case, the young ladies ended their controversies by alluding to her courting days, about which they could never draw from her a word. Mary was in no hurry to be married, as she was happy as happy could be;' and in no hurry were we to lose her, for a dark shadow would there be upon the hearthstone when she deserted it.

Julia was not exactly upon my hands; yet she did not spend the winter with us without 'making her market.' She was ambitious, and professed to think little of love. She had beauty, and knew well its market value. With it she fascinated one who satisfied all her aspirations s; one who was not rich, but whose family position and influence were far above her own. But he, too, was ambitious, and I had many fears that the spell by which she held him would break, if a brighter vision in the shape of gold should entice him. It was well known that he coveted wealth, and many were the whispers of wonder when it was divulged that he had knelt at the shrine which contained beauty alone. We will wait and see.

Ipsi lætitia voces ad sidera jactant

Intonsi montes; ipsae jam carmina rupes;

Ipsa sonant arbusta: Deus, Deus ille, Menacla!'- VIRG. Ec. V.

I SAW the rough-furred Winter in his arms
Holding the laughing Spring, who, with her brows
Adorned with wild flowers and sweet violets,
Had vainly striven to loose his cold embrace;
Yet as she strove, with such contagious laughter
As made the mountains to their summits ring,
The old churl peeping o'er her snow-white shoulder,
Smirked merrier than before, and held her fast
Around her loosened waist, till out there fell
From her sweet bosom what she there had hid,
Daisies, and king-cups, and the primrose pale,
And golden butter-cups. So, half in spite,
She fell to weeping, with her lily hand
Pettishly drying one eye, then the other,
Till he who held her, growing tender-hearted,

As men most stubborn in their natures do,

When women's eyes drop rain, straightway unloosed

His icy grasp: whereat she suddenly,

Laughing until she fairly cried again,

Leaped quickly from his lap, and o'er the plain,
Pointing her delicate foot amid the grass,

With graceful bow, and sweet face sideways turned,

Scattered her roses to the jocund sound

Of most harmonious winds, nor stopped to look

At the old churl, who, with his staff in hand,
Moved slowly toward the north.

'T was but a dream,

As baseless as the 'stuff' that dreams are of;
For there is nothing here that ever bore
The least resemblance to so sweet a form:
Nor, had I bathed in founts of Castaly,
Or drank full draughts at the Pierian spring,
Would I have dared to call this weeping thing
That moves so mournfully across the plain,
The blue-eyed April, whom the poets crown
With their accustomed coronals of flowers:
She looks more like some melancholy nun,
Whom Winter, like a cowled and gloomy monk,
Hides in his convent walls, but now escaped,
To say her mournful beads in drops of rain;
Or like some spirit doomed to walk the earth
For some rash wickedness still unforgiven;
Or like some fair OPHELIA crazed with grief,

Her hair adorned with straw and withered flowers,
Her face a vacant stare, and in her speech
The accent and the utterance of wo.

How much I wish I could, with a dear little kiss, hail you this bright Sunday morning, with a sweet breeze blowing from off the sea, the water bright with the sun, and glittering with his rays, but looking fresh and sparkling under the influence of a gentle breeze. It was just such a day as this, in the year 1817, when buoyant in spirit and full of the vigor of a young manhood, possessed of competent means, and with the wide world before me, filled with sanguine hopes of a life of prosperity, I determined to visit Cuba, and accordingly sailed in a small yacht I owned, named the Billy Pitt,' from the port of Anatto Bay, on the north side of Jamaica. The run across, from island to island, is usually accomplished in twenty-four to thirty-six hours, but in our instance, we reached mid-channel in about twelve hours, when we became perfectly becalmed; and the sun rose upon us the following day, shining, without one intervening cloud, upon a sea bright and smooth as a mirror. We lay thus, vainly invoking San Antonio to send us the lightest breeze, for three long days, when the earnestly prayed-for blessing came down upon us from a favorable quarter, and on the afternoon of the sixth day we anchored in the very beautiful harbor of Guantanimo, as named by the Spaniards, or Cumberland Harbor, as called by the English, from the circumstance of one of our line-of-battle ships of that name having struck upon a rock in the centre of the channel entering. The harbor, beautiful, spacious, and commodious as it is, was at that time entirely deserted, nor could the tiniest sail be dis• covered in any of its numerous little bays and inlets. We got out our boat soon after we had dropped anchor and pulled into a small fiver, the St. Augustino, which debouches into Cumberland Harbor on the south side, near the entrance. At sun-set we reached a small hacienda, or cattle-farm, and procuring horses, we rode about five miles further into the country, to a tobacco-plantation, one of the objects of my excursion being to learn the mode of planting, cultivating, and curing that plant in Cuba. The owner of the plantation was unluckily absent, and as some two or three days would intervene before his expected re

turn, and nothing in the person or manners of his manager during his absence promising me comfort or interest, I determined to return to the vessel and again visit the plantation when the gentleman Don Augustino Bernardez might be expected home. An Irishman of the name of Callaghan, had, I knew, a sugar-estate somewhere on the shores of the Harbor, and I thought I might find his whereabouts and spend a day or two with him. I had known this gentleman in Jamaica: he had left that island in some disgust, and had married a young and beautiful girl in Cuba; had established a large sugar property in this vicinity, and I was sure to receive from him the warm-hearted, cordial hospitality for which he had been renowned in Jamaica. The vision of the happy three days I anticipated to spend with my friend Callaghan, was, you may be sure, a warm and vivid one. Fancy pictured his wife to be endowed with all the beauty and grace of a fairy, the warm cordiality of the Creole, gentle, loving, and susceptible. I fancied her young sisters and friends to be formed of similar mould; in short, I pictured an earthly paradise peopled with earthly houris, and I could almost have fancied myself to become Mohammed the Prophet among them. This was my dream during the night I passed at the tobacco-plantation of St. Don Augustino Bernardez, and I impatiently ordered the horses as day broke, that I might rush to the scene of my dreamy happiness. By eight o'clock we were again floating on the calm waters of Guantanimo; but the little 'Billy Pitt' no longer remained in the loneliness we had left her in the preceding evening. Two long, low, rakish-looking schooners lay anchored just outside of her, and though our little vessel boldly and proudly displayed the flag of my own loved country, the courtesy had not been returned by the schooners. A few instances of the piratical atrocities which soon after became notorious, had already occurred at the period of which I am writing; and one of my own crew, a little, wiry, active, impetuous scoundrel, was more than suspected by his ship-mates of having been a free rover but a few months previously. This man, Calshrue by name, and a Dane by birth, was with us in the boat, and he at once pronounced the larger of the two schooners to be a cruiser of one of the newly-declared republics of South-America, under the pretence of which the piracies had occurred, and whose scarcely yet known and unrecognized flag covered atrocities, the relation of which was of the most revolting nature. As we neared the large schooner in our progress toward the cutter, for such was the rig of our craft, we were hailed in broken English and ordered on board, but I replied with only the usual' Ay, ay,' and ordered the boat's crew to pull for our own vessel, which they did with a will; Calshrue, who pulled the stroke-oar, observing to me in a low tone, 'They will fire at us directly, and we are within musket range;' and the words had not escaped his lips a minute when a musket was discharged from the schooner, but I think not loaded with ball. Civil, that,' says Calshrue; but we shall have it again directly and not so civilly.'

'Pull, my lads, pull !' was all I said, and the men still steadily bent to their oars, when a musket was again discharged, and the ball whistled as it passed over our heads. Calshrue then said, still speaking lowly but

distinctly I know those fellows, Sir; see their red bandas round their waists, every one of which has a brace of pistols, cutlass, and knife. Best not to anger them; get their bloods up and they 'll massacre every mother's son of us. I know them, Sir,' he said, and we had best board them and be civil.' The third shot then was fired, striking the gunwale of the boat, but fortunately not hurting any one. I then quietly put the helm down and steered straight for the cruiser,' as Calshrue would continue to call her, and we were soon alongside. She was a beautifully proportioned craft, about one hundred feet on deck, and with quarter-beam. She appeared to have been fitted with the greatest care and with a perfect seaman's skill, evidently not maintained, however, on the cruise, and her running rigging hung slack and in disorder; the sails but half-furled, and the decks dirty and unwashed, showing a thorough want of discipline in her crew, and something too of want of seamanship in her officers.

Her captain was a slight-made man, of twenty-two or twenty-three, a Frenchman, and, as he told me, named Vidal, gentlemanly in manner and appearance, and one you would suppose more likely to be met with in the salons of Paris than on the deck of a pirate, and in her command. He met me with much courtesy, said I was wrong to have persisted in proceeding after he had hailed me; that we had run some risk by our obstinacy, but was glad to perceive none of us had been hurt by the last shot, which he had ordered to be fired in advance of the boat, but which he perceived had struck her; inquired where we came from, what was our crew, what our cargo, and what our object in visiting Cuba. Having nothing to conceal, my replies were frank, and I soon forgot the prejudices I had imbibed against him and his calling, in the usual charm of his conversation. He spoke English fluently, told me he was not originally bred to the sea, had been in the French army, had retired in disgust, gone out to Columbia and joined Aury's squadron, who had given him a commission, then the command of the vessel he was in, and that he was on the coast of Cuba with instructions to harass the Spanish trade; but as the trade was protected by the British men-of-war, he had seldom the opportunity to do it much damage. The other schooner, he said, pointing to the one close to us, apparently a Baltimore-built pilot-boat of about fifty tons, was the only craft he had been able to take hold of; that he had run into Guantanimo with the intention to land her crew and passengers and to replenish his fire-wood and water, which having done, he would run down again to the main, report his progress to Commodore Aury, who was also a Frenchman, and probably again join the squadron; but first,' he quickly and brusquely continued, I must see what you are made of." I pointed to the flag which the cutter had hoisted, I suppose as the most conspicuous point, to her mast-head, and I quietly replied: That flag says, Touch me not, or touch me at your peril.' Vidal smiled, and said with something more sinister than I had yet observed in his countenance : 'Well, let us to breakfast, and then I will return the courtesy of your visit. I told him I thought it best our men should not mix together: that I was anxious to be on board the cutter, and if he would come