"ARE you writing for the December number of the Columbian Magazine?" asked a certain dear friend of mine, who came into my room just as I was sitting down to my desk yesterday.

Yes, I shall begin this morning, if you do not prevent me."

"Don't flare up, my dear; I have no intention of preventing or hindering you. Have you a subject?"

Yes; I was thinking of founding a little story upon the remarkable exploit of our village amazons the other day, but if you have anything better to suggest, my alms-basket is at your feet; I shall be grateful to you for any aid to my invention."

"I do not expect your gratitude. I know there are no people more tenacious of the old proverb, 'many hands spoil the broth,' than you writers. I was about very modestly-to make a suggestion. You are going to write a story for the magazine; the country is drugged with stories."

"No more of that, if you love me, Hal.'" My friend proceeded: "Suppose you abandon fiction for once."

"Why-my story is founded on fact."'

"Rather a small foundation," interposed one of those fair young amazons, whose brave deeds I would fain have illustrated. "Your foundations are like city lots; so narrow that you are compelled to run your structure far up into the air."

"I have, at least, one advantage," I replied. "This sort of structure does not betray its want of solidity."

"Perhaps not," resumed my friend, "but the unreality weakens the impression; so soon as an article is found to be a leetle mixed,' to borrow VOL. 7.-No. 1.

our Western friend's expression, the adulterating matter vitiates the whole. But to come to the point, it seems to me that at this closing and solemn season of the year, it would be well to intersperse the stories of a magazine with something better adapted to the December of our lives."

"But will our public take broth and biscuit, when all sorts of piquant preparations are got up for them by the cunning artistes of such works?"

"Try them. The late Mathew Carey, himself a doer of good, proposed that records of virtue in private life should be made. Such records might do something in this imitative world to stimulate the zeal of profitable emulation, or at least to awaken our confidence and hope in humanity. Pardon me if I repeat that however strong the assurance may be of a fact foundation, there is always uncertainty attached to a fictitious narrative. I speak for myself; on my mind there is all the difference in the effect of a real and an imaginary character that there is in the landscape of this morning-distinct, clear and defined in this brilliant sunshine-and that of yesterday, exaggerated and dimmed by the floating mist."

I sighed over my craft, but I could not but acknowledge that there was justice in my friend's criticism. My thoughts turned to those tenants of our new made graves to whom he had alluded; persons of no eventful history nor very marked character, but whose example, for that very reason, might better harmonize with general experience. They were hidden in their lowly estate and, like the lakes deep set in the bosom of our hills, they were a serene mirror of Heaven. And now that with the leafy veil that shrouded these, their natural types, their veil of life has fallen, it is fitting