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had frozen it. Lorna was now so far oppressed with all the troubles of the evening and the joy that followed them, as well as by the piercing cold and difficulty of breathing, that she lay quite motionless, like fairest wax in the moonlight-when we stole a glance at her beneath the dark folds of the cloak; and I thought that she was falling into the heavy snow-sleep whence there is no awaking.

Therefore I drew my traces tight, and set my whole strength to the business; and we slipped along at a merry pace, although with many joltings, which must have sent my darling out into the cold snow-drifts but for the short strong arm of Gwenny. And so in about an hour's time, in spite of many hindrances, we came home to the old courtyard, and all the dogs saluted us. My heart was quivering and my cheeks as hot as the Doones' bonfire, with wondering both what Lorna would think of our farmyard and what my mother would think of her. Upon the former subject my anxiety was wasted, for Lorna neither saw a thing nor even opened her heavy eyes. And as to what mother would think of her, she was certain not to think at all, until she had cried over her.

And so indeed it came to pass. Even at this length of time I can hardly tell it, although so bright before my mind, because it moves my heart so. The sledd was at the open door with only Lorna in it; for Gwenny Carfax had jumped out and hung back in the clearing, giving any reason rather than the only true one-that she would not be intruding. At the door. were all our people; first of course Betty Muxworthy, teaching me how to draw the sledd, as if she had been born in it, and flourishing with a great broom wherever a speck of snow lay. Then dear Annie, and old Molly (who was very quiet and counted almost for nobody), and behind them mother, looking as if she wanted to come first, but doubted how the manners lay. In the distance Lizzie stood, fearful of encouraging, but unable to keep out of it.

Betty was going to poke her broom right in under the sealskin cloak, where Lorna lay unconscious and where her precious breath hung frozen, like a silver cobweb; but I caught up Betty's broom and flung it clean away over the corn-chamber; and then I put the others by and fetched my mother forward.

"You shall see her first," I said; "is she not your daughter? Hold the light there, Annie." Dear mother's hands were quick and trembling as she opened the shining folds; and there she saw my Lorna sleeping, with her

black hair all dishevelled, and she bent and kissed her forehead, and only said, "God bless her, John!" And then she was taken with violent weeping and I was forced to hold her.

"Us may tich of her now, I rackon," said Betty in her most jealous way: "Annie, tak her by the head and I'll tak her by the toesen. No taime to stand here like girt gawks. Don'ee tak on zo, missus. Ther be vainer vish in the zea-Lor, but her be a booty!"

With this they carried her into the house, Betty chattering all the while, and going on now about Lorna's hands, and the others crowding round her, so that I thought I was not wanted among so many women, and should only get the worst of it and perhaps do harm to my darling. Therefore I went and brought Gwenny in, and gave her a potful of bacon and pease, and an iron spoon to eat it with, which she did right heartily.

Then I asked her how she could have been such a fool as to let those two vile fellows enter the house where Lorna was; and she accounted for it so naturally, that I could only blame myself. For my agreement had been to give one loud knock (if you happen to remember), and after that two little knocks. Well, these two drunken rogues had come; and one, being very drunk indeed, had given a great thump; and then nothing more to do with it; and the other, being three-quarters drunk, had followed his leader (as one might say) but feebly, and making two of it. Whereupon up jumped Lorna, and declared that her John was there.

All this Gwenny told me shortly, between the whiles of eating, and even while she licked the spoon: and then there came a message for me that my love was sensible and was seeking all around for me. Then I told Gwenny to hold her tongue (whatever she did, among us), and not to trust to women's words; and she told me they all were liars, as she had found out long ago; and the only thing to believe in was an honest man, when found. Thereupon I could have kissed her, as a sort of tribute, liking to be appreciated; yet the pease upon her lips made me think about it; and thought is fatal to action. So I went to see my dear.

That sight I shall not forget till my dying head falls back and my breast can lift no more. I know not whether I were then more blessed or harrowed by it. For in the settle was my Lorna, propped with pillows round her, and her clear hands spread sometimes to the blazing fire-place. In her eyes no knowledge was of anything around her, neither in her neck the sense of leaning towards anything. Only both her lovely hands were entreating something to

spare her or to love her; and the lines of supplication quivered in her sad white face. "All go away except my mother," I said very quietly, but so that I would be obeyed; and everybody knew it. Then mother came to me alone and she said, "The frost is in her brain: I have heard of this before, John." "Mother, I will have it out," was all that I could answer her; "leave her to me altogether: only you sit there and watch." For I felt that Lorna knew me and no other soul but me; and that if not interfered with, she would soon come home to me. Therefore I sat gently by her, leaving nature, as it were, to her own good time and will. And presently the glance that watched me, as at distance and in doubt, began to flutter and to brighten, and to deepen into kindness, then to beam with trust and love, and then with gathering tears to falter, and in shame to turn away. But the small, entreating hands found their way, as if by instinct, to my great protecting palms; and trembled there and rested there.

For a little while we lingered thus, neither wishing to move away, neither caring to look beyond the presence of the other; both alike so full of hope, and comfort, and true happiness, if only the world would let us be. And then a little sob disturbed us, and mother tried to make believe that she was only coughing. But Lorna, guessing who she was, jumped up so very rashly that she almost set her frock on fire from the great ash log, and away she ran to the old oak chair, where mother was by the clock-case pretending to be knitting, and she took the work from mother's hands, and laid them both upon her head, kneeling humbly, and looking up.

"God bless you, my fair mistress!" said mother, bending nearer, and then as Lorna's gaze prevailed, "God bless you, my sweet child!"

And so she went to mother's heart, by the very nearest road, even as she had come to mine; I mean the road of pity, smoothed by grace, and youth, and gentleness.

RODS AND KISSES.

All blessings ask a blessed mood;
The garnish here is more than meat;
Happy who takes sweet gratitude;

Next best, though bitter, is regret.

"Tis well if ou the tempest's gloom
You see the covenant of God;
But far, far happier he on whom
The kiss works better than the rod.
COVENTRY PATMORE.

THE WOOER.

BY JOANNA BAILLIE.
It fell on a morning when we were thrang,
Our kirn was gaun, our cheese was making,
And bannocks on the girdle baking,
That ane at the door chapt loud and lang.

But the auld gudewife and her mays sae tight
Of this stirring and din took sma' notice, I ween;
For a chap at the door, in braid daylight,
Is no like a chap when heard at e'en.

Then the clocksey auld laird of the warlock glen,
Wha stood without, half-cow'd, half-cheerie,
And yearn'd for a sight of his winsome dearie,
Raised up the latch and came crousely ben.

His coat was new, and his o'erlay was white,
And his hose and his mittens were cozie and bein:
But an wooer that comes in braid daylight,
Is no like an wooer that comes at e'en.

He greeted the carlin' and lasses sae braw,
And his bare lyart pow he smoothly straiket,
And looked about, like a body half glaiket,
On bonny sweet Nanny the youngest of a'.
"Ha ha!" quo' the carline, "and look ye that way!
Hoot! let na sic fancies bewilder ye clean-

An elderlin man i' the noon o' the day,
Should be wiser than youngsters that come at e'en."

"Na na!" quo' the pauky auld wife; "I trow,

You'll fash na' your head wi' a youthfu' gilly, As wild and as skeigh as a muirland filly, Black Madge is far better and fitter for you." He hemm'd and he haw'd, and he screw'd in his mouth,

And he squeezed his blue bonnet his twa hands be tween;

For wooers that come when the sun's in the south Are mair aukwart than wooers that come at e'en.

"Black Madge she is prudent."-"What's that to me” "She is eident and sober, has sense in her noddle, Is douce and respeckit."-"I care na a bodle, I'll baulk na' my luive, and my fancy's free."

Madge toss'd back her head wi' a saucy slight, And Nanny ran laughing out to the green; For wooers that come when the sun shines bright Are no like the wooers that come at e'en.

Awa' flung the laird and loud muttered he,

"All the daughters of Eve, between Orkney and Tweed O,

Black and fair, young and old, dame, damsel, and widow,

May gang wi' their pride to the deil for me!"
But the auld gudewife and her mays sae tight,
For a' his loud banning cared little, I ween;
For an wooer that comes in braid daylight
Is no like an wooer that comes at e'en.

STRAY THOUGHTS.

BY JEAN PAUL F. RICHTER.

Complaint of the Bird in a Darkened Cage. "Ah!" the imprisoned bird, "how unhappy were I in my eternal night, but for those melodious tones which sometimes make their way to me like beams of light from afar, and cheer my gloomy day. But I will myself repeat these heavenly melodies like an echo, until I have stamped them in my heart; and then I shall be able to bring comfort to myself in my darkness!" Thus spoke the little warbler, and soon had learned the sweet airs that were sung to it with voice and instrument. That done, the curtain was raised; for the darkness had been purposely contrived to assist in its instruction. O man! how often dost thou complain of overshadowing grief and of darkness resting upon thy days! And yet what cause for complaint, unless indeed thou hast failed to learn wisdom from suffering?-For is not the whole sum of human life a veiling and an obscuring of the immortal spirit of man? Then first, when the fleshly curtain falls away, may it soar upwards into a region of happier melodies!

On the Death of Young Children.-Ephemera die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever sported in the beams of the morning sun.1 Happier are ye, little human ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn, and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life; hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms; and fell asleep in innocence, before yet the morning dew was exhaled!

The Prophetic Dew-drops.—A delicate child, pale, and prematurely wise, was complaining, on a hot morning, that the poor dew-drops had been too hastily snatched away, and not allowed to glitter on the flowers, like other happier dew-drops, that live the whole night through, and sparkle in the moonlight and through the morning onwards to noonday: "The sun," said the child, "has chased them away with his heat or swallowed them

1 Some class of ephemeral insects are born about five o'clock in the afternoon, and die before midnight-supposing them to live to old age.

* If the dew is evaporated immediately upon the sunrising, rain and storm follow in the afternoon; but, if it stays and glitters for a long time after sunrise, the day continues fair.

in his wrath." Soon after came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards. "See," said he, "there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set-a glittering jewellery in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my child, thou art taught, that what withers upon earth blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words: for soon after, the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dew-drop into heaven.

Female Tongues. -Hippil, the author of the book Upon Marriage, says "A woman that does not talk must be a stupid woman. But Hippil is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent amongst women; and again, the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other, except amongst men. In general, the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women-that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when light is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labours: sedentary artisans as tailors, shoemakers, weavers

have this habit, as well as hypochondriacal tendencies, in common with women. -Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk double their share-even because they work.

Forgiveness. Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation. Our weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly-being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest, the man who has pierced thy heart stands to thee in the relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the mussel, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl.

Great Men. The graves of the best men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the graves of the Hernhuters (the Moravian Brethren) level, and undistinguishable from the universal earth: and if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three cornertrees of earth-the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom-shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods

of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun. Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue-and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of nameless heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the one hero, whose name is embalmed, bleedingconquering and resplendent. The grandest of herioc deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy. And because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex, and because she dips her pen only in blood-therefore is it that, in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world, our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and noble than in our own.

The Grandeur of Man in his Littleness.Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapour and a bubble-were it not that he felt himself to be

So.

That it is possible for him to harbour such a feeling-this, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, this is it which makes him the immortal creature that he is.

Night. The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night, for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened-viz. that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought, in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us in the night, as lights and flames; even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the day time appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.

The Stars.-Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth vaulted over by a material arch -solid and impervious.

Martyrdom. To die for truth-is not to die for one's country, but to die for the world. Truth, like the Venus di Medici, will pass down in thirty fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them into a goddess.-Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! that now stands half below the earth-made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses, will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be fixed in the grave of a martyr.

The Quarrels of Friends.--Why is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for this reason it is because all passions feel their object to be as eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness it is, that we, hard fields of ice, shock together so harshly, whilst all the while, under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years, we are rapidly dissolv ing.

Dreaming.-But for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tesselated with flowers and jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents, friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep-the ante-chamber of the grave-were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live in the other world.

Dignity of Man in Self-sacrifice.-That for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defence of her child; in short, only for the nobility within us-only for virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this nobility -this virtue-presents different phases: with the Christian martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honour; with the republican, it is liberty.

Fancy.-Fancy can lay only the past and the future under her copying paper; and every actual presence of the object sets limits to her power: just as water distilled from roses, atcording to the old naturalists, lost its power exactly at the periodical blooming of the

rose.

Derham remarks, in his Physico-theology, that the deaf hear best in the midst of noise: as, for instance, during the ringing of bells, &c. This must be the reason that the thundering of drums, cannons, &c., accompany the entrance into cities of princes and ministers, who are generally rather deaf, in order that they may the better hear the petitions and complaints of the people.

-Translated by T. D. Quincy,

THE SEED AND FRUIT.

BY LEWIS KINGSLEY.

'Tis not its blood that bursts the vine
When in the press it's trampled on,
But healing sacramental wine,
The Holy Grail-the cup divine-
Christ's life, free-given for our own.

'Tis not with angry stroke but kind,

The sculptor hews the marble stone; His blows, their scars, if we will mind, But loose the angel there confined

An angel from a shapeless stone!

'Twas not in wrath, the psalmist old,

His inspired hand swept o'er the strings And vexed his harp with beatings bold: A purer, holier music rolled

E'en from its sharpest quiverings.

And thus in all the world's great round, When we its meaning full divineFrom fiercest twangs the sweetest sound; By sharpest strokes the soul unbound; From sorest bruise the sweetest wine.

So to the faith now tossed with fear

All seeming ills shall prove to be Each one the seed for harvests near: "Though Christ was dead, he is not here;" There needs the cross, the funeral bier, Ere we the resurrection see.

Harper's Magazine.

DANIEL O'ROURKE.1

BY T. CROFTON CROKER.

People may have heard of the renowned adventures of Daniel O'Rourke, but how few are

there who know that the cause of all his perils, above and below, was neither more nor less than his having slept under the walls of the Phooka's tower! I knew the man well; he lived at the bottom of Hungry Hill, just at the right-hand side of the road as you go to An old man was he at the time that he told me the story, with gray hair and a red nose: and it was on the 25th of June, 1813, that I heard it from his own lips, as he sat smoking his pipe under the old poplar tree, on as fine an evening as ever shone from

wards Bantry.

The Quarterly Review said that this humorous tale was 'a fine Dutch picture of nightmare, rivalling in its way the sublimer vision of Burns." It is from the Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland.

the sky. I was going to visit the caves in Dursey Island, having spent the morning at Glengariff.

"I am often axed to tell it, sir," said he, "so that this is not the first time. The master's son, you see, had come from beyond foreign parts in France and Spain, as young gentlemen used to go, before Buonaparte or any such was heard of; and sure enough there was a dinner given to all the people on the ground, gentle and simple, high and low, rich and poor. The ould gentlemen were the gentlemen, after all, saving your honour's presence. They'd swear at a body a little, to be sure, and may be give one a cut of a whip now and then, but we were no losers by it in the end; and they were so easy and civil, and kept such rattling houses, and thousands of welcomes; and there was no grinding for rent, and few agents; and there was hardly a tenant on the estate that did not taste of his landlord's bounty often and often in the year; but now it's another thing: no matter for that, sir, for I'd better be telling you my story.

"Well, we had everything of the best, and plenty of it; and we ate, and we drank, and we danced, and the young master by the same token danced with Peggy Barry, from the Bohereen-a lovely young couple they were, though they are both low enough now. То make a long story short, I got, as a body may say, the same thing as tipsy almost, for I can't remember ever at all, no ways, how it was I left the place: only I did leave it, that's certain. Well, I thought, for all that, in myself, I'd just step to Molly Cronohan's, the fairywoman, to speak a word about the bracket heifer that was bewitched; and so as I was crossing the stepping-stones of the ford of Ballyasheenough, and was looking up at the stars and blessing myself-for why? it was Lady-day-I missed my foot, and souse I fell into the water. 'Death alive!' thought I, I'll be drowned now!' However, I began dear life, till at last I got ashore, somehow or swimming, swimming, swimming away for the other, but never the one of me can tell how, upon a dissolute island.

"I wandered and wandered about there, last I got into a big bog. The moon was shinwithout knowing where I wandered, until at ing as bright as day, or your fair lady's eyes, sir (with your pardon for mentioning her), and

I looked east and west, and north and south, and every way, and nothing did I see but bog, bog, bog;-I could never find out how I got into it; and my heart grew cold with fear, for sure and certain I was that it would be my

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