convenience, real gipsies are accustomed to hang every cooking utensil, and all that pertains to the table, high up in their wagons. It is almost needless to point out how closely these ideas agree with those of many Hindus.-From "The English Gipsies and their Language.

THE MELODY OF BIRDS.-Listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland, on a bright forenoon in June. As you try to disentangle the medley of sounds, the first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud, harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch; and the metallic clinking of two or three sorts of titmice. But above the tree-tops, rising, hovering, sink. ing, the woodlark is fluting, tender and low. Above the pastures outside the skylark sings-as he alone can sing; and close by, from the hollies rings out the blackbird's tenor-rollicking, audacious, humorous, all but articulate. From the tree above him rises the treble of the thrush, pure as the song of angels; more pure, perhaps, in tone, though neither so varied nor so rich, as the song of the nightingale. And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself: now croaking like a frog; now talking aside to his wife on the nest below; and now bursting out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds sorrow, he himself surely finds none. All the morning he will sing; and again at evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn; but if his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mocked by the ambitious blackcap, it sounds in the bright morning that which it is, the fulness of joy and love. Milton's

"Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,"

is untrue to fact. So far from shunning the noise of folly, the nightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close to a stagecoach road, or a public path, as anyone will testify who recollects the "Wrangler's Walk" from Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, when the covert, which has now become hollow and shelterless, held, at every twenty yards, an unabashed and jubilant nightingale. Coleridge surely was not far wrong when he guessed that

"Some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love

(And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow)-he, and such as he,
First named these sounds a melancholy strain,
And many a poet echoes the conceit."

Prose Idylls. By C. Kingsley.

SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS.— It was during the spring of 1822 that Sir Walter wrote the dramatic sketch entitled Halidon Hill, for the copyright of which he received £1000. Mr. Cadell writes to my father on May 24:- I hope you will be pleased with what I am now going to tell you. I intended to have written to

you to-day on the subject at any rate. I have given Sir Walter, one thousand pounds for a poem! The thing is written, and I hope to have it out in a fortnight. The circumstances are as follows:-"He only came from Abbotsford on Wednesday. He called yesterday about noon, and seemed displeased at James B. not meeting him for the purpose of talking over a Dramatic Poem he has written. He had been asked by Miss Baillie to contribute a few pages to a picnic book, and wrote this, but it turned out too long-it will make as much as Lord Byron's Manfred or his own Waterloo. He said he would date it from Abbotsford, but agreed at my request to put his name to it. The Ms. was on B's desk when I went down a little after; I made my calculations, found that 9,000 Waterloo had divided £1,300; wrote Sir Walter a note, went with it myself, and closed for £1,000 in five minutes. He seemed much gratified. He wrote it in two days. It will pay us out and out, and all over will be ours, besides the copyright. I think you will approve of this. My, views were these here is a commencement of a series of dramatic writings - let us begin by buying them out. The author is so well pleased that I have no doubt of managing the others in the same way. I shall lay on 10,000. I am quite happy to have such a nice little thing to blaze out with just now at the heels of Nigel."-Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondence.

PILGRIMAGES. It is generally assumed, though very rashly, that pilgrimages are an institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing can be farther from the truth, however, for they are as old as history itself. Herodotus, "the Father of History," for instance, was an invete. rate pilgrim; at all events, he spent his life in visits of a more or less religious character to every temple and holy place to which he could get access in the countries bordering on the east of the Mediterranean, including Egypt and Asia Minor; and we learn on high authority that both Croesus and Alexander the Great made special expeditions to the shrines of the heathen deities for certain purposes of their own. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that Noah and his family in after-life did not leave unvisited the Mountain of Ararat-that sacred spot on which the Ark had rested; and if it had not been for the unfortunate destruction of all antediluvian documents by the Flood, we should probably have been able to prove that Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from Eden, went back more than once to the home so sacred in their memories, and that, if not in fact, at all events in wish and intention, they were guilty of the sin of "pilgrimage." But, seriously speaking, the love of associating places with persons, and persons with places, is deeply ingrained in the nature of everybody who has something in him or her higher and better than plain prose and dry matter-of

fact. Our Yankee cousins are business-like and commercial enough in their ways; but who of them that can afford the journey does not make a pilgrimage, once in his life, to Europe and Old England? and, on reaching England, what places do they visit? First of all, as the good people of Herald's College will tell you, they find out the old parish churches where their fathers lie buried; and when they have made a pilgrimage thither, they flock in shoals to Stratford-on-Avon, and Abbotsford, and Dryburgh Abbey, and Newstead, and Stoke Pogis, in order to tread the same ground, and gaze upon the same fields, and woods, and rivers which were gazed on by Shakespeare and Walter Scott, by Byron and Gray, and which they fondly regard as still haunted by the spirits of those poets. In fact, it may be said that everyone who takes an excursionist ticket to see Glastonbury, or Malmesbury, or Tintern, or the Lakes, is in principle as much a pil. grim as those who four, five, or six hundred years ago walked along the weary road to the shrines of St. Dunstan at Winchester, of St. Cuthbert at Durham, or of Our Lady at Walsingham, or rode, as Chaucer's pilgrims did, from the "Tabard" Inn along the via sacra of Kent, through Sittingbourne and Faversham, to the shrine of St. Thomas A'Beckett in the Cathedral Church of Canterbury. -From "Gentleman's Magazine."

CLEVER EXCUSES.-Palmer the actor would not have come under the ban as a man good at excuse-making. One day, while busy in his garden at Kentish-town, he was stung in the eye by a wasp, with such effect that he was obliged to send word to the theatre that it would be impossible for him to appear on the stage that evening. The customary apology on account of sudden indisposition was made by the manager. A pittite, however, was incredulous, and rising in his place, loudly gave his disbelief expression, until the audience, convinced they were being deceived, became uproarious, and insisted upon seeing the actor himself; so the manager was obliged to fetch him. When Palmer walked on the stage, the people saw no sign of any ailment, and hissed him unmercifully. As soon as quiet could be restored, Palmer, advancing to the footlights, addressed the house briefly, and, as he thought, to the purpose, with," Ladies and gentlemen, I am aware the odd effect my appearance here may produce after the apology which has been made for my illness, which I thought it hardly possible to describe by communication to the theatre." Here he was interrupted by shouts of "No wonder!" "Shame!" "What's the matter?" "The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, my illness was all my eye!" Of course, the impatient people interpreted the dubious expression their own way, and a scene of confusion resulted easier to be imagined than described.

For once,

at least, Palmer achieved the height of an actor's ambition, and brought down the house. We

do not suppose an army was ever yet defeated without plenty of proof being forthcoming that it ought to have been victorious, but it would be hard to beat the way in which a Yankee, bragging of his countrymen's warlike achievements, disposed of the Englishman's reminder that they got the worst of it at Long Island. "Well, yes," said he, "you did whip us there; but then, you see, in that battle the Americans somehow didn't seem to take any interest in the fight." This was as pure an invention as the story with which Dr. Chalmers's aunt averted the punctuality-loving doctor's wrath, when she came down late to breakfast. She laid the blame of her bedkeeping upon a dream, exclaiming, before he had time to speak: "Oh, Mr. Chalmers, I had such a strange dream; I dreamt that you were dead! I dreamt that the funeral-day was named, the hour fixed, the funeral cards sent out. Then the day came, the folk came, and the hour came; but what do you think happened? Why, the clock had scarce done chapping twelve, the time named in the invitations, when a loud knocking was heard inside the coffin, and a voice came out of it, saying: "Twelve's chappit, and ye're no liftin'!”— Chambers's Journal.

ANECDOTE OF SYDNEY SMITH.-Lord Houghton, in his Monographs Personal and Social, gives an amusing anecdote of the Rev. Sydney Smith, for the authenticity of which, he says, he will not vouch, but which seems to him good enough to be true. On being settled at his small living in Yorkshire, Sydney willingly assisted his neighbors in their clerical duties. On an occasion of this kind 'he dined with the incumbent on the preceding Saturday, and the evening passed in great hilarity, the squire, by name Kershaw, being conspicuous for his loud enjoyment of the stranger's jokes. "I am very glad that I have amused you," said Mr. Sydney Smith at parting, "but you must not laugh at my sermon to-morrow." "I should hope I know the difference between here and at church," remarked the gentleman with sharpness. "I am not so sure of that," replied the visitor; "I'll bet you a guinea on it," said the squire. "Take you," replied the divine. Next day, the preacher ascended the steps of the pulpit apparently suffering from a severe cold, with his handkerchief to his face, and at once sneezed out the name Ker-shaw several times, in various intonations. This ingenious assumption of the readiness with which a man would recognize his own name in sounds imperceptible to the ears of others, proved accurate. The poor gentleman burst into a guffaw, to the scandal of the congregation; and the minister, after looking at him with stern reproach, proceeded with his discourse, and won the bet.

NIGHT FEARS.-I then was a stranger to the whole host of night-agitators, ghosts, goblins, demons, burglars, elves, and witches. Horrid ghastly tales and ballads, of which crowds afterwards came in my way, had not yet cast their shadows over my mind. And yet I was terrified

in the dark, and used to think of lions, the only form of terror which my dark-engendered agitation would take. My next bugbear was the Ghost in Hamlet. Then the picture of Death at Hell Gate in an old edition of Paradise Lost, the delight of my girlhood. Last and worst came my uncle Southey's ballad horrors, above all the Old Woman of Berkeley. Oh, the agonies I have endured between nine and twelve at night, before mamma joined me in bed, in presence with that hideous assemblage of horrors, the horse with eyes of flame! I dare not even now rehearse these particulars for fear of calling up some of the old feeling which, indeed, I have

never in my life been quite free from. What made

the matter worse was that, like all other nervous sufferings, it could not be understood by the inexperienced, and consequently subjected the sufferer to ridicule and censure. My uncle Southey laughed heartily at my agonies. I mean at the cause. He did not enter into the agonies. Even mamma scolded me for creeping out of bed after an hour's torture, and stealing down to her in the parlor, saying I could bear the loneliness

and the night-fears no longer. But my father

understood the case better. He insisted that a lighted candle should be left in my room, in the interval between my retiring to bed and mamma's joining me. From that time forth my sufferings ceased. I believe they would have destroyed my health had they continued. Yet I

was a most fearless child by daylight, ever ready to take the difficult mountain path and outgo my companions' daring in tree-climbing. In those early days we used to spend much of our summer time in trees, greatly to the horror of some of our London visitors.-From "Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge."

WHAT ART Is.-" Fortunate is he who at an early age knows what art is!" It would be diffi. cult in the whole course of ancient and modern literature to find a sentence relating to art imply. ing so much thought and experience as this. Goethe felt that true knowledge of a subject so difficult and complicated as art, is, if we reach it at all, unhappily only too likely to be reached at a time of life when it comes too late to be carried out effectively in practice, and that therefore the fortunate man, amongst men to whom art is of any consequence, is he to whom this knowledge comes early, when it may light up for him the obscurity in which he works. And if we had access to Goethe's mind, such as it was when he wrote that profound and immortal sentence, we should discover, most probably, that he used the word "art" in a sense much more comprehensive than the sense that is commonly attached to it, and that, in his much-embracing view, the good consequences of a knowledge of "what art is" would extend to many spheres of human activity that are usually believed to lie entirely outside of art; indeed, it is not impossible that Goethe, like

other enlightened men of modern times, may have perceived that art cannot be understood, until so much of life and nature is understood that the mastery of this single subject implies at least an intelligent appreciation of almost every other subject.—Thoughts About Art.

WORDSWORTH'S INFLUENCE UPON MILL.— In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural ob jects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of

sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the peren. nial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt

myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.-Autobiography, by John Stuart Mill.

ELODIA.

O SUDDEN heaven! superb surprise!
O day to dream again!

O Spanish eyebrows, Spanish eyes,
Voice and allures of Spain!

No answering glance her glances seek,
Her smile no suitor knows;
That lucid pallor of her cheek

Is lovelier than the rose ;

But when she wakens, when she stirs,
And life and love begin,
How blaze those amorous eyes of hers,
And what a god within!

I saw her heart's arising strife,
Half eager, half afraid;

I paused; I would not wake to life
The tinted marble maid.

But starlike through my dreams shall go,
Pale, with a fiery train,
The Spanish glory, Spanish glow,
The passion which is Spain.