Finally he crossed. When he returned, there was much more hilarity than when he threatened the visit: Of General Lee, the rebel chief, you all perhaps do know; How he came North, a short time since, to spend a month or so; But soon he found the climate warm, although a Southern man, And quickly hurried up his cakes, and toddled home again. CHORUS. look'd pale and seedy loike, and ow't at elbows, ye noa; but that chap's gout a hat, and he's so weel dressed toodang it, I shud ne'er ta'en him for an owther!"' The only account of King Keder, the apocryphal monarch, is a poetic myth, relating an amorous design, from the frustration of which the town of Kidderminster, England, was named. It is as follows: King Keder saw a pretty girl; How are you General Lee? is it; why don't King Keder would have kissed her: you longer stay? The damsel nimbly slipped aside, Keder miss'd her. - [Kidderminster] As usual, we leave a bit for the children, and say, au revoir. THE HONEY-BEE'S SONG. WHAT THE BEE SINGS TO THE CHILDREN. I am a honey-bee, buzzing away A long way out of Richmond and the Con- Seeking for honey our hives to supply. fed'racy? For with "Porter " on the river, and The songs for the invasion just now ending have not yet been written nor sung. But they Up in the morning, — no laggards are we, will be, else it will never be proved as it Back to the hive with the store we are bringing. ought that "We air the greatest nation In all the Lord's creation; Speaking of poetry and poets calls to mind an anecdote of Macaulay : No idle moments have we through the day; Awake, little mortals! no harvest for those A Yorkshireman, on a railway platform, had Baron Macaulay pointed out to his notice; and, upon its being explained to him that the baron was an author, who was formerly known as Mr. Macaulay, he thus gave vent to his astonishment: "That's Measter Micowley, the author, is it, now? Weel, I awla's thought they Industry ever its own reward bringing. And listen awhile to the honey-bee's song. THE LADIES' REPOSITORY. GAINS AND LOSSES. By Mrs. Ada H. Thomas Nickles. THE CHAPTER IV. HE winter of fifty-seven and eight is not yet forgotten by rich or poor. Even in these short war days, so filled with terror and pain and suffering, we can look back on those, and see less of quiet and peace than in common years. Here the city was burdened with men cast out of employment, with only a week's, or month's, or possibly a few days', wages to keep the wolf from the door. Many manufactories had ceased employing any hands, had put out the furnace-fires, and locked up the tools for the damp air of winter to tarnish and rust. It would have been well could the master workman have taken the human tools these shops had used and kept partially bright, and locked them, too, with only an expectation of so much rust and so much tarnish, which would rub off with a little filing in the spring. But rust eats deeper into souls than oil can entirely remove. What wonder is it, then, that the city papers were complaining of the awful prevalence of vice; that the police-stations were full of wretches; that the judges were wearing out with sentences; that fashionable preachers swelled into denunciations of the sins of the gentiles; that virtuous aldermen moralSEPT., 1864 VOL. XXXIII. — NO. III. ized, over their oysters, on the moral degradation of the lower classes. They were degraded. The Rev. Mr. Sweettone didn't know the last, I'm sure. Why should he? His church didn't lift its spire from the bogs of the earth. His duty he owed his parishioners; he fulfilled it. He visited among them every day of the week, Saturdays excepted, enlightening them with his spiritual conversation. His parishioners didn't get into fights on the street-corners, from drinking cheap whiskey, nor get sent up to Bridewell for petty thefts and such vulgarities! The minister down there must be very lax in his duty, Mr. Sweettone thought, very inefficient and careless, and so he dismissed the subject. At the doctor's, one evening, their family-party increased by Galena, they had been discussing the subject. "I wonder if Mr. Sweettone don't congratulate himself on the superiority of his parishioners over those that Christ ministered to when he fed the hungry and motley multitude with loaves and fishes! John Bates broke in from a reverie, addressing Ruth. ,, "What on earth put Mr. Sweettone in your head, John?" questioned the doctor. I know what you intend to do, John Bates," he continued; "you're just getting ready some of your ultra humanitarian notions to hurl against those gewgaws, and expect them to be shattered into atoms before us. But it wont do at all, sir; they'll rebound-your balls like india-rubber. I'd be willing to bet a shilling you've computed to the last farthing, and know just how many swearing beggars it would feed. Shouldn't we decorate the house of the Lord, so that it may become a sightly and beautiful place?" 66 Yes," said John. "We should decorate it with Christ's love for all mankind, with his charity for all sin, with his pity for all sufferers. I'm afraid Mr. Sweettone's cushions and stained glass and carpets and chandeliers will take a woful shape in the judgment-day of his soul." You talk strongly, John," said the doctor. "And uncharitably, you would add, perhaps," Bates said. "I'm afraid I do. I'm afraid I'm getting harsh, and need the beam taken out of my own eye before I should judge; but I'm getting tired of waiting for people to come out of their selfish interests, to see the forlorn condition of the world which they have power to relieve." "But they don't see it," said Ruth, gently. "That's it; if they only got down into the mire once, they'd find the immaculate purity of their garments now no proof against the filth then." that disgust at the victims of the condi tion; for it is the circumstances that make the crime, and not crime the cir cumstances, almost always." "You're preaching heretical doctrine, sir, do you know?" questioned the doctor, threateningly. "Am I? It's the truth, at any rate. I tell you, reform the conditions, reform the times, burn fires in empty grates, cover bare tables with healthy food, and the men are reformed." "That implies work for us. That pulls at our bell-ropes, and unties our pursestrings, and we wont accept it, I tell you," the doctor said, doggedly. "Accept it or not, there the sin lies, but not the suffering, which is the mischief of it. If they were hurt, if they felt cold, if they felt hungry, if their children were driven into crime for food, they would feel compassion; but these beggars who shiver at their back-yards are none of their relation-let them shiver. I think we ought to feel thankful and humble that we are not as these wretches, not knowing how much worse we might have been. You know Grant, doctor?" 66 "The man from your foundry-yes.” He isn't there now. When the directors insisted on fewer hands, one of the lots fell on Grant, and he left." "What has he been doing since?" The doctor shook his head; Ruth looked grave. "His daughter was in the station-house yesterday for pilfering. The house was empty of everything." 66 Did she get sent up?" "No. Grant felt so terribly, I went and, as it was a first offence, got her off." "There's work for you to do, Jane," said the doctor," a pretty job of refor. mation." "But how? What can I do with her? How shall I begin?" questioned the timid little woman. "Fill her stomach first, and then set her to scrubbing; but, mind, keep your "Then these poor people are so degraded, so vicious and ripe for crime; even when the suffering is seen, the deg-pantries locked." radation accompanying disgusts one," said Galena. "I don't think we've a right to feel "I'll relieve you, Mrs. Gurnsey," broke in Galena; "Aunt Martha would be glad to take her, under the circumstances." "I believe I'd rather have found myself a place there than Grant's girl. There's selfish human nature for you.' "When you show me your selfishness, John Bates, I'll acknowledge-I'm homely." "I've a pretty good chance of remaining in your good graces, then, little Ruth," he said. And of getting into another's?" she asked. He laughed' and blushed. Ruth pursued him still further. "Confess to the desire," she said. "Very well, I confess." The winter sped away with the latest days of February, and the breath of spring came with March, like a blessing upon the city. It is wonderful what an infinitude of hope and promise comes with the spring. God knows when the worn old earth needs rejuvenating; and then come the soft, damp breezes, with their earthy smells, the blue, blue tint of sky, the glad running of waters, the clear sun, and songs of birds; and then the earth smiles, the aching heart breaks into joy-beats, and the little dead hopes of flowers and plants take root, and throw down and shoot up, and leaf and blossom into violets and purple pansies, —“heartsease.” The wheels of progress cannot always remain clogged. There are brawny shoulders enough always to put to the task of setting her going again; and now that the spring had come, the business-men, one and all, began to move with a will, and the machinery of business began to work with a new life. The spring days grew slowly into the summer heats of June, slowly to the two girls pent up in their brick prison, with their imprisoned elves, restless, weary, and dissatisfied. But that was only seven hours out of the twenty-four, and outside there were books to be read, work to be done, and long conversations that made compensation. Aunt Martha was never so happy as when her two children came, after school-hours, with a new poem, or a fresh thought, winding their delicious music about the plain thread of daily life; or Galena would spend a few hours with Ruth in Mrs. Gurnsey's parlor to help Ruth listen to the prosy but heart-full talk of the old lady. Galena, awakened to her duty, fully persevered in it. There was no word like fail in her vocabulary. She trod self underfoot every hour in each day. It was a constant battle; but the victory was certain. She kept her past from her; permitted no silent broodings; kept a cheerful countenance, and worked and thought of others always. Aunt Martha grew younger, Biddy more tidy and respectful, her scholars less awed, now and then even affectionate and thoughtful. I don't think she knew it, but unconsciously she grew happier herself, happy in teaching and praising Biddy, in amusing her aunt, in teaching her scholars, in her visits among the poor. Occasionally the old trouble would intrude; but she pushed it away with her present interests, and so lived on. CHAPTER V. Ir was on one of their June Saturdays that the girls took the cars for the Inlet, some eight miles from the city. The day was one of the fairest, cool and sunshiny. The far-stretch of prairie showed billows of grain fields, or the soberer tints of grasslands crossed with lines of brown fence, with the river, a brushwood of osier, and now and then a house. The city was isolated. A distinct line marked its boundaries; outside was the calm and quiet and tameness of the plain. The cars fretted along, and the girls watched from either window the stretch of green, resting their eyes with its freshness, until the Inlet was reached, and the train pushed on, leaving them on the platform of the station-house. city. She closed the book, her voice silenced, while the drum of the waves came in like 66 the deep-voiced neighboring ocean." "I used to think," said Ruth, "that the tale was too sad; but lately I have grown to wonder at the exquisite expression of spiritual compensation that pervades the whole, and gives a glory to the fulness of peace that closes it round." Galena remembered rides here years before on youthful birthdays. She remembered, as in a dream, the tall, dark trees, with the earth below them mossy in "First pure, then peaceable,' the aposmounds and damp with mouldering leaves tle taught," said Galena. "Life teaches and acorn-cups in indentations; the dark us that purity is to be arrived at only gullies filled with mysterious echoes when through suffering, which shall make us you rolled a branch down their sides, their peaceable,' that is, contented to accept evsources hidden from view with dense un-erything with a ready and satisfied mind." dergrowth, suggestive of lairs for dragons and monsters, and standing on the bluff, looking beyond the musical reach of the shore, the stretch of lake meeting far out the line of blue sky. Now it had become a little subject to the rule of man. The gullies had been cleared of underbrush and fallen branches; rustic seats had been constructed of stumps, and around the larger trees, and the woods re-echoed, now and then, to the laugh of a child out for a day's picnicking, or a boy emancipated from school, or the tones of a man teased out of his office by wife or sister, trying to attune his voice to its old tone with nature; but the sky was the same, and the breeze came shaking the leaves with the same motion; the sunlight fell in just the same lines of gold, and the lake droned out its weariness upon the beach the very same as then. Galena had brought Evangeline, that loveliest expression of woman, and in the low, full tones of her voice, read the tale, beautiful beyond all others, of affection that hopes and Endures and is patient," through all the trial of hope deferred, the sickening fear, the haunting loneliness, and the long wanderings of the Acadian maiden, until "It's "See that thin line of smoke curling up from the horizon!" said Ruth. a steamboat going out. Do you know I never have been twenty miles from the city, never have seen a hill except these bluffs, nor a country except the prairies around us?" "Never have seen Niagara, nor the White Mountains, nor the Beautiful River, nor the Mississippi, where Gabriel floated when Evangeline slept so near him he might almost have heard her still breathing, yet never knew his happiness was within grasp, and so he passed her by, and the moment never came again!" "I think that is the most thrilling scene in the history. How one hopes and lists for some hum of bee, or song of bird, or plash of oars to waken the slumbering maiden! how one's breath stops, and one's heart chokes, as the steady oar-falls carry the boat up and away." "The one balance-moment of both their lives, when even an insect might have turned the scales to happiness, of which they were so unconscious," said Galena. "I think each person's life lies where the fall of a feather, on either. at some time in that perfect balance, scale, determines the future." "Who knows it?" asked Ruth. "Faded she was, and old, when in disappoint- said Galena. ment it ended.' And her voice died into echoes of sadness when the long pilgrimage ended in the two graves in the heart of the busy 66 No, nor the poor Scotch girl who choked out her sorrow in the river yonder," said Ruth. "What is the story?" |