key up the instruments for the performance, strangers say, "Why, what awful thunder you have here!"

Now as to the size of the weather in New England -lengthways, I mean—it is utterly disproportionate to the size of that little country. Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you will see that New England weather striking out beyond the edges and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring States. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather.

I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof, so I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on the tin? No, sir; skips it every time.

Mind, I have been trying merely to do honor to the New England weather; no language could do it justice. But after all there are at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you please, effects produced by it) which we residents would not like to part with. If we had not our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries the ice-storm when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top-ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles, cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches, and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms, that glow and hum and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with

inconceivable rapidity, from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold; the tree becomes a sparkling fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels, and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.

Month after month I lay up hate and grudge against the New England weather; but when the ice-storm comes at last, I say, “There, I forgive you now; the books are square between us; you don't owe me a cent; go and sin no more; your little faults and foibles count for nothing; you are the most enchanting weather in the world."- S. L. Clemens.

JOHN BURNS OF GETTYSBURG.

AVE you heard the story the gossips tell

HAY

Of John Burns of Gettysburg? No? Ah, well! Brief is the glory that hero earns,

Briefer the story of poor John Burns;
He was the fellow who won renown

The only man who did n't back down

When the rebels rode through his native town; But held his own in the fight next day,

When all his townsfolk ran away.

That was in July, sixty-three

The very day that General Lee,

The flower of Southern chivalry,

Baffled and beaten, backward reeled

From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.

I might tell you how, but the day before,
John Burns stood at his cottage-door,
Looking down the village street,

Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,

He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;
Or, I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell in a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood;
Or, how he fancied the hum of bees
Were bullets buzzing among the trees.
But all such fanciful thoughts as these

Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,

Troubled no more by fancies fine

Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kineQuite old-fashioned, and matter-of-fact,

Slow to argue, but quick to act.

That was the reason, as some folks say,

He fought so well on that terrible day.

And it was terrible. On the right
Raged for hours the heavy fight,
Thundered the battery's double bass-
Difficult music for men to face;

While on the left where now the graves

Undulate like the living waves

That all the day unceasing swept

Up to the pits the rebels kept

Round shot ploughed the upland glades,
Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;

Shattered fences here and there
Tossed their splinters in the air;
The very trees were stripped and bare;
The barns that once held yellow grain
Were heaped with harvests of the slain;
The cattle bellowed on the plain,

The turkeys screamed with might and main,
And brooding barn-fowl left their rest
With strange shells bursting in each nest.

Just where the tide of battle turns,
Erect and lonely, stood old John Burns.

How do you think the man was dressed?
He wore an ancient, long buff vest,
Yellow as saffron-but his best;
And, buttoned over his manly breast,

Was a bright blue coat with a rolling collar,
And large gilt buttons-size of a dollar-
With tails that country-folk called "swaller."
He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
White as the locks on which it sat.
Never had such a sight been seen
For forty years on the village-green,
Since John Burns was a country beau,
And went to the "quilting" long ago.

Close at his elbows all that day
Veterans of the Peninsula,

Sunburnt and bearded, charged away,

And striplings, downy of lip and chin,

Clerks that the Home Guard mustered in,

Glanced as they passed at the hat he wore,
Then at the rifle his right hand bore;
And hailed him from out their youthful lore,

With scraps of a slangy repertoire :

"How are you, White Hat?" "Put her through!"
"Your head's level!" and, "Bully for you!"
Called him "Daddy"-and begged he'd disclose
The name of the tailor who made his clothes,
And what was the value he set on those;
While Burns, unmindful of jeer and scoff,
Stood there picking the rebels off-

With his long, brown rifle and bell-crown hat,
And the swallow-tails they were laughing at.

'Twas but a moment, for that respect

Which clothes all courage their voices checked;
And something the wildest could understand
Spake in the old man's strong right hand,
And his corded throat, and the lurking frown
Of his eyebrows under his old-bell crown;
Until, as they gazed, there crept an awe
Through the ranks in whispers, and some men saw,
In the antique vestments and long white hair
The Past of the Nation in battle there.
And some of the soldiers since declare
That the gleam of his old white hat afar,
Like the crested plume of the brave Navarre,
That day was their oriflamme of war.

Thus raged the battle. You know the rest;
How the rebels, beaten, and backward pressed,
Broke at the final charge and ran.

At which John Burns-a practical man