May furnish illustration, well applied;
But sedentary weavers of long tales
Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails.
'Tis the most asinine employ on earth,
To hear them tell of parentage and birth,
And echo conversations, dull and dry,
Embellished with, "He said," and "So said I."
At every interview their route the same,
The repetition makes attention lame:
We bustle up, with unsuccessful speed,
And, in the saddest part, cry, "Droll indeed!"
Lo! the plain eater, whose untutor'd taste,
Finds health in salads and in homely paste;
His tongue proud science never taught to lave
In charbone cream, or gravy's poignant wave.
Yet simple cook'ry piles his earthen plate
With England's honest beef, an humble treat.
Guiltless of ortolans his spit whirls round,
Nor catsup stains his kitchen's wholesome ground,
Where no disguise affronts the genuine meal,
Nor Chloe tortures salmon into veal.
To eat, contents his hunger's nat❜ral call,
He chews no latent gout in forc'd-meat ball;
But throws to faithful Tray his dinner down,
Th' applauded beef 's reversionary bone.
Come nicer thou, come, let thy palate try,
'Gainst Moll's plum-pudding, Chloe's lobster-pie.
In every dish find some important fault,
The broth wants relish, and the edge-bone salt.
Condemn each joint not dress'd by learned rule,
Yet cry, if hunger fails, that Moll's a fool.
If fricassees employ not all her skill,
Studious to nourish, not expert to kill,

Snatch from her care the hangers, and the hooks
Redress her dressings, be the cook of cooks.

SLEIGHING SONG.-JAMES T. FIELDS.

Oh swift we go, o'er the fleecy snow,
When moonbeams sparkle round:
When hoofs keep time to music's chime,
As merrily on we bound.

On a winter's night, when hearts are light,
And health is on the wind,

We loose the rein and sweep the plain
And leave our cares behind

With a laugh and song, we glide along
Across the fleeting snow;

With friends beside, how swift we ride
On the beautiful track below!

Oh, the raging sea has joy for me,
When gale and tempests roar;

But give me the speed of a foaming steed,
And I'll ask for the waves no more.

SUNRISE AND SOLITUDE-WORDSWORTH.

The cock had crowed, and now the eastern sky
Was kindling, not unseen, from humble copse
And open field, through which the pathway wound,
And homeward led my steps. Magnificent

The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e'er I had beheld-in front,
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near,

The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light:
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn-
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields.

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasure tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude;
How potent a mere image of her sway;
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre-hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.

15

PUDDLEFORD AND ITS PEOPLE.-H. H. RILEY.

THE township of Puddleford was located in the far west, and was, and is unknown, I presume, to a large portion of my readers. It has never been considered of sufficient importance by atlas-makers to be designated by them; and yet men, women, and childrer live and die in Puddleford. Its population helps make up the census of the United States every ten years; it helps make governors, congress-men, presidents. Puddleford Joes, and fails to do, a great many things, just like the 'rest of mankind,' and yet, who knows and cares anything about Puddleford?

Puddleford was well enough as a township of land, and beautiful was its scenery. It was spotted with bright, clear lakes, reflecting the trees that stooped over them; and straight through its centre flowed a majestic river, guarded by hills on either side. The village of Puddleford (there was a village of Puddleford, too) stood huddled in a gorge that opened up from the river; and through it, day and night, a little brook ran tinkling along, making music around the 'settlement.' The houses in Puddleford were very shabby indeed; I am very sorry to be compelled to make that fact public, but they were very shabby. Some were built of logs, and some of boards, and some were never exactly built at all, but came together through a combination of circumstances which the "oldest inhabitant" has never been able to explain. The log-houses were just like log-houses in every place else; for no person has yet been found with impudence enough to suggest an improvement. A pile of logs, laid up and packed in mud; a mammoth fire-place, with a chimney-throat as large; a lower story and a garret, connected in one corner by a ladder, called "Jacob's ladder," are its essentials. A very few ambitious persons in Puddleford had, it is true, attempted to build frame-houses, but there was never one entirely finished yet. Some of them had erected a frame only, when, their purses having failed, the enterprise was left at the mercy of the storms. Others had covered their frames; and one citizen, old Squire Longbow, had actually finished off two rooms; and this, in connection with the office of justice of the peace, gave him a standing and influence in the settlement almost omnipotent.

The reader discovers, of course, that Puddleford was a very

iniscellaneous-looking place. It appeared unfinished, and ever likely to be. It did really seem that the houses, and cabins, and sheds, and pig-sties, had been sown up and down the gorge, as their owners sowed wheat. The only harmony about the place was the harmony of confusion.

Puddleford had a population made up of all sorts of people, who had been, from a variety of causes, thrown together just there; and every person owned a number of dogs, so that it was very difficult to determine which were numerically the strongest, the inhabitants or the dogs. There were great droves of cows owned, too, which were in the habit of congregating every morning, and marching some miles to a distant marsh to feed to the jingle of the bells they wore on their necks.

Puddleford was not destitute of a church, not by any means. The "log chapel," when I first became acquainted with the place, was an ancient building. It was erected at a period almost as early as the tavern-not quite-temporal wants pressing the early settlers closer than spiritual.

This, reader, is a skeleton view of Puddleford, as it existed when I first knew it. Just out of this village, some time during the last ten years, I took possession of a large tract of land, called "burr-oak opening," that is, a wide, sweeping plain, thinly clad with burr-oaks. Few sights in nature are more beautiful. The eye roams over these parks unobstructed by undergrowth, the trees above, and the sleeping shadows on the grass below.

The first time I looked upon this future home of mine, It lay calm and bright, bathed in the warm sun of a May morning, and filled with birds. The buds were just breaking into leaf, and the air was sweet with the wild-wood fragrance of spring. Piles of mosses, soft as velvet, were scattered about. Wild violets, grouped in clusters, the white and red lupin, the mountain pink, and thousands of other tiny flowers, bright as sparks of fire, mingled in confusion. It was alive with birds; the brown thrasher, the robin, the blue jay poured forth their music to the very top of their lungs. The thrasher, with his brown dress and very quizzical look, absolutely revelled in a luxury of melody. He mocked all the birds about him. Now he was as good a blue-jay as blue-jay himself, and screamed as loud; but suddenly bouncing around on a limb, and slowly stretching out his wings, he died away in a most pathetic strain; then, darting into another tree, and turning his saucy eye inquisitively down, he rattled off a chorus or two, that I

might know he was not so sad a fellow after all. Now, his soft, flute-like notes fairly melted in his throat; then he diew out a long violin strain, the whole length of his bow; then a blast on his trumpet roused all the birds. He was "everything by turns, and nothing long." After completing his performance, away he went, and his place, in a moment almost, was occupied by another, repeating the medley, for the whole wood was alive with them.

Scores of blue-jays, in the tops of the trees, were picking away at the tender buds. The robin, that household bird, first loved by our children, was also here. Sitting alone and apart, in a reverie, and blowing occasionally his mellow pipe, he seemed to exist only for his own comfort, and to forget that he was one of the choristers of the wood. Woodpeckers were flitting hither and thither; troops of quails whistled in the distance; the oriole streamed out his bright light through the green branches; there was a winnowing of wings, a dashing of leaves, as birds came rushing in and out. It was their festival.

Reader, such was the scene presented to my eye the day I first looked upon the piece of wild land upon which I finally settled and improved. I had just arrived from an Eastern village, where I was born, and "brought up," as the phrase is. A somewhat broken fortune, and breaking health had driven me from it, with a moderate family, to seek a spot elsewhere; and I resolved to try the Great West, that paradise (if the word of people who never saw it, is to be taken) where the surplus population of a portion of the world have found a home.

The change was great. But great as it was, I resolved to endure it. So at it I went. I procured "help," girdled the trees, put a breaking team of twelve yoke of cattle on the ground, tore it up, fenced the land, raised a log-house, and in the fall I had a crop of wheat growing, the withered oak-trees standing guard over it. My family, consisting of a wife and three children, a boy of eight, and two girls of twelve and ten, were removed to their new quarters, and I had thus fairly begun the world again, and all things were as new about me as if I had just been born into it.

During the summer, I had an opportunity of studying the general character of the inhabitants of Puddleford, and its surrounding country population. Like most Western settlements, it was made up of all kinds of materials, all sorts of folks, holding every opinion. More than a dozen States had contri