sion in sending people on errands and expeditions that are to end in disappointment, and raise a laugh at the expense of the persons sent. The April fool among the French is called un poisson d'Avril, their transformation of the term is not very well accounted for, but their customs on that day are similar to ours.

As Peter Parley is known to love a joke, many are the goodhumoured jokes sometimes played upon him, and it was only the other day that a lady threatened to make a fool of him, just as if he was not fool enough already. I have no objection whatever to be made an April fool, if it will teach me wisdom, and so I wrote the following verses to my intended tormentor :

Why strive, fair maid, to make a fool

Of one not wise before,

Who, having 'scaped from Folly's school,
Would fain go there no more?

HE Germans are a frank, brave, and generous people, fond of literature, and especially that kind of literature which excites the imagination, and developes the faculties of ideality and wonder. Their literature is full of stories of fairies, dwarfs, and supernatural appearances. Many of the stories to which they relate are dangerous to children, but some of them may be read to advantage; as the following, which is translated from a recent German publication, called the Jugend-Blätter, published at Stuttgart, and relates to the dwarfs of the Nine Mountains of Rambin.

These mountains are inhabited by dwarfs, who dance, and sing, and speak in the moonlight, and more particularly when the earth is visited by spring or summer. They are rather mischievous than

malicious; and are fond of alluring children into their po are then compelled to serve them in their subterraneous abo

this service is not hard, and, at the end of fifty years, by a law of the dwarf kingdom, they are again set at liberty. Nor do these fifty years add an hour of age to the captives; time and sun have no influence upon these realms of middle earth, and it is further said, that such people have ever afterwards been fortunate in the world, either from the wisdom they learned below, or from the assistance of their masters who have wished to recompense their servitude.

The unearthly beings who dwell in the Nine Mountains belong to the clan of brown dwarfs, and they are not malicious; but in two other mountains are white dwarfs, and these are the friends of all in the upper world. There are also black dwarfs, who work the metals with an ingenuity far surpassing that of man; but their hearts are evil, and they are never to be trusted.

I will now tell a story of these brown dwarfs in the Nine Mountains, which happened long ago. The editor of the Jugend-Blätter had it from one Henry Fiesk, who was a resident at Giesendorf, and who was well acquainted with all such matters. My young friends must therefore suppose that it is Henry who tells the story. The story is as follows:

There was once at Rambin, a peasant named Jacob Dietrich, with his wife and family. Of all his children he loved the youngest, who was then in his eighth year, and tended cows in the meadows by the Nine Mountains. Here the little Hans got acquainted with a cowherd, named Klas Starkwolf, a grey-headed man, whose brain was like a volume of ancient fairy tales. But if the old peasant was fond of repeating his legends, the boy was no less fond of listening to them, till at last his young fancy was so influenced, that he could neither think nor speak of anything but of dwarfs and gnomes, and golden