"Viver! ch'é un correr alla morte!"

and warn the hastening pilgrim to fix his thoughts upon the common and inevitable goal towards which his journey tends. But if the old Egyptian stones oftener express a longing after the rest to come than a regret for the life that is past, these modern stones on the contrary lament in wistful language the vanished light of day.

"The springtide comes, in sighs I fade away;
Glows my poor heart, mine eye is drowned in weeping;

Its head the floweret lifts each new-born day;
My head alone in endless night is sleeping."

No complaint can be bitterer, no sorrow more deeply felt or more vividly expressed than in these few words on a Persian gravestone but to complete their beauty they need the Egyptian refrain: "Because the spring comes again, I also shall come again."

Once while I was seeking in an Oriental burying-ground for the voices of the people lying beneath my feet, a tablet sighed out to me in like manner (though in somewhat different form), the same lament over the life that was lost:

"O sorrow, that the spirit
Its mansion must forsake;
The nightingale, love-drunken,
Must quit the flowery brake!
O! friends and happy brothers,
At times remember me;

A pilgrim far, I come not

My home again to see.”

The speaking stones are the speaking men themselves. Their words breathe the spirit and feeling of individuals, as they do of the race. And if, in closing, I may be permitted to refer with pride to my own country, let me say that the Prussian hero, Frederick the Great, reached an epigrammatic perfection in the inscriptions of his day, which show the keenness of his mind. Can there be a finer motto for a library than the brief words over the royal library at Berlin, "Nutrimentum Spiritus," and could any words, were they a yard long and blaz ing with pomp, do higher honor to the disa bled soldier than those inscribed over the entrance of the Invalidenhaus in the same city, which cry out proudly to the wanderer

as he enters or passes:

"Laeso et invicto militi!"

E. A. Washburne.

Lucrèce.

WHEN the widow Coe married Jason Carter she brought him no money at all; only a small, stony farm in Noppit, that had been her father's, and two wild boys of ten and twelve years' growth. Jack and Dan were hard subjects for a step-father to rule, and Jason Carter found his hands full. Naturally he was a quiet, gentle, but persistent man; in his youth he had run away to sea, and for fifteen years had been a common sailor, which had pretty well knocked the quiet out of and the persistence into him. In this time he had learned to swear, as a matter of course, though he had been strictly brought up, and went to church and Sunday School always. His mother would have cried her eyes out to hear him talk in this fashion, but she never did; his father would have used the rod, but he also was spared the trouble, for both father and mother died before Jason came back; and when he found they were gone he never went back to Tolland, but after he got tired of sea-going took to peddling notions about the country, and at last married the widow Coe and settled down in Noppit.

He had stopped swearing long ago; for under dear old Father Taylor's preaching

he had been converted between his two last voyages, and though profanity had become a habit with him, he had conquered it at last, after years of patient endeavor, and now was so gentle, and pleasant, and pious, that Phoebe Coe thought her last days would be her best days.

He had come to know the widow Coe from being an old shipmate of her brother, John Wires; who had also left sea-faring because he had injured a knee, and become too lame to climb rigging; so he set up a small shop in Boston, where he sold tobacco, twine, and other odds and ends; but he had been married and had one son, called Jenison. This boy was about the age of widow Coe's youngest son, for her brother had married soon after she did, while he was still a sailor; and when Jason Carter began the peddling business, John Wires had told him to stop when he went through Scranton and see his sister. The children were small, and their father living, when Jason first saw them, and they learned to look for "Uncle Jase" every spring and fall with delight, for he always brought them marbles, tops, candy, string, and made them bows and kites, sure passports to a boy's heart. So

when their poor drunken father died and the widow found herself left without a penny, she moved over to Noppit to live with her father; and when he died too, leaving her all he had, the farm from which he had scratched a scanty living, and she found herself alone and helpless, she listened favor ably to Jason Carter's proposal, for he was as tired of his wandering life as she of her loneliness, and married him. The boys were glad, for they loved him, and they never had loved their own father; and Jason was as good to them as if they were his own, though a certain thrill of emotion shook him when his baby daughter came, that never had troubled that worn old heart in any emergency of Jack or Dan. But then Celia was a girl; of course that made it different! Jason, when compared with his predecessor, was as mild and pleasant about the house as a spring day after stormy winter. He became a useful and prominent member in the Noppit church, and never was heard to utter a profane or impatient word. Jack and Dan loved him as much as healthy boys ever love anything but mischief and meals, and Phoebe was entirely happy.

True, they were poor; Jason had a few hundred dollars laid by, but the Noppit farm was too sterile to produce crops enough to support the family, so he laid out his little capital, or part of it, in a good breed of sheep, which found abundant living among mullens, hard-hack and huckleberry bushes, and proved in due time a profitable investment. For in those days dogs, the curse of New England, were by no means common in the country; there was no reason for keeping them, and farmers had money and mutton instead of hydrophobia and horrors. The wool sold well always and kept the family in stockings, for Jason's wife could spin and knit with wonderful rapidity; the lambs he had not room to raise were sent to Hartford and sold to the butchers, and now and then a fat old wether went to the meatman's cart in the shape of juicy quarters. But the glory of the flock was a big blackfaced ram, who terrified marauding boys and intruding vagabonds, and asked no better fun than to send somebody heels over

head whenever he had a chance. Jack and Dan had brought him up from lambhood, but he was no longer a lamb, and of his painstaking education only one trait stayed by him, a distinct and angry recollection of the rod that had not been spared on his early and somewhat stupid youth. To the day of Billy's death a little stick, shaken before anything, would send him, "head on," at that luckless object; and the boys often amused themselves by climbing the pine rail fence and dangling a small switch full in Billy's sight against a big post: the result was sudden and severe to Billy, and he might have seriously injured himself if Daddy, as the boys called Jason, had not found them at this sport one day and strictly forbidden it. Cruelty to animals was one of the few things that roused his choler and made him imperative.

One summer Mrs. Carter received a letter from her brother asking her to take his boy for a few months; his wife was so feeble that she was going home to her father's with the baby and a young child, and Jenison could not go with her for want of room. Mr. Wires did not want him in the city with him, at a boarding-house, but was willing to pay his board in Noppit; so he came.

Jenison Wires was a sharp city-bred boy, with very little faith in anybody's goodness. His father was a pushing, money-making, profane man, and his mother a meek cipher; he himself, at the mature age of fourteen, could smoke, and swear, and talk sailor slang glibly, for he had run about the wharves ever since he could run anywhere. Mrs. Carter was troubled and disgusted to find such a boy on her hands; Jason considered that Providence had sent the lad there for his good, and resolved to pray for him as for his own boys, to set him as good an example as he tried to set Jack and Dan, and to "deal with him," as he expressed it, "with a view to his eternal salvation." The boys thought Jenison was wonderful; he knew so much; he had seen so many things; he had such a pocket-knife, such marbles, such a swagger! But when his first round oath came out, Jack and Dan were startled.

"Look-a-here!" said Jack; "don't you

"Whe-e-ew!" responded Jenison; "I ain't a baby; I guess I'll swear if I want to, for all him; he ain't so pious himself, I bet, but what he rips out sometimes!"

in the condition that results to cows from eating green clover, and Uncle Jason worked over the poor creatures all day, without a word of impatience, though he said more than once: "I wish I knew who let down

"H'm! I guess you don't hear him; the old fellow keeps shady before folks, but he used to swear like a Botany Bay pirate. I've heerd pa say so!"

The boys were shocked into momentary silence; but recovered themselves soon. "I don't believe it!" said positive Dan. "And if he ever did, he don't now," added reasonable Jack; "he's awful good; he's a professor; he prays in meetin' and to home too, and he don't never scold, nor swear, nor nothin'. Scurce ever he licks a feller; he did give Dan and me one whalin,' but he'd oughter hev, that's a fact. Dan he told a thunderin' lie and I backed him up. I tell ye! we was sore for one spell, arter he found it out."

"Well, I know he used to swear aboard ship, I've heard pa tell more stories about him! They called him 'Still Jase,' to be sure, but when he got riled, the fur flew! I'll bet my jack-knife I can make him swear inside of next week!"

The pins were taken out of the ox-yoke, and never found; egg-shells strewed the mow while the family never could have any eggs for their own use, the nests being always emptied; the great gray cat's tail was singed to bareness, and her ears snipped, but Uncle Jase never swore or lost his temper; his scythe-snath disappeared, but he borrowed another; the grindstone was soaped, the hay-cutter broken, hoes and rakes disappeared when wanted, and reappeared when useless; his razor was mislaid and hopelessly dulled when he found it, and a thousand petty annoyances heaped on him in vain; he only said to his wife: "It does beat all, Phoebe, what's got inter things this week; seems as if I never was so pestered. It ain't in human natur for things to happen so; somebody's a doin' on't, I feel to believe; but I declare for't I can't see into 't a mite."

"I don't know as I want your head for anything, but I'll bet my knife against that cake o' maple sugar you've got in the closet, that I'll set Uncle Jase a swearin' before next week's over."

The boys were so sure that nothing could make Daddy swear, and so pleased with their first bet of any importance, that they accepted the terms at once, and Jenison began to cudgel his brains for means of tripping up Jason Carter's tongue.

One day he slyly let down the bars into a field of clover, getting up before light to do it; the two cows, turned out of the barnyard to nip at the road-side until Dan or Jack could drive them to pasture, accepted the bait, entered the clover, and rioted in its fragant crimson spheres, half killing themselves with greedy feeding. Jack found

plans accordingly. They had prayers always before breakfast, and the weather was so warm and the kitchen so hot that Jenison set the outer door open wide this morning, and stepping out, just as his uncle laid down the Bible, under pretext of scaring an old hen away, the boy opened a little side gate into the lot where he had previously driven the old ram, and laying a train of salt to a big lump on the doorstep, retreated speedily to the kitchen and knelt down next Mr Carter, where he had left his chair. Billy had seen the tin pan in Jenison's hand, and knew it meant salt; he followed the trail surely to the door, and having begun to nibble the lump heard an earnest and accustomed voice near by and looked up into the kitchen door. Jason was praying earnestly, and the rest had their eyes closed and heads bent; all but Jenison, who