has been a treasure to us, and I wouldn’t stand for expense; get her a new gown too. I won’t stand for money. If you have to spend ten dollars, I wouldn’t mind it, to have her dressed up as handsome as any gal that sits in the singers’ seats on Sunday.”

What would little Emily Proudie have thought of a spring outfit that could be got for ten dollars? One of her dresses was trimmed with velvet that cost thirty dollars, and Emily cried when it was brought home because it was the wrong shade of color, and sent it back to Madame Tulle-ruche, to have all the velvet ripped off, and thirty dollars’ worth of another shade put on. But what did she know or care how much it cost?

The next morning, after the worthy couple had arranged for Pussy’s spring prospects, her father was so full of the subject that he could not forbear opening it to her at once. So at breakfast he pulled forth a great leather pocket-book, out of which he took a new ten-dollar bill, which he laid on Pussy’s plate.

“Why, father, what is this?” said Pussy.

“Well, I noticed last night how pretty you looked, with your posies on, and I told your mother the time was come when you’d be a-wantin’ folderols and such like,—as girls ought to have when they come to the right age; and, as you’ve been always a good daughter, and never thought of yourself, why, we must think for you; and so there’t is. Get yourself any bit of finery you want with it. I don’t grudge it.”

Now Pussy had never in her life had a dollar of her own before, and if, instead of ten dollars, it had been ten thousand, she could scarcely have been more delighted. She laughed and cried and jumped for joy, and she and her mother calculated over and over again how this large sum should be invested. Pussy insisted that half of it should be spent for mother; but mother very firmly insisted that every bit of it should go to Pussy’s spring outfit.

“Let her have her way, child,” said the father. “Don’t you see that you are herself over again? She has her young days again in dressing you.”

And so the straw braid was sewed into a little flat straw hat; and the straw was so white and delicate, and the braid so fine, that all the gossips round about said that the like of it had never been seen in those parts. And when she sent it over to the bonnet factory at Elverton, Josiah Stebbins—who was at the head of the factory, and was a cousin of Pussy’s mother, and, some say, an old sweetheart too—he put the precious little hat through all the proper processes, and delivered it at last, safe and shining, to her, and would not take a cent in pay; so that there was Pussy’s little fortune still untouched.

Then they had a glorious day, going over to Worcester, shopping. They had a friend in town with whom they could stay over night; and so, though it was a good twenty miles’ drive, they did not mind it.

There they bought a white cambric dress, and a blue ribbon, and a wreath of lovely white daisies, mixed with meadow-grass, which the shopman said had been made in Paris. Pussy wondered in her heart how Paris milliners could know so exactly how meadow-flowers looked. The young man at first asked so much for the wreath that Pussy quite despaired of being able to get it; but when he saw the blue eyes fixed so longingly on it, and noticed the pretty light on her curls as she turned her head in the sunshine, somehow he began (like a great many other young men) to wish that a pretty girl could have her own way; so finally he fumbled at the lid of the box, and looked at the price-mark, and said that it was the last of the set, and that they were closing out the stock, and ended by letting her have it for just half the price he originally asked. So Pussy returned home the next day delighted, with what seemed to her a whole wardrobe of beautiful things.

Very fast flew her little fingers as she fixed the wreath of daisies and meadow-grass around the shining crown of the delicate straw hat, and then tied it with long strings of blue ribbon, and found, to her delight, that there was enough still remaining to make a sash to her white dress.

Her mother fitted the dress, and Pussy sewed it; and the next Sunday Pussy’s father took her to church with a delighted heart. He was observed to keep wide awake all sermon-time, staring straight up into the front gallery, where Pussy sat in the singers’ seats, with her pink cheeks, her blue eyes and blue ribbons, and nodding wreath of daisies and meadow-grass. He disturbed his wife’s devotion several times while the choir were singing,

with his “Mother! mother!” (with a poke of the elbow.)

“What is it, father?”

“Do look up at her.”

“I have looked.”

“But, mother,” (another poke,) “isn’t she the prettiest girl you ever saw?”

“Father, dear, don’t talk now.”

“I declare,” said the father, as they were driving home, “I don’t grudge that ’ere ten dollars one grain.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe.

III.
REGULAR CHINESE FUN.

the bowline! the bully, bully bowline!

O the bowline! the bowline!—Haul!”

That was Round-the-world Joe pulling on his tight new boots. “Nothing like a bit of a song for boarding the main sheet in a gale, or coaxing a tight boot home. Just pay him down with a little smooth slush first, and then haul on him with a will, all together, like this:—

and Joe, with a grunt and a stamp and a puff, and his face very red, popped his foot in, sock.

“Just so,” said Charley Sharpe: “that’s what I always tell Georgey. ‘Georgey,’ says I, ‘there’s nothing like a bit of a sheet for boarding a song in a main gale. Just slush your boots down with a smooth will first, coax for your pay when you’re a little tight, and haul it all home together.’ ”

“Now, Mr. Sharpe,” said I, “what is all that run-mad nonsense you are getting off this time?”

“O, that’s the Language of the Sea, my dear; that’s the style that my big brother, with the literary turn of mind, is going to write his Nautical Dime Novel in. What’s the use of keeping company with a boy that has Crossed the Line, and Doubled the Cape, if you can’t express yourself ship-shape?”

“Very well,” said I, “the first thing we know, that same big brother of yours will be REVIEWING us in some overgrown booby of a newspaper or magazine; and asking us if we can find nothing more Elegant and Improving to set before the Inquiring and Susceptible Mind of Ingenuous Youth, than the heels-over-head nonsense of a set of natural-born, live boys.”

“All right,” said Charley, “let him REVIEW away. I wish I had as many dollars as I don’t care if he does. Reviewing never knocked anybody from his base yet, that had the right sort of a constitution.”

“What’s REVIEWING?” asked Round-the-world Joe. “O, I know now. It’s blowing up the bo’sin for not bending his clove-hitch right, when all the time you can’t show the cook how to take a turn round a belaying-pin. But come, my lads, if we’ve got all our traps aboard, let’s get under way for a cruise among the shops.”

So we started down Broadway, Charley Sharpe having to leave a message for some one at the Metropolitan Hotel.

“Do they have hotels in China?” said I; “and did you ever ‘stop’ at one?”

“O yes,” said Joe; “there was the ‘Heaven-on-Earth Hotel,’ at Shang-hae, kept by Mr. Loong-Wil-Yam,—Old Long Bill, we used to call him. The front door looked as if it were made of old tea-chests, and there were inscriptions all over it, in Chinese letters, like gridirons fighting, describing all the delicacies of the season that Mr. Long Bill could set before his noble guests,—‘Hospitality, Pleasant Company, and Kitten Soup, Politeness, Virtue, Tender Puppies, and Wise Discourse; besides Fried Silk-worms, Disinterestedness, Sharks’ Gizzards, Poetry, Conundrums, the Pleasures of Memory, and Cockroaches done in Castor Oil. Walk in, Ladies and Gentlemen, and swoon with satisfaction! Your respectable Loong-Wil-Yam will receive your Thoughts as his Friends, and treat your Desires like his Children. Hi-yah!’ ”

“Good gracious!” said Charley Sharpe. “How much for all that?”

“Well, you see, chum,” said Joe, “Chinese signs are very much like some folks we know of, who hang out more promises than they can keep inside. Of course there were not cash enough in all the Flowery Kingdom to pay for such a spread as Old Long Bill offered in his bill of fare, but Barney Binnacle and I had a pretty good time at the Heaven-on-Earth Hotel for about ten cents.

“Over the window there was another sign,

which was as much as to say, ‘Elegant English spoken here.’ So we called for the piece of man that did the Pigeon-English all proper, and he came and chin-chinned us, and asked us what would we do the House of Fragrant Festivities and Gratified Desires the honor to order. And we told him we’d take a little of everything he had on the front door, especially a pair of the tender puppies, and some Pleasures of Memory on the half-shell. And he said ‘All Right: can s’cure,’—he could get them. And then he brought us some pickled peanuts and a boiled cucumber, two spare-ribs of rat on toast, and a proverb of Wei-chan on flowered paper, ‘Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed’;—which was doing pretty well for a Chinese sign. He said he was sorry they were just out of everything else, except a cut of cold Politeness, some Hospitality warmed over, and a little Plain Talk left by the last customer, done brown.”

“But, Joe,” said I, “where were the shark’s fins, and the bird’s-nests, and the peacocks’ combs, and the goose-feet, and the humming-birds’ brains, and the grasshoppers’ gizzards, and the butterfly cutlets, that we read of in all the books of travel?”

But before Joe could answer, Mr. Charley (who is so smart, you know, and so satirical, and such a bore) must put in his pertness: “Why, you see, Georgey, we are under the painful necessity of confessing that we have been quite out of all those delicate national dishes, ever since the illustrious member of the American-Forest-of-Pencils Society, who wrote the article ‘China’ for your father’s Cyclopædia, dined with the Corrector of Learning, and the Flowering Talent, and the Entered Doctors, and the rest of the awful big-wigs, in the Grand Hall of Examinations. Ever since that exhaustive occasion we have been compelled to import our peacocks’ feathers from foreign countries, to make our mandarins with; and as for the humming-birds, we have to make shift now with the brains of humbugs.”

“Yes, George,” said Joe; “there’s plenty of honest truth in what Charley says, though he has a droll way of putting it; the stories that travellers tell about Chinese dinners are like the bill of fare in a Bowery restaurant,—all the substantial matter-of-fact that you can get out of four gilt-edged, fancy columns of Epicurean fiction is a codfish ball, or some leathery liver, or ‘one stew, and no questions asked.’ And nobody knows that better than our old friend, Loong-Wil-Yam, for the customers that patronized the Heaven-on-Earth Hotel used to bring their own tea in a little bag slung to the waistband of their trousers, and some salt fish, sour-krout, potted puppies, and rice (Kan-leang, ‘dry and cold,’ they call it), in a sort of three-decker trunk. Why, the folks that stayed all night in the house used to drink large bowls of warm water with salt in it, the first thing next morning, to destroy their appetites (if you don’t believe that, I’m willing to take my after-davit to it); or else, as soon as they turned out of their bunks, they would eat enough rice and cold boiled cucumbers to last them till the same time next day,—breakfast, dinner, and supper in one, to tide them over another Heaven-on-Earth; for the Chinese have stomachs like camels,—they can go longer in ballast, and then stow more stores at once, than anything except a regular Ship of the Desert.

“But Old Long Bill did not always keep his customers on such short commons. As often as New Year’s, or the Feast of Lanterns, came round, he shipped a heavy cargo of grub, doubled the force of cooks on the galley, and sent a fellow to the front door to beat a gong and call the public in: ‘Come in, O Beautiful and Elegant! Come in, O Rich and Powerful! O Wise and Accomplished, come in! And eat, drink, and be merry! For Life is short, and Art is long; and your respectable Loong-Wil-Yam is not immortal, and Heaven cannot abide on Earth forever!’

“Then it was rich fun,” said Round-the-World Joe, “to see them beginning dinner with the dessert, and ending it with the soup; having their food brought to them ready cut up in little morsels, as we do for young children; eating it with a pair of sticks, instead of knife and fork; wiping their mouths with bits of colored silk paper, instead of napkins; leaving their seats between the courses to take a pull at an opium pipe, or play ‘Simon-says-wiggle-waggle’ for thimbles of rum; pecking at their fried silk-worms between the square cups of hot wine; and fanning themselves, and chin-chinning each other.

“A description of every dish was bawled out by the waiter who brought it in; and as he set it on the table he proclaimed the name of the gentleman who had ordered it; and when the dinner was over, a Mandarin of the Kettle (as they call the head-cooks) stood at the door, and sing-songed the name and title of each guest as he passed out, and the quality and price of everything he or his friends had eaten. This is to excite their vanity, and make them all extravagant for sheer envy of each other; so that those now treat who never did before, and those who always treated treat the more. You see,” continued Joe, “if Mandarin Ben-Net of the peacock’s feather had nightingales’ heads, it would never do for Mandarin Gree-Lee of the coral button to call for pigs’ feet.”

“I wonder,” said Charley, “if Mr. Delmonico takes ‘Our Young Folks.’ ”

“Why, Charley?” I asked. “What has that to do with Mandarins and hotels and the price of pigs’ feet?”

“Because,” said Charley, “it will be as much as a Corporation Dinner in his pocket if he reads this number.”

“Talking of hotels,” said Joe, “did you ever hear of the House of the Hens’ Feathers at Pekin?”

“Emperor’s chicken-coop?”

“No,—public roost for beggars and vagabonds. It’s about an acre of house,—nothing of it but walls, roof, and one floor, and that a sort of flush deck,—not a bedstead or bureau, table, chair, bench, or stool,—just an acre of bamboo flooring, covered two feet thick with feathers, and called Ki-mao-fau, the House of the Hens’ Feathers. Every night two thousand of the homeless loafers and other human nuisances of Pekin—men, women, and children alike, all horribly squalid and disgusting—come with their cash to hire a nest for the night in the hens’ feathers. In they all tumble pell-mell, wrangling and squalling, scrambling and scratching, and stow themselves spoon-fashion, two thousand in a bed.

“Then somebody bangs a gong; and immediately they all turn over on their backs, and the fellows with sharp elbows draw them in, and the chaps with long legs draw them up.

“Bang!—and up pop two thousand heads with tails to them, and two thousand noses and twenty thousand toes are pointed straight at the ceiling.

“Bang!—and a hundred pulleys begin to creak, and down from the roof descends an acre of coverlet, made of felt, with two thousand holes in it.

“Bang!—and the two thousand heads pop through the two thousand holes, and fire off six thousand sneezes.

“Bang! Bang! Bang!—and all the lights are put out, and four thousand eyes are shut, and two thousand noses begin to snore.

“And there you are till daylight,—the door locked, your neck in limbo, everything pitch-dark, and an acre of grunting Chinese pigs between you and the window. If Long-Sam, on your right, happens to be a kicking chap, or Lean-Nan, on your left, digs with her elbows,—if big John Chinaman, at your head, keeps up a mangy scratching, or little Johnny Chinaman, at your feet, yells all night with the colic,—so much the worse for you; there you are till daylight, and you must grin and bear it. Neither the kicking, nor the digging, nor the scratching, nor the yelling, will make any difference in the price,—you must pay your sapeck in the morning all the same.

“But for all that the world moves, and daylight comes at last, even to the House of the Hens’ Feathers.

“Bang!—four thousand eyes are opened wide.

“Bang!—two thousand heads pop under the coverlet,—all but three.

“Bang!—up goes the acre of coverlet to the roof; and up go with it three screaming heads, and three dangling tails, and six yellow, struggling legs; those heads had forgotten to pop under when the gong sounded the second time.

“Bang! Bang!! Bang!!!—and the two thousand human porpoises jump up all together, and begin to plunge and roll and flounder in that sea of feathers, and scramble for their rags, and scratch.”

“Why, Joe,” said I, “that reminds me of Mr. Thackeray’s funny description of the Jew passengers on board the steamer Iberia in the white squall. But is that story all true, ’pon your honor,—feathers, coverlet, and all?”

“I’ll take my after-davit to it,” said Joe. “And every man, woman, and child of them pays one sapeck (which is about one fifteenth of a cent) before they go out on their begging business for the day. At first, every lodger was allowed a separate quilt; but the ragamuffins stole so many of them, to make jackets and trousers of, or to sell again, that the proprietors had to rig the acre of coverlet with the two thousand holes.”

I asked Round-the-world Joe if there were any Broadways in China.

“O yes,” said he, “Chinese Broadways.”

There is Tung-Kiang-mi-Kiang Street in Pekin, and the Great Street of Tranquillity; and Old and New China Streets, and Spectacle and Looking-Glass Streets, in Canton. The Great Street of Tranquillity is the finest in all China. It is a hundred and eighty feet wide, and long and straight, and is bounded in part, on the north side, by the walls of the Emperor’s Palace. Vast and magnificent temples, roofed with white or yellow marble, the splendid palaces of princes, covered with green-glazed tiles, the courts of justice, superbly columned and adorned, and hundreds of gray-tiled residences, belonging to private citizens of wealth and consequence, are there. In all these fine houses the doors and partitions are of camphor, cypress, and sandal-wood, profusely and curiously carved, so that they are both attractive to the eye and agreeable to the nose; and the windows are hung with tapestry, and the walls with paper, on which famous sentences from philosophers and poets are painted.

On Tung-Kiang-mi-Kiang Street the shops are as various and as splendid as on any part of Broadway, from Union Square to the Park. There are the jewellers’ shops, where ornaments skilfully carved out of ivory, pearl, jasper, and precious woods, are sold; and the shops for books and pictures and toys, and for glass-ware and porcelain and lacquered ware, and for silks and shawls, and bamboo furniture inlaid with box-wood and ivory. Joe says on Leoo-le-Chang Street, where there are several bookstores, a Chinese Ticknor and Fields publish a magazine every moon for Our Celestial Young Folks. It is called “The Artificial Garden of Complicated Raptures”; and Charley Sharpe says the woodcuts, which are drawn by the artificial Mr. Sol-A-Ting, and engraved by the complicated Mr. An-Ton-Y, display all the sweetness of a tea-caddy and the force of a soup-plate.

Joe says the queerest thing about the Chinese streets and people is that they always smell of musk,—just as all Hindostan smells of sandal-wood, and all Birmah of petroleum, and all Japan of varnish, and all Africa of Jim Crow. But Joe says, as for that, there’s an English smell too, and a French smell, and an American smell,—and for all he knows a Boston smell, and a New York smell. He says he can’t tell one from the other, but the cook’s dog on the Circumnavigator could!

Once, on Looking-Glass Street, in Canton, Round-the-world Joe and Barney Binnacle joined a party of Chinese boys, who were having holiday, and a small frolic, in honor of the name-day of one of them. Barney and Joe asked one bright little chap who spoke Pigeon-English if they might go along just to see how they did that sort of thing in China; and Little Pigeon said, the fast young gentlemen of the Central Flowery Kingdom would not object to the company of the foreign marine devils, if the foreign marine devils would treat. Barney and Joe said of course they would, if the sucking mandarins would give them change for a dollar, in cash; but as it takes fifteen sapecks to make a cent, and as a sapeck is about the size of a jacket-button, and as fifteen hundred of them would have been a load for a small donkey, and as there was no small donkey convenient, the sucking mandarins said ten cents’ worth of treat would satisfy them. So Round-the-world Joe gave them the dime, and he and Barney filled their pockets with the change,—one hundred and fifty sapecks; and then the gay young bloods of the Central Flowery Kingdom and the foreign marine devils cruised around in company among the shops and stalls, and had a good time.

Joe says, in all his travels he never saw a set of young monkeys get through a ten-cent spree in such a solemn, Sunday-school style; they gave all their minds to it awfully, and in the lowest kind of spirits, and ate, drank, and were merry as if to-morrow they were to die, sure. But weren’t they keen little customers, nevertheless, and didn’t they know how to get half a cent’s worth for a sapeck! Joe says he couldn’t help thinking, that, if they only kept on cheating and stealing in the same proportion, and according to their years and opportunities, every one of them would be able, by the time he was a man, to build a jail and lock up all the others in it. They went from shop to shop, and from stall to stall, buying a walnut here and a joint of sugar-cane there, in this place a dozen fried beans, and half an orange in that, a cup of tea from one man, and a candied grasshopper from another, a slice of bamboo pickle from Wot-Siz-Name, and a doughnut made of cocoa-nut oil, from Thing-Am-Mee; but every unlucky dealer lost money by them, and wished he was dead; as Artemus Ward says, it would have been as much as two cents in his pocket if he had never been born.

“Watermelon seeds!” said Joe. “You want to know if they bought any of them? Well! if those melancholy young Chinese undertakers chawed one watermelon seed, they chawed a solid peck. Watermelon seeds! Well! As you may imagine, from what I told you about the travellers at the Heaven-on-Earth Hotel, Chinese stomachs are built on the gutta-percha principle, and there’s one thing a Chinaman never does,—the only pre-pos-te-rous thing he never tries,—and that is bustin’; a true Celestial never busts. Why, if you or I were to stow as many watermelon seeds as Little Pigeon, and the rest of those sucking Mandarins, put themselves outside of, brass hoops wouldn’t hold us. Barney Binnacle asked Little Pigeon, when he was on his third quart, if he thought he could stand it, and Little Pigeon put on airs. ‘Hi-yah, fan-kwei!’ (which means foreign devil,)—‘hi-yah, fan-kwei!’ says he, ‘how kin do? how kin makee talkee so fashion. Mi too muchee strong man inside—kin secure.’

“Watermelon seeds!” said Round-the-world Joe. “Well! And what do you guess they do it for? They don’t taste good, they don’t make you feel good, they are not much to smell; there’s no more richness, no more meat in them, than in so much cork. But three hundred millions of people, every man, woman and child of them, beginning with their first tooth, and chewing all together all the time till they die,—how many watermelon seeds does that make?”

“Enough,” said I, “to pay the national debt of England; laid side by side, one seed apart, they would reach round the world 7,000,000,000 times and a half; and if one of them was dropped into an ordinary half-pint tumbler every five minutes, the last one would fall at precisely half past eternity.”

“Half-pint tumbler?” inquired Charley. “Isn’t there some mistake about that?”

“No,” said I, “half-pint,—must be glass, too.”

“Watermelon seeds!” said Round-the-world Joe. “Well!”

“Joe,” said I, “what is a sapeck?”

“Sapeck,” said Joe, “is the great Chinese institution. It’s entirely owing to sapecks that so many watermelon seeds are chewed, and that there are so many people to chew them; for if it wasn’t for sapecks, nine tenths of the people would die of starvation, and the other tenth could then afford to chew tobacco. A sapeck is the only coin in the world that you can buy half of next to nothing with, and get next to nothing half done for. You can buy half a piece of chalk with a sapeck, and enough watermelon seeds to half kill you; and there are sights in China that you can see with one eye for a sapeck. All the Chinese babies cut their teeth on sapecks; sapecks are the first things they cry for; sapeck is the first word they pronounce; and as soon as they can sit alone, they play at keeping pawnbroker’s shop, and pawn their melon seeds for sapecks. A sapeck is so small a coin that the only thing you could buy with it in this country would be somebody’s soul now and then. It is made of copper and pewter, is about the size of a nickel cent, and has a square hole in the middle, so that it can be strung like button-moulds. So sapeck is one of the most insignificant little chaps in this world, and also one of the most tremendous; for his other name is Cash.”

George Eager.

Jack’s great toe dug holes in the sand as he stood on the shore, dreamily looking out to the sky; and the salt water, slowly rippling up, made them into little wells, or filled them with sand and sea-weed. Jack didn’t mind, as he stood there in a brown study, that the tide was rising and creeping over his restless feet up to the very Sunday trousers that he had put on when mother had said he might go on board of Captain Ben’s sloop with Jimmy Ben.

Captain Ben was really Captain Ben Slocum; but nobody ever thought of calling him that; and so, as Jimmy and Nathan and Polly came, one after the other, and grew up gradually in the little low house under the sand-hill, it was Jimmy and Nathan and Polly Ben, and likely to be so to the end of the chapter.

Jack was not one of them. He lived half a mile from them, and a thick pine-wood lay between his house and the sea, though for all that they could hear it, day and night, winter and summer. Jack’s father was only a clam-digger and fisherman, who drove his cart two or three times a week back into the little towns farther inland, and sold the fish he had caught, while Jack and his mother dug clams on the beach till they were so tired it seemed as if there were nothing good in the world but bed.

Jack had never had time to learn much more than to read and write a little; there were no schools near them, and if there had been, he was always too busy to go; but his mother had taught him all she could as they worked together. She told him long stories from the Bible and Fox’s “Book of Martyrs,” for these were the only two books of which she knew anything; and Jack could tell much more about the Bible than many grown-up people. In the winter evenings, when the fishermen came in, he sat and listened with wide-open eyes to the stories they told of Captain Kidd’s money, buried ’long shore, or the ships that had come sailing in from beyond seas, only to be wrecked on the reefs and shoals off the coast.

So Jack had grown to be twelve years old, with few ideas of the great world about him, and no events save the coming home of Captain Ben’s sloop three or four times a year. Only a week ago it had cast anchor in the little cove, and Jimmy and Nathan and Polly Ben had rushed wildly down to hurrah for father’s coming home, and to find out as speedily as possible what he had brought them.

Wonderful things came from that little cabin. Sunday caps for the boys, and bright dresses for mother and Polly; sweet oranges and candy, and once a whole bag of cocoa-nuts, which they ate till they were very sick indeed, and hardly wanted ever to see another.

This time there was something quite worth while. Jack was on hand as usual, and wondered why Cap’n Ben didn’t give the children something at once. Tease and pull as they would, his hand stayed firmly in his pocket, and did not come out till they were all under the roof of the little gray house, where mother and Polly could look and admire. Such a pressing up about Cap’n Ben when the hand did come out, and such a shout from Jimmy and Nathan when it opened!

Two knives!—knives such as they had never seen before, ivory-handled, double-bladed, strong and sharp and bright,—knives that might whittle away at boats for a twelvemonth and be none the worse,—that might even lie out over night and hardly know it, Jimmy said.

Those were not the days of cheap knives, for it was many years ago. Jimmy had had only an old one of his father’s, and Jack had never owned one at all. So, as he looked at the beautiful shining gifts and thought of all the good times Jimmy and Nathan were to have, envy and jealousy could hardly be kept out, even when Jimmy, diving to the bottom of his pocket, fished out the old knife and handed it to Jack, with a “Here, Jack, I don’t want it no more.”

A week ago such a possession would have been paradise to Jack. Now he could hardly say, “Thank you,” and rushed out of the house, down the steep bluff, and out to a long, narrow strip of sand running far into the bay. There he stood, digging in the wet sand where we first saw him, a woful pucker on his freckled forehead and a very wistful look in his honest gray eyes. Jack stood there till a larger wave, rolling in, wet him so thoroughly as to awaken him to the fact that those Sunday trousers were really drenched, and then with a spring he left the point, dashed up the bluff, and home through the pine-wood. Evidently an idea had come after hard thinking, for next morning, when the breakfast of clams and johnny-cake was eaten, he darted off on the road to the village, and was missing two or three hours.

Such a broad, full smile as lit up Jack’s little brown face when he returned is seldom seen, and such a medley of words never before had come from the mouth of one small boy. “Squire Green! knife! cows! two dollars! Jimmy Ben! Sloop going again!”

What it all meant Jack’s mother never could have told, had not Jack sobered down and given her the whole story.

So it came out that driving cows appeared the only method of making money, and that Squire Green had said to somebody, who had mentioned it in Jack’s hearing, that he would give two dollars to any boy who would drive his cows to and from pasture without stoning or racing them. Jack had applied, and, meeting with approval, had undertaken the task for three months, at the end of which time he might hope for a knife in every respect the counterpart of Jimmy Ben’s; and here Jack’s delight suddenly found vent in a whoop, and a dance round the clam-basket, that no wild Indian could have beaten.

“But, Jack,” said his mother, “I thought Jimmy Ben gave you his old knife.”

Jack blushed. “So he did, but’t ain’t the kind I wanted; point was broke off, and it had got all rusty. I swopped it for some red apples and a piece of string.”

“That’s you, boy all over! if you can’t have just what you want, you’ll go without till you can, and so half the time you don’t have nothin’.”

“But I’ll have it now, mother,” and Jack dug up a great clam, and threw it into the basket with a vim that showed energy enough to earn a hundred knives.

So through the summer weather Jack drove the cows, along the little stretch of sea-shore, over the Point, up to the meadows. Rain fell, and wind blew, but he trudged along patiently, finding a boy’s pleasure in both, and in the coloring of the gorgeous sunrisings and sunsettings he daily saw. At last September had come, and towards the end of the month the wild winds of the equinoctial began to blow, and Jack saw one morning, as he looked off to sea, that a storm was coming up, and that he must bring the cows home along the bluffs, out of reach of the heavy waves rolling in on the Point.

All day the storm gathered strength, and at evening, as the fishermen watched a schooner beating up toward the Narrows, they said among themselves that she never would come to port, and that daylight would give them a harvest of drift-wood and sailors’ chests, and the fine goods on board of her. All night the wind howled, the rain fell, and the sea roared. Jack in his little bed heard guns fired, and knew they were signals of distress from the ship; but there were few on the shore, and those few had no lifeboats, or indeed any in which they could brave the raging sea.

So, when morning came, there was work in good earnest for the wreckers,—and thirty years ago all along that shore were such. The narrow strip of sand under the bluffs was strewn with fragments from the wreck, though it had not entirely broken up, but lay beating up and down on the rocks. There were no signs of life on board; either all had perished, or reached the mainland in their boats. Her cargo was only lumber, and the fishermen grumbled, as they hauled in the boards, that it was nothing better.

Jack had rushed off in the early morning to drive his cows. Only two days longer, and the precious two dollars would be in his hand. He was so full of hope and spirits, that, dancing home over the sands, he hardly noticed the poor schooner fast going to pieces. Wrecks in autumn and winter were a common sight to Jack, and sometimes he had stood by his father, as he and other wreckers buried the bodies of poor fellows who had struggled to reach land, but lost strength and were swallowed up in the cruel waves.

The shore was almost clear; only one or two men were still working far out on the rocks. Jack ran on, skirting a little cove at the head of which were a cluster of rocks where he had often fished at high water. Something lay there,—something which took away Jack’s breath for a moment, and sent the blood in one great thump to his heart.

It was a dead sailor, wedged in between the rocks, and half covered with the dripping sea-weed. There was a belt about his waist, and Jack gave another start, as it reminded him of the bright gold pieces Cap’n Ben himself had taken from just such a belt found on another drowned man only the year before. Nobody would know if he slipped off this belt, and certainly if he did not, those men working down the shore would, as they passed the body on their way home. Jack had seen such sights too often to dread touching the belt, and so he unfastened it hastily, made a vain effort to drag the man quite out of reach of the waves, and then ran like a flash till he reached the pine-wood.

Safe under the dark-green trees he sat down, and, taking the belt from inside his jacket, looked at it, half afraid, half curious. Nothing save one hard lump at the back. Jack wished again for his knife as he pulled at the tight stitches. A sharp bit of oyster-shell loosened them at last, and he saw one—two—three—four—five glittering pieces of gold! He shook the belt, turned it over,—there were no more; but what wealth even these five represented! Jack thrust them hastily back to their place, as the dreadful thought came, Suppose anybody had seen him take them out, and should try to get them away, or, worse than all, if he told his mother, as he knew he must, sooner or later, would she let him keep them?

Jack grew quite pale as he thought of the many chances which might take them from him, and belted them tightly around his own waist, under his jacket, before he started again for home. He had no appetite for clams or johnny-cake, or even for the piece of gingerbread his mother brought him when she saw he did not eat.

Digging was hard work that day, and Jack’s share of clams in the great basket had never been so small. At nightfall, when the cows were safely home, he went round by the beach. The dead sailor still lay there; the wreckers had not yet noticed the body, and Jack thought how dreadful it was to lie there with the salt spray dashing over one, and no covering but sand and sea-weed. Perhaps this money had been saved for his little children at home; perhaps he had an old mother, who needed it, and who would wonder so long where her boy was, and why he did not come. Jack felt tears filling his eyes, and ran again to get away from them.

Night came, and in his little bed, under the roof, Jack tossed and tumbled miserably. Through the chinks in the rafters he saw the stars shining, and by and by the moon rose, and made it so light that sleep would not come. Now, with such dead silence all around, only the steady beat of the sea on the shore in his ears, he thought and thought. “Thou shalt not steal,” said conscience over and over again, and over and over again Jack repeated, “ ’T wasn’t stealing! Even good Cap’n Ben took money from that man he buried, and thought he’d a right to it; and I’m sure he’d ’a’ done it if he’d found this one.”

No use. The white face of the dead sailor rose before Jack till he felt as if he were going wild.

“Maybe the other sailors got ashore; and if they did,” he thought, “they may come to find him, and they’ll know who he saved the money for. ’T ain’t mine anyhow, an’ I’ve just got to put it back. To-morrow’ll do. I’ll take it down the first thing in the morning.”

Still Jack tossed and tumbled. The belt was like fire to him. “It’s no use going on like this,” said he to himself. “I’ll get up now, this very minute, and go down to shore. ’T won’t be no worse than lying here, rolling round so.” And, with his heart beating quickly, he slipped on his clothes, stole down the steep stair, and, carefully unbolting the door, stepped out into the night.

It was clear and still, but Jack’s heart almost failed him as he saw the pine-wood rising dark before him, and knew he must go through it to reach and return from the shore. A strong will, and the dread of holding this ill-gotten money an hour longer, pushed him on. Through the wood, out to the open land, down the steep bluff to the cove, and up to the rocks, Jack rushed. How still he stood for a moment! and then what a sharp little cry of disappointment and fear he uttered! The body was gone, and as he glanced along the shore there were no traces of one.

All Jack’s courage forsook him. He trembled and shook for a moment; strange shadows seemed to lie all about him; there were dreadful sounds in the air; and, with a great sob, he ran wildly up and on, till the wood was passed and his own room received him again. Poor Jack! How he wished, as he buried his head under the bedclothes, that he had never touched that money, and O how long morning was in coming!

When day broke, he got up sadly. The precious two dollars were to be his to-day. Only a week ago, how he had longed for the time to come, and now he felt as if he hardly cared at all. The belt seemed to weigh him down, and he started after the cows with so sad a face, that Squire Green, who met him on his way from the pasture, thought something must be wrong at home.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” said he. “Anybody sick?”

“No, sir,” sighed Jack; and here an inspiration came. Squire Green was a justice of the peace. Who so well as he could know just what to do about this terrible business? “Please, sir,” said he, “there’s something I’d like to tell you about.”

“Sit right down on this flat rock, Jack,” answered the Squire, “and let us hear all about it.”

So Jack told his story, and wondered that the old Squire didn’t look very severe as he went on. When he had ended, there was quite a long silence.

“Come home with me, Jack,” said the Squire at last; and poor Jack rose up, convinced that the two dollars were lost forever, and that he was going to jail at the very least. So he crept along miserably, and hardly held up his head to see where he was going, till they entered the yard in front of the Squire’s house. Two or three rough-looking men stood there, and one said, “Have you heard anything of it, sir?”

“Yes,” answered the Squire, “I’ve got it with me.”

There was quite a stir, and the men followed into the large sitting-room, where the Squire, taking Jack by the hand, turned to them, and, to our hero’s astonishment, told them the whole story.

When he described Jack’s run through the wood to return the belt, one of the men gave the boy a great slap on the back. “By George, you are a brave chap!” said he, “I wouldn’t ’a’ done that for a thousand belts!”

Jack’s heart grew lighter and lighter as he found the worst was past, instead of to come; and he pulled off the belt and handed it to Squire Green, who passed it over to the rough man.

“It’s poor Bill’s belt, sure ’nuff,” he said, “an’ glad he’d be to know we’d got it for his wife and little gal. He was washed overboard, young’un, tryin’ to get into the boat that took us to land, and we found his body last night and brought it up here to give it decent burial. There’s a hundred dollars here, an’ it’s lucky’t was you found it, an’ not any o’ them blasted wrackers! What do you want for givin’ on it back?”

“Nothin’,” said Jack. “I’m glad to get rid of it.”

“Haw! haw! haw!” shouted the man. “Wal, you do look as if you was. You sha’n’t lose nothin’ by it,” and they went out leaving Jack with Squire Green.

“You’re a good boy, Jack,” said he, “and I think you’ll make a good man if you go on as you have begun. There are your two dollars, and you may tell your mother and father I am coming to see them to-morrow.”

Jack flew over the ground, and, whirling into the house, almost upset his mother, who was walking to the cupboard with a bowl of thoroughwort tea she had made for him, fully believing that his sad face would end in his coming down with measles or mumps.

“Land alive, boy!” she cried. “What is the matter now?” and she listened in astonishment to Jack’s account of the past few days.

It all seemed so wonderful, that she felt constrained to put on her sun-bonnet and go with Jack down to Cap’n Ben’s, whose sloop had come into the cove that morning, unnoticed by Jack for the very first time in his life.

How admiringly Jimmy and Nathan and Polly looked at him, and how the Captain slapped the table when the tale ended!

“I didn’t calkilate you was arnin’ money to pay for it, Jack,” said he; “but when I see how down in the mouth you looked when I gave them knives, I made up my mind that, if I had a good run, you should have one jest like ’em, an’ I did, an’ here it is,”—and Cap’n Ben handed Jack a knife, the very image of the two that had spurred him on to work all summer.

“I’ll pay you then, Cap’n Ben,” said Jack.

“No, you won’t!” shouted the Captain. “It’s yourn, an’ that’s the end on’t!”

Was ever such a day! Jack, provided with knife, cared no longer for money, and presented it by turns to father and mother, who advised him to lay it away in the cupboard, where he finally put it, under a cracked teacup.

When Squire Green appeared next day, he had two propositions to make; one from the rough man, who had taken a great fancy to Jack, and wanted him to go to sea as a cabin boy, with the chance of rising every year, and perhaps in time becoming captain of a ship. Another from the Squire himself, who wanted Jack to come and live with him, and learn to be a farmer.

Which carried the day you can guess. I shall only tell you that back of the Highlands lies a beautiful farm, with wheat and corn fields, and great meadows where the cattle feed, and that the tall man who manages everything answers to the name of Jack, and that, still more, when he goes home at night to the little farm-house back of the old Squire’s, somebody comes to meet him who looks wonderfully like Polly Ben grown up, and that running by her side is another Jack freckled, and with big gray eyes, who I am very sure is some relation to our Jack.

Helen C. Weeks.

The story that I have to tell is about Adam and Eve, our great-greater-greatest grandfather and grandmother. After they were sent away from the garden of Eden, they built themselves a neat little house in a retired part of the world, and went to work very industriously. Adam—Mr. Adam, I should say, for we ought to be very respectful to our ancestors—dug all day in the garden, planted his corn and potatoes, and in every way set a good example to his neighbors. Mrs. Eve was for a little while very industrious also. She spun plenty of neat little dresses for herself and her children, and baked very nice bread for the whole family. You must not forget that, although she and Adam worked so hard, they really belonged to the very first family in the world; and if they did not keep any servants, it was only because there were none to be had.

Well, as I said, Mrs. Eve was for a while a very good housekeeper. Her children were neatly curled and dressed, and the kitchen was always in good order. One unlucky afternoon, however, Mrs. Eve, having finished her work rather earlier than usual, went out to take a little walk. She rambled gayly through the woods, gathering flowers to deck her cottage with, now and then singing a little song and bounding lightly on the path. Suddenly, whom should she see but her old acquaintance the Serpent! At first she was frightened, and turned to run away; but he saw her too, and, quick as lightning, glided around her, spreading out all his glittering coils on the grass, and gliding and sliding with the most graceful, wave-like motion. She looked down at the beautiful creature, and, on the whole, thought it would do no harm to speak to him; for had not he too been driven from Paradise, and punished bitterly, for giving her that unlucky apple?

“How are you, sir?” said Mrs. Eve.

“O, I am very well; at least as well as could be expected,” replied the Serpent; “but indeed, my dear lady, you are sadly changed by this life of hard work. It gives me really a pain in my heart to see you working so hard! Why, those beautiful lily hands are as brown as a nut! Those beautiful hands,—what have they to do with work? O, how I should love to see you playing on a harp and singing such tunes as the angels sing! Only I think you would give them much more expression, you have such a heavenly voice! Ah, well, I must say farewell. It would not do for us to be seen talking together!”—and he slid away through the grass and flowers.

Mrs. Eve walked homeward more slowly than she had walked out. She looked at her little hands, once so white and soft, and thought it would do just as well, if, instead of scrubbing her floors and paint so often, she did it thoroughly once or twice a year. This was the way that the grand house-cleanings, which turn your nurseries topsy-turvy, and every spring and fall clear out all your favorite treasures of old bottles and ribbons, were instituted. Mrs. Eve, you see, began to be lazy, and concluded to clean house twice a year instead of every day; and, of course, all her descendants do likewise.

This was not, however, the end of Mrs. Eve’s laziness. By degrees she forgot how to spin, and her poor children were soon in rags. A crowd of little youngsters there were too! When you came near the house their little heads peeped out from every window, as thick as the ferns that grow together in the crevices of an old rock. A great noise they made too, all playing and shouting together; for Mrs. Eve never thought of teaching them to be industrious and useful, but spent all her time reclining gracefully on a sofa, or trying such airs as she had occasionally heard among the angels.

One day Mrs. Eve was lounging in her parlor, working a pair of slippers for Adam, (worsted-work, she said, always looked so ladylike!) and now and then singing a very sentimental tune, when, behold! there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Eve was much surprised; for in those days, as there were very few people in the world, there was not much morning visiting. She quickly opened the door, however, and, behold! a beautiful angel, in an elegant suit of pure white, stood without. She was delighted to be noticed by such high society, and welcomed him very cordially. “Ah!” thought Dame Eve, “I should never have had the honor of this visit, if I had not taught myself how to sing so finely. Of course, the angels could not care for one who did nothing but work!”

The angel talked to her very kindly a little while, and asked many questions about her husband and her children, and at last particularly requested to see the children; for angels, you know, are always very fond of the little ones. Mrs. Eve said she would bring the children to see him, and went up stairs to call them. It was a long time since she had washed their faces or curled their hair; and when the little creatures gathered around her, she found it would take several hours to make them all clean. Then, too, she suddenly remembered that she had no nice clothes for them, and certainly it would not do to let an angel see them unless they were neatly dressed. After rummaging ever so long, she at last discovered two little frocks that were still fit to be seen; so she chose a couple of children, who she thought would fit them, and washed and dressed them in a great hurry, and carried them down to the parlor. The angel patted the little ones very kindly on the head and took them, one on each knee. “But,” said he, “Mrs. Eve, are these your only children?”

Now Mrs. Eve was very much troubled. She thought if she told the angel that she had a nurseryful besides, he would want to see them all, and as it would be quite impossible to make them at all presentable, she determined to tell a story, and answered, “Yes, sir, these are all my children.”

Then the angel put down the two little ones from his knee, and arose to leave. As he rose he seemed to grow taller and grander, and his face grew stern and solemn, and his eyes looked right into Eve’s and saw the wicked lie she had told. He said to her: “Eve, you have not told me the truth. You have many other children besides these, but remember that what is unworthy to be seen by the eye of the Lord shall henceforth be hidden from all men!”

Then as he vanished Eve knew that it was the Lord himself who had been with her, and she fell on the ground, weeping bitterly, and wishing in vain that she had never told the wicked, sinful lie. At last she arose, determined to take care of her children as she used to do before the evil Serpent persuaded her to mimic the fashions of Heaven. So she went right away to the nursery to wash the children all round, and make them look as nicely as she could. As she went up the stairs she heard their merry voices, and the sound of their little feet as they ran about playing with one another, but when she opened the door, not a child could be seen! She heard their little voices, she could feel their loving little hands and their gentle kisses, but not a single little darling rosy face could she see; and now she knew what the Lord meant when he said they should henceforth be hidden from all men, and she felt sure that she should never see her little pets again.

Eve was really good-hearted, and but for that wicked Serpent she might have been very happy. Now she was very sad and sorrowful, but she went industriously to work, kept her house in good order, and, above all, took great care of the two children whom she had shown to the angel, and who were consequently not invisible, as the others.

As for the little ones who could no more be seen by men, at first they were inclined to be mischievous, and indeed some of them are still, but the greater number, when they saw how hard their mother worked, did all they could to help her, and when she rose in the morning she would often find that they had done all her work for the day. These are the good elves and fairies, and they still go about the world invisibly helping all those who are good and patient and try to help themselves.

Anna M. Lea.

It’s true, every bit of it,—no make-believe picture at all. I saw the original myself, last summer, and I’ll tell you all about it.

I was sitting by my window one warm, sunny June afternoon, looking at the illustrations in “Our Young Folks,” when I heard a childish voice, with an unmistakable brogue, calling out in derisive tones, “Ha-a-a-a! givin’ candy to a nagur! givin’ candy to a nagur!”—and, raising my eyes, I saw a trio of small boys who live in our street. The little fellow whose voice I had heard was one Master John McCafferty, who, though a good-natured, grinning, quick-witted urchin, like most of his race, despised “the nagurs!”

It’s queer, isn’t it, despising people because they’re more shaded than we are? Why, the animals show more sense in this matter than some of us human beings. A pretty time there’d be if the white kitten and the gray kitten should refuse to associate with the black one, and should set upon him and drive him into the corner, and leave him there, almost frightened to death, while they lapped up all the milk! Or if the speckled chickens looked with contempt upon their dark-brown sister, and snatched all the corn from her, and pulled her feathers out in the bargain! A pretty state of things, indeed! But, dear me, this isn’t telling you the story.

Johnny’s sarcastic remark was addressed to a dear, bright, blue-eyed boy, the son of my next-door neighbor, who, with the cunningest little look of intense benevolence on his wee face, was offering a share of his candy to Darkey. Now, I don’t call the colored boy “Darkey” for fun, I assure you; but that’s the only name I know him by; and as he grins good-naturedly when it is shouted after him, I suppose he has no serious objection to it.

Percy, as I said before, is a bright, blue-eyed fellow, who is always willing to give a portion of his cake, candy, or apple to a friend; but he deserves particular credit for “going halves” this summer afternoon; for Percy is also extremely sensitive, and, to say the least of it, it wasn’t pleasant to hear Johnny McCafferty shouting at the top of his voice, “Ha-a-a-a! givin’ candy to a nagur! givin’ candy to a nagur!”

Percy waxed indignant, and shook his little round fist at Johnny McCafferty. “Johnny McCafferty,” said he, “you just hush! He’s no more of a nigger than you are, under his skin. And now I won’t give you a piece. I was going to, but I won’t,—you’re too saucy. I’ll go halves with you, Darkey; so open your mouth and shut your eyes and bite down to there,”—placing his finger half-way down the stick of candy.

Darkey opened his mouth, and it wasn’t small,—no, to tell the truth, it was large, very large (Percy seemed rather taken aback by the prospect at first, but stood his ground with the air of a boy who had resolved to do what was right),—and he shut his eyes; only for an instant, though,—for how could he see to bite “down to there” with his eyes closed?

I tell you, Johnny McCafferty began to look serious when he beheld the refreshments disappearing in this wholesale fashion, for he saw that his chances for obtaining a bit were indeed very small.

“Golly, that’s good and sweet,” said Darkey, smacking his lips; but just then I heard the voice of his master.

“You young scamp,” cried he, from his parlor window, “haven’t you been to the butcher’s yet? You were sent half an hour ago. Just you wait, sir,”—and the window went down with a bang.

But Darkey didn’t “wait.” He started off at railroad speed, rolling his candy about in his mouth, and swinging his basket to and fro. Percy looked after him a moment, as though rather astonished at his abrupt departure, and then commenced conversing with a little dog who had been sniffing about, evidently in the hope that somebody would “go halves” with him. And so the picture was broken; but it was impressed on my mind, and the more I thought about it, the prettier I thought it was; and, on again taking up “Our Young Folks,” it straightway occurred to me that all of you would be as delighted to see it as I had been. The artist came home, and I told him all about it, just as I have told you, and then suggested, “Suppose you reproduce it for our dear ‘Young Folks’?” And he, loving children very dearly, hesitated not a moment, but set to work and drew it all just as you have it in this month’s Magazine.

Margaret Eytinge.

Let us first consider foot-ball, a game held in the very highest esteem by English school-boys, and played with great ardor, not to say fury, in the winter season of the year. It may, indeed, be played at any season, but it serves peculiarly for the winter and spring, because the ground at such times is not in order for cricket and base-ball, and ice is not always to be found suitable for skating. Almost any sort of ground will do for foot-ball,—the best, however, being good level greensward, when dry. Very good games may be had, too, upon a hard surface of snow, and I have often played it on the ice. The falls are then, however, a little too frequent. The outfit for foot-ball is of the simplest kind,—merely a large ball, six or eight inches in diameter. Ours used to be a hollow ball made of leather, or sometimes hide with the hair on. It was made in sections, sewed together, except one, which was made wider than the others, and across which the edges of the two between which it was placed were laced with a leather thong. It was the same as the tongue over which you lace your boot on your instep. This was for the purpose of putting in a bladder of the proper size, when blown up, to keep the ball stretched. The bladder being put in, it was blown into until the ball was filled. Then the neck of the bladder outside was tied, and forced into the ball, and then the lacing was drawn tight. This gave strength without much weight. A bladder alone would be a very good foot-ball if it were durable; but it is not, and a few kicks send a hole through it. Now-a-days, however, foot-balls are to be had of gutta-percha, and they will do as well as the old-fashioned sort. The ball being provided, nothing is needed for the game but a place to play it in. A field is the best for this, and the distance between goals may be regulated by the size and number of the players.

As I said before, foot-ball has long been a favorite game with the villagers and school-boys of England. It is not confined to a certain number, like cricket and base-ball, in which there are at most but thirteen players ever actively engaged at one time. At foot-ball you can have thirty, or twice thirty, if you please; for the great schools hold that, in regard to the number of players, the more the merrier. It was customary at one time for different villages in the midland counties of England to play against each other. On these occasions all the males, except the very young, the very old, the maimed, and the blind, turned out on their respective sides. The women and lasses, too, were not backward in going to see the game, and encouraging the players. But desperate struggles took place; bad blood grew up between neighborhoods; and the game often ended in a sort of battle-royal on the common where it was played. Those who had been worsted by the foot, whether fairly or not, appealed to the fist, and the fighters were sometimes so obstinate as only to be dispersed by the magistrates, and the reading of the Riot Act. This Riot Act was a statute commanding people to disperse when it was read by a magistrate, and if they remained together after it had been read, they were guilty of a misdemeanor. Long and bitter feuds, too, sometimes grew out of the village-against-village play. The game is of that exciting nature that it inspires courage and hardihood more than any other play, and the violent partisanship which resulted may not be altogether set down to rivalship in neighborhoods. The same neighborhoods played cricket against each other, but that never brought on a fight. There was another thing laid to the charge of foot-ball in the rural districts which gave it a bad name. The squires and gamekeepers pretended to believe that almost all the poaching forays in the country were planned at these foot-ball matches. But this was not true, I think. The game is not now as much played in the villages and country districts of England as it was twenty-five or thirty years ago. But it has found stanch and constant support in the great public schools, Rugby, Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and the like. The boys at these great training institutions (I use the word because mentally, morally, and physically the boys at these schools are trained) take quite as much pride in the prowess of their school at foot-ball as they do in its learning. Some may say that this should not be so, but these should read “School Days at Rugby,” a book that you have got, perhaps. If you have not got it, somebody ought to get it for you.

Simple as foot-ball was in the beginning, when it was nothing but a struggle between two sides to kick the ball from one end of a field to the other, against each other, many variations and intricacies grew up. These variations arose in part from the simplicity of the original game, which had been played without written rules. The game as played at the great schools was different, and is yet different, in its rules and parts. At all of them it consists in the playing of a ball towards a goal, against the efforts of the other side to play it to the other goal. This is the great principle of the game; but the mode of play differs. The goals are commonly about two hundred yards apart, and at the ends the goal-posts are set up. These are poles put say ten yards apart. Between these posts, sometimes over and sometimes under a crossbar or cord, the ball had to be driven to constitute a goal. Now, at some of the schools all had to be done by kicking, which was proper, the game being foot-ball. But at Rugby it was allowable to seize and carry the ball by hand. Another rule at Rugby grew out of this, namely, that, when one player was carrying the ball, his opponents might do anything short of knocking him down with a club to stop him. This made the Rugby game the roughest of all in the schools, and the boys seemed to love it and cling to it because it was rough. The game at Eton was not quite so rough. As no carrying of the ball was allowed, there was no necessity for tripping up the player, mauling and hacking him to make him drop the ball. Still it was pretty rough. It began with what was called a “bully,” or “hot,” round the ball in the centre between goals. The ball was placed upon the ground between the two sides; the players of each were ranged together, shoulder to shoulder, in close order, face to face with their antagonists; and now all efforts were directed to break the other line, and force the ball through. The struggle was always fierce, and sometimes prolonged. Many hard kicks were given and exchanged. Old military officers have often compared the steadiness and obstinate courage of the British infantry in a charge of bayonets to those of the boys in the “bully” and “hot” at foot-ball. Once the ball was forced through the line on either side, the “hot” was broken up, and the players became, in a measure, dispersed. Each side has to keep behind the ball, that is, between the ball and the goal they are defending. A player is not allowed to get behind his opponents and there wait for the ball, and so stab them in the back, as it were. Two of the strongest, most vigilant, and active players on each side are detached to remain near the goals to guard them and return the ball, if it should be kicked through the main rank of their players. These are the goal-keepers; they are like the reserves of an army. The width of the playing-space is not as great as its length; but it is many times greater than the width between the goal-posts. Therefore, the ball may often be driven past the goal-posts while in proper play, and still not through them so as to win a goal. When the ball was thus played past the posts, but not through them, there were different rules. In some it counted a rouge, and so many rouges were equal to a goal. At other schools, whoever should first touch the ball “down in goal,” that is, behind the goal, should have a “place-kick” from a certain point. When the ball was behind the goal, then, or seemingly going behind, there was a desperate struggle to touch it down, or to prevent somebody else of the other side from touching it down. This was another great delight to the Rugby boys. They rushed in at each other, hacking, mauling, and tripping, until they lay in heaps around the ball, about which there was such a desperate struggle to “have it down.” It had to be had down with the hand, and held for a certain space, and that hand and the arm and head above it were in some danger of sundry kicks. The sides were headed by captains; and when the game was at a crisis nothing could exceed the daring with which the boys rushed in to maintain an advantage or to repel a strong attack from the other side, amidst “the thunder of the captains and the shouting.”

At one time the game of foot-ball was scarcely ever played except in the schools. Some years ago, however, clubs were formed in the neighborhoods of the large cities, and these clubs soon began to agitate for the formation of rules which should govern the play all over England. They also desired to exclude the hacking, mauling, and tripping in practice at the schools, as well as do away with the “bully” and “hot” with which the game began, and the scrimmage at the effort to “have it down” when it went behind the goal-posts. The schools were called upon to come into a convention which should be empowered to enact one set of rules for all England. The lads were unwilling to send delegates to a convention with full powers. Each school was willing enough that there should be uniform rules all over England, provided they were the ancient rules of its own school. Eton wanted the carrying of the ball by hand put down; Rugby insisted that the practice and the fierce struggles resulting from it made the best of the game; other schools clung to what was peculiar in their methods of play; and they all united in declaring that they would have nothing to do with such a reform as that proposed by the city clubs. A hot controversy arose. The city clubs declared that the game at the schools, particularly at Rugby, was brutal, and that boys were often compelled to limp out of action, lame from kicks received in the “hot” or the “have-it-down.” The school-boys retorted by calling the clubmen “milksops,” and declaring that the game they proposed was effeminate.

The clubs at last promised to agree to rules by which it should be lawful to kick at whoever had the ball in play, and pointed out the absurdity of two boys kicking away at each other’s shins at one end of the field, while the ball was at the other. But these efforts to induce the schools to come into council and give up the rugged beauties of foot-ball, as they had been used to play it, totally failed. To the arguments against kicking and hacking, they replied: “We don’t consider a kick on the shins, or a fall by the trip, a very dreadful thing. If we get kicked or thrown at our game, and like it all the better for these chances, shall we change it to please you? Your shins are not hurt; you are not down in heaps in our scrimmages; and we, who have always played in that way, are of opinion that we should not like your soft game half as well.” To a last appeal to come into a convention at which a committee of collegians from Oxford and Cambridge should be appointed to draw up a code, the school-boys replied that they would not trust the collegians. Foot-ball was not played at the universities, but only at the schools. And the Rugby boys finally declared that they would agree to no rules, not even if drawn up by the Lord Chief Justice of England, which should abolish the “bully” and the “scrimmage” at the “have-it-down.”

Thereupon the clubs acted without the schools. Delegates assembled at the Free-Masons’ Tavern, on the 8th of May, 1866, and a set of rules were adopted. I shall give these, and point out the difference between the game as played by them and that under the various rules of the chief schools.

Rule 1. The distance between the goals shall not be more than two hundred yards; the width of the playing space one hundred and fifty yards, to be measured on each side of a line drawn through the centre of the goals. The goal-posts shall be seven yards apart.

The height is not mentioned, and there is no provision for a cross-bar which was in use at some of the schools, and over or under which, as the case might be, the ball had to be kicked to win a goal.

Rule 2. The captains on each side shall toss for choice of goal. The side losing the toss, or losing a goal, shall have the kick-off from the centre-point between the goals. After a goal is kicked, the sides shall change ends.

This rule abolished the beloved “bully” or “hot” of the Rugby boys. The captain who won the toss, of course, chose the goal which had the wind at the backs of his players, and in the faces of their opponents. At the schools, the play would begin with the “bully” round the ball in the centre, until one side was forced to give way by reason of its line being broken and the ball forced through. In place of this, by the rule as given above, the winners of the toss must have a kick-off, which is not to be interfered with, though the ball may be stopped, if the other side can stop it, at five yards from the kicking-off place.

Rule 3. A goal must be kicked fairly between the posts, without touching either of them, or any portion of the person of one of the opposing players. In case of the ball being forced through the goal-posts in a scrimmage, a goal shall be awarded, but not if the ball is forced through with the hand or arm.

After all, it seems that the clubs have included a scrimmage as lawful when a desperate effort is made by one side to win a goal, and by the other to resist it. If the ball is sent through by a clean kick, and one of the defenders touches it on its passage ever so slightly, it is no goal. But if half a dozen of them touch it in the scrimmage at the line of goal, it will still count as a goal, if forced through. The school-boys had always said, “No scrimmage, no foot-ball!” and had declared that girls might as well play it, if the scrimmage was left out. I dare say there was some chuckling at the schools, when they found that the convention had been unable to devise a game of foot-ball without it.

Rule 4. Two posts, to be called the kick-off posts, shall be erected at a distance of twenty yards on each side of the goal-posts, and in a straight line with them.

These posts, the use of which is explained in the next rule, were unknown to the schools; they are for that part of the play devised to supersede the “have-it-down” at Rugby, and the struggle for a “rouge” at Eton.

Rule 5. In case the ball is kicked behind goal, any one of the side behind whose goal it is kicked may bring it twenty yards in front of any portion of the space between the kick-off posts, and shall kick it towards the opposite goal.

This is how they got rid of the famous “have-it-down” at Rugby, and “touch-it-down” for a rouge at Eton. Instead of the desperate struggle which followed to touch it down when it went behind the goal, this rule provides that, by the mere fact of going behind, it shall be the property of the defenders of that goal for a free kick, at a point twenty yards in front of the goal-posts, and anywhere not more than twenty-three yards and a half from the centre-line of the playing-ground.

Rule 6. Any player catching the ball directly from the foot or leg may call, “Mark!” He is then to have a free kick from any spot in a line with his mark and the centre of his opponents’ goal-posts; no player being allowed to come inside the spot marked, or within five yards in any other direction.

This rule is drawn in a bungling way. “Any spot in a line with his mark and the centre of his opponents’ goal-posts,” might be claimed to include a place within six inches of the line between the goal-posts, if the ball had been caught, and the player had called his mark when on the centre-line of the playing-ground. The rule should have said, any spot in a line with his mark and the centre-line of the playing-ground, drawn through the centre of the goal-ground.

Rule 7. Tripping and hacking are strictly prohibited. Pushing with the hands or body is allowed when any player is in rapid motion. Holding is only allowed while a player has the ball in hand, except in the case provided in Rule 6.

It should have said, that there could be no holding at all when there is a clean catch from the foot or leg, and the catcher calls his mark. The first part of this rule is not likely to do away with hacking and tripping altogether. When a player sees an opponent just going to kick at the ball, it is not in human nature—at any rate not in school-boy nature—to pause within distance, and not kick too. It is incompatible with the first principle of the game. One has as much right to kick as another, and a third as much right as any two. Now if three kick at once at the ball, shins will be in danger of hacking. If this prohibition extends to hacking while the ball is being kicked at in the centre of a group of players, it must needs be disregarded, for one side is not going to stand still while the other side kicks the ball.

Rule 8. The ball may be taken in hand at any time, but not carried farther than is necessary for a kick; and no player shall run with the ball unless he strikes it against the ground in every five or six yards.

It would have been better to enact that the ball should not be taken in hand at all, except in case of the catch and mark.

Rule 9. When a ball goes out of bounds, it shall be brought back to the point where it crossed the boundary line, and thrown in at right angles with that line.

It would have been well to enact here, that the ball shall be thrown in by one of the umpires.

Rule 10. The ball, while in play, may under no circumstances be thrown.

Rule 11. In case of deliberate infringement of any of the above rules, the captain of the opposite side may claim that one of his party shall have a free kick from the place where the breach of the rule was made.

Whether the claim is well founded is of course to be decided by the umpires, or rather by the umpire that was nearest to the place where the alleged deliberate infringement of the rule took place. When the player has a free kick for this cause, it is to be like that after a catch, in so far that no other player shall come within five yards of him.

Rule 12. Before the commencement of a match each side shall appoint an umpire, and they shall be the sole judges of goals and breaches of rules. The nearest umpire shall be appealed to in every case of dispute.

With the above rules in hand, and after the description of play I have given, the boys who read “Our Young Folks” will have no difficulty in understanding foot-ball. Any doubt that may arise will speedily disappear when they begin to play, and they may take my word for it that they will greatly enjoy this bold, robust game. After a few matches between even sides of a dozen or two dozen each, they will discover the reasons which have made the boys of the English schools esteem it above all other games, even above the scientific game of cricket. The latter is in truth a beautiful game, but for dash, daring, wild excitement, and powerful exercise that hardens the muscles and gives wind that never tires, nothing compares to the hurly-burly of foot-ball.

Hockey is a game of much simplicity, affording a great deal of sharp exercise, both of the legs and arms, and much fun. The ground to play on may be like that of the foot-ball players, two hundred yards between goals, and one hundred and fifty yards wide. But where the sides are strong, and the space is ample, it may be well to have the distance between goals three hundred yards. There are no goal-posts at hockey, except to mark the goal-line, so that a goal may be won anywhere in the line, instead of only in the seven yards in the centre, as at foot-ball under the club rules. The means of play are so simple, that they are within the reach of all. The object to be driven home is simply a piece of hard wood, say two inches long and an inch in diameter. A cut from a dry, tough bough with the bark on is all that is wanted. One out of a seasoned hickory or blue beech sapling of the requisite thickness is just the thing. The lads who live in the West will have nothing to do but to saw a piece two inches long out of a well-seasoned hoop-pole. This piece of wood is called the “nun.” Each player has a hockey-stick, which should be straight from the hand end down to within about three inches of the striking end. There it may either curve, run into a knob, or make a sort of angle. I think the best and handiest is in the shape here given.

The thickness and length are of course to be according to the size of the player. A young sapling, with a piece of the root, may easily be got of the shape above given. A stick without the root will seldom be got of the right shape, and, besides, the root is tougher and heavier than the other part, and so better adapted for the striking end. Sides being chosen, the first stroke is tossed for, and the rules are similar to those of foot-ball, except that a nun is to be driven home by strokes of the sticks, instead of a large ball to be kicked home. The players may strike as often and as hard as they please, and it is a good point to interpose your stick between the nun and the blow of an opponent when you have not time to strike first yourself. There is great fun and excitement as the nun is driven here and there, backwards and forwards, and the boys follow in chase. As at foot-ball, no player is allowed to get before the nun and behind his opponents. As most boys are right-handed strikers, they must be on the left-hand side of their ground to give a good two-handed stroke to the nun; but it is a rare advantage to be able to give a left-handed stroke sometimes. The foot exercise in this game is fine, for the nun is sometimes struck away a long distance at a stroke, and then all hands but the goal-keepers pursue “hot foot,” that is, at speed. He who can outrun the other party gets the next stroke, and if he can gain time to set the nun up endwise, he may do so, and his blow, well delivered, will drive it the farther. The striking, too, brings into play the muscles of the arms and shoulders, and as the striker bends a little to deliver a hearty stroke, the muscles of the back and loins are much exercised. Hockey may be played on the ice; but in this game and in foot-ball great care must be taken that the ice is strong and sound. When there is any doubt about this, choose dry ground for these games, because in the rallies which are constantly occurring round the ball or the nun, ice that might do very well to skate on would give way, and in you would all go. I recollect once playing hockey on the ice of an ancient moat. There were about a score of us, and rushing together round the nun, after we had been some time at play, down we went through the ice. Luckily the water was not deep enough to drown us, and, scrambling out as well as we could, we ran home at a good pace. There was not one of us that caught even a cold by that ducking on a winter’s day. The run home kept up a good circulation, and stalled off all evil effects. Some play hockey with a round ball, but a wooden nun is the best.

Charles J. Foster.

DOUBLE ACROSTIC CHARADES.

CHARADES.

ENIGMA.

ILLUSTRATED REBUS.—No. 5.

J. E. S.

PUZZLE.

ANSWERS.

Alice & Fenella. It is a magazine devoted to descriptions of the postage-stamps of various countries, their prices, &c.—We have a short story by the author of “Leslie Goldthwaite,” which we shall print by and by.

John Y. AtLee writes us that the verses attributed to him by Hattie E. S. are not original with him,—that he selected them “without any idea of claiming the authorship,”—and that he desires us to contradict her statement, which arose of course from her haste in looking over what he sent her.

Cousin Ella says: “We read the ‘Young Folks’ after we go to bed, till mamma says, ‘Put the gas out,’ and then we play ‘buzz,’ or ‘think of a number.’ ”

Mary B. Everett. The enigmas are too long, and the verses, we are sorry to say, are not so pretty as those you sent us before.

S. C. A. T. “Salve” does not stand for “save.”

Oberon. Thank you.

Albany sends a note, signed by eight young folks, inquiring whether we will “set apart a portion of the Magazine for stamp-collectors.” We are not prepared to promise a special department, but any items relative to stamps, &c. will always be welcome to a good place here.

G. S. M. and others. We mean to take up the subject by and by, but we doubt whether we shall be able to do so this year. You know it will require quite a number of articles to explain all its particulars.

Fritz. Don’t you know that a peck-measure won’t hold a bushel? If we should put into the Magazine the things you mention, (and very good things they are,) we should have to leave out some matters which it now contains and which you like.

G. H. D. Not original.

Xerxes. “The Testimony of the Rocks” is not a poem, but a scientific and religious treatise.

Nannie, John, & Co. We have a rebus on that subject now engraved and waiting publication.

Krazy Jimmie. It will be sent you for 20 cts.

“The Story of Our Geranium.” To our surprise a number of another juvenile publication has been sent us, in which this story is printed. There are some differences, but the stories are to all effects and purposes the same; and as the other publication was prior to ours, we have been asked to state whether we copied the story. We did not copy it, but printed from the author’s manuscript. The only probable explanation is that the writer, impatient of delay in publication, gave a copy to the editor of the other journal, without consulting us, and without telling him that she was promised a place here.

W. R. K. The Falls of Lodore—written about by Southey in the verses commonly printed under the title “How does the water come down at Lodore?”—are in England, in the district known as the “Lake country,” because in it are grouped Windermere and the other famous English lakes.

W. P. Your words are not right.

Willy Wisp would be pleased to correspond with any of our readers who would like to chat with him about rebuses. His address is, P. O. Box 224, Malden, Mass.

H. F. H. No.—Shall you send for it?

L. L. Manuscript for a Magazine is obliged by law to pay letter-postage.—None so young.—On one side only.—Yes; for two new names and four dollars the publishers will send you “Leslie Goldthwaite.”—Don’t expect too much.

J. J., Fanny C. B., K. N., Munsen, Charlie M., J. F. S., Santa Claus. Thank you for sending.

Jack o’ Lantern. We do not know his age,—thirty-five years, perhaps.—We believe he was never in the navy.

F. B. J. has a couple of conundrums:—

“What is the difference between a ship and a man inspecting farming tools?—Answer: One ploughs the sea, and the other sees a plough.”

“What is the difference between a church-bell on Sunday morning, and a jeweller weighing gold ornaments?—Answer: One rings away, and the other weighs a ring.”

“Pater” says:—

“The following verses were addressed by one of your young readers at the sea to her father at home on the occasion alluded to. They interested one, they may interest others.”

We have only room for these:—

Theodore Stanton’s verses are only tolerable, but the fable is good:—

Helen W. Do all your duties, little and large, faithfully; learn all that is given you to learn; observe others, and follow their example in all good things; try to think for yourself, and to decide of your own judgment what is right and what is wrong. Beyond this, you can only be patient and wait for your place and your opportunity in the world. Unto most of us a task in life is appointed, as we shall sooner or later find out; but “they also serve, who only stand and wait.”—Your note deserves commendation for its neatness.

R. J. J. We have no information beyond that already published.

H. T. S., C. of E. B. B. C. A Latin rebus should be made up in Latin symbols.

Susy S. We have had that sentence once.

Box 123, &c.; Flora. We have done the line in a rebus once already.

L. C. Your definition would tell the story to almost everybody at once.

Ned Noddy. Sew is pronounced sō, not soo.

G. A. W. You sent no answers.

Warner B. You must not use the letter h aspirated in a rebus to help you in spelling a word in which it does not belong. “Hat” really will not do for “at,” any more than “pin” would do for “in.” We do not “make ‘w,’ ‘ore,’ ‘earth,’ spell earth.” Please explain.

Iris sends these pretty answers to the Double Acrostic Charades in our February number:—

C. B. W. The reason for introducing the articles in the exercises you mention is, if we understand the matter correctly, that the learner may be helped to a decision about the gender of the name by the gender of the article, which is unmistakable.—We do not wish to discredit the judgment of your teacher in the slightest degree, but if you represent him aright, he seems to undervalue the accents. These are often necessary to determine between words of similar spelling, and in the most advanced grades of Greek scholarship they are made to have an influence also on pronunciation. Since he considers Mr. Sophocles and his books as good authority, perhaps he will follow out that eminent Grecian in his views and principles of accent.—Let us hear from you again.

Mrs. E. J. R., who sends us a pleasant account of maple-sugar making, which we have not room to print, sends us also these cheering words:—

“Our little people are delighted with your charming Magazine, and we who have the care of them are perhaps just as well pleased.

“We are satisfied, for the companions to whom you introduce them are so true and natural, and instruction is so pleasantly mingled with amusement, that Christian parents need not fear to place your dear little book in their children’s hands.”

Fanny L. says:—

“I have a little brother who wishes to send an enigma to your Magazine, but is very busy just at present making a small water-wheel for a brook in our lawn, so wishes me to write the note for him.

“His name is Frank, and this is his first trial; so he is very anxious that you should favor him by putting it in the first copy you can.

“We like your Magazine better than any we ever took, and have recommended it to all of our young friends, so ever so many of them take it now.

“I think I will close this letter, or I shall not have room enough to put in the enigma.”

Just tell brother Frank, if you please, Fanny, that his puzzle was not an enigma, but a charade; and also, that we must lay it by, because the second syllable does not come out right,—“car” not being a proper term for “ca.”

Clara B. C., Periwinkle, James C. B. (good writing), J. W. T. (prints nicely), Kittie Fitch (what a cunning horseshoe!), Harry C. C. You must all be contented with our thanks for your favors.

J. E. C. Your spelling puzzle has been mislaid until recently. According to the best authorities, “peddler” is as correct a word as “pedlar”; “Sybil” is a mistake for “Sibyl”; and the precious stone mentioned is not “cornelian,” but “carnelian,”—from carnis, the paler varieties being flesh-colored.—What is the best way to chew tobacco? To eschew it.

N. C. B. When our set of songs is finished, we shall probably print some nice little piano-forte pieces.

L. T. K. Was it all spelled rightly?

E. A. G. It will be a long time before such another can be had; things of that kind are rarer than giants, and to find one would please us even more than you.

A Little Girl. “The Seven Wonders of the World” were the Colossus at Rhodes; the Pyramids of Egypt; the Pharos (light-house) at Alexandria; the Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon; the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; the Statue of Jupiter Olympius; and the Mausoleum built by Artemisia.

Willie P. McC. Did you write it yourself?

W. L. C. sends a copy of a little monthly paper, containing advertisements of postage and other stamps for sale by its publisher, which is probably to be considered as an exception to our remark that no postage-stamp magazine was issued in this country.

Corinne. Not yet, not yet!

Johnnie. We can’t promise, but we will see.

B. Reynolds. The enigma is very good, but we do not like the sentiment of the subject.

O. O. There is a good deal of truth in what you say; charades are better made from the syllables of one word, correctly spelled, than from a combination of words; but we must suit all tastes if we can. We shall print a part of yours,—not all, for that would be more than your share.—The rebus is well drawn, but not entirely good in its symbols. “Sail” does not stand for “sal,” nor “reefer” for “rever,” &c.

Alice. You have much to learn before you can appear creditably in public.

Red Star. Rather hard.

Violet. Because the author had ended it.

Here is a comical little tail-piece, for the idea of which we are indebted to “The Unknown Three.” It is one of a few picture proverbs that we have by us, and we wonder how many of our little people will guess it at sight.

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

[The end of Our Young Folks. An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls. Volume 3, Issue 4 edited by J. T. Trowbridge, Gail Hamilton and Lucy Larcom]