livelihood by going out to families as an assistant dressmaker at a shilling a day..

AMONG the distinguished women in the humble ranks of society, who have pursued a loving, hopeful, benevolent, and beautiful way through life, the name of Sarah Martin will long be remembered. Not many of such women come into the full light of the world's eye. Quiet and silence befit their lot. The best of their labours are done in secret, and are never noised abroad. Often the most beautiful traits of a woman's character are confided but to one dear breast, and lie treasured there. There are comparatively few women who display the sparkling brilliancy of a Margaret Fuller, and whose names are noised abroad like hers on the wings of fame. But the number of women is very great who silently pursue their duty in thankfulness, who labour on-each in their little home circle-training the minds of growing youth for active life, moulding future men and women for society and for each other, imbuing them with right principles, impenetrating their hearts with the spirit of love, and thus actively helping to carry forward the whole world towards good. But we hear comparatively little of the labours of true-hearted women in this quiet sphere. The genuine mother, wife, or daughter, is good, but not famous. And she can dispense with the fame, for the doing of the good is its own exceeding great reward.

It happened that, in the year 1819, a woman was committed to the Yarmouth gaol for the unnatural crime of cruelly beating and ill using her own child. Sarah Martin was at this time eight-and-twenty years of age, and the report of the above crime, which was the subject of talk about the town, made a strong impression on her mind. She had often, before this, on passing the gloomy walls of the borough gaol, felt an urgent desire to visit the inmates pent up there, without sympathy, and often without hope. She wished to read the Scriptures to them, and bring them back lovingly,-were it yet possible,-to the society against whose laws they had offended. Think of this gentle, unlovely, ungifted, poor, young woman taking up with such an idea! Yet it took root in her and grew within her. At length she could not resist the impulse to visit the wretched inmates of the Yarmouth gaol. So, one day she passed into the dark porch, with a throbbing heart, and knocked for admission. The keeper of the gaol appeared. In her gentle, low voice, she mentioned the cruel mother's name, and asked permission to see her. The gaoler refused. There was "a lion in the way "--some excuse or other, as is usual in such cases. But Sarah Martin persisted. She returned; and at the second application she was admitted.

Very few women step beyond the boundaries of Home and seek a larger sphere of usefulness. Indeed, the home is a sufficient sphere for the woman who would do her work nobly and truly there. Still, there are the helpless to be helped, and when generous women have been found among the helpers, are we not ready to praise them, and to cherish their memory? Sarah Martin was one of such-a kind of Elizabeth Fry, in a humbler sphere. She was born at Caister, a village about three miles from Yarmouth, in the year 1791. Both her parents, who were very poor people, died when she was but a child; and the little orphan was left to be brought up under the care of her poor grandmother. The girl obtained such education as the village school could afford her, -which was not much,-and then she was sent to Yarmouth for a year, to learn sewing and dressmaking in a very small way. She afterwards used to walk from Caister to Yarmouth and back again daily, which she continued for many years, earning a slender

Sarah Martin afterwards related the manner of her reception in the gaol. The culprit mother stood before her. She was surprised at the sight of a stranger." "When I told her," says Sarah Martin, "the motive of my visit, her guilt, her need of God's mercy, &c., she burst into tears, and thanked me!" Those tears and thanks shaped the whole course of Sarah Martin's subsequent life.

A year or two before this time Mrs. Fry had visited the prisoners in Newgate, and possibiy the rumour of her labours in this field may have in some measure influenced Sarah Martin's mind; but of this we are not certain. Sarah Martin herself stated that, as early as the year 1810 (several years before Mrs. Fry's visits to Newgate), her mind had been turned to the subject of prison visitation, and she had then felt a strong desire to visit the poor prisoners in Yarmouth gaol, to read the Scriptures to them. These two tender-hearted women may, therefore, have been working at the same time, in the same sphere of

Christian work, entirely unconscious of each other's labours. However this may be, the merit of Sarah Martin cannot be detracted from. She laboured alone, without any aid from influential quarters; she had no persuasive eloquence, and had scarcely received any education; she was a poor seamstress, maintaining herself by her needle, and she carried on her visitation of the prisoners in secret, without any one vaunting her praises: indeed, this was the last thing she dreamt of. Is there not, in this simple picture of a humble woman thus devoting her leisure hours to the comfort and improvement of outcasts, much that is truly noble and heroic?

Sarah Martin continued her visits to the Yarmouth gaol. From one she went to another prisoner, reading to them and conversing with them, from which she went on to instructing them in reading and writing. She constituted herself a schoolmistress for the criminals, giving up a day in the week for this purpose, and thus trenching on her slender means of living. "I thought it right," she says, "to give up a day in the week from dressmaking to serve the prisoners. This, regularly given, with many an additional one, was not felt as a pecuniary loss, but was ever followed with abundant satisfaction, for the blessing of God was upon me."

She next formed a Sunday service in the gaol, for reading of the Scriptures, joining in the worship as a hearer. For three years she went on in this quiet course of visitation, until, as her views enlarged, she introduced other ameliorative plans for the benefit of the prisoners. One week in 1823, she received from two gentlemen donations of ten shillings each, for prison charity. With this she bought materials for baby-clothes, cut them out, and set the females to work. The work, when sold, enabled her to buy other materials, and thus the industrial education of the prisoners was secured; Sarah Martin teaching those to sew and knit, who had not before learnt to do so. The profits derived from the sale of the articles were placed together in a fund, and divided amongst the prisoners on their leaving the gaol to commence life again in the outer world. She, in the same way, taught the men to make straw hats, mens' and boys' caps, grey cotton shirts, and even patchwork-anything to keep them out of idleness and from preying upon their own thoughts. Some also she taught to copy little pictures, with the same object, in which several of the prisoners took great delight. A little later on, she formed a fund out of the prisoners' earnings, which she applied to the furnishing of work to prisoners upon their discharge; "affording me," she says, "the advantage of observing their conduct at the same time.'

Thus did humble Sarah Martin, long before the attention of public men had been directed to the subject of prison discipline, bring a complete system to maturity in the gaol of Yarmouth. It will be observed that she had thus included visitation, moral and religious instruction, intellectual culture, industrial training, employment during prison hours, and employment after discharge. While learned men, at a distance, were philosophically discussing these knotty points, here was a poor seamstress at Yarmouth, who, in a quiet, simple, and unostentatious manner, had practically settled them all!

In 1826, Sarah Martin's grandmother died, and left her an annual income of ten or twelve pounds. She now removed from Caister to Yarmouth, where she occupied two rooms in an obscure part of the town; and from that time devoted herself with increased energy to her philanthropic labours in the gaol. A benevolent lady in Yarmouth, in order to allow her some rest from her sewing, gave her one day in the week to herself, by paying her the same

on that day as if she had been engaged in dressmaking. With that assistance, and a few quarterly subscriptions of 2s. 6d. each, for bibles, testaments, tracts, and books for distribution, she went on, devoting every available moment of her life to her great purpose. But her dressmaking business, always a very fickle trade, and at best a very poor one, now began to fall off, and at length almost entirely disappeared. The question arose, was she to suspend her benevolent labours, in order to devote herself singly to the recovery of her business? She never wavered for a moment in her decision. In her own words—“ I had counted the cost and my mind was made up. If, whilst imparting truth to others, I became exposed to temporal want, the privation so momentary to an individual would not admit of comparison with following the Lord, in thus administering to others." Therefore did this noble, self-sacrificing woman, go straightforward on her road of persevering usefulness.

She now devoted six or seven hours in every day to her superintendence over the prisoners, converting what would otherwise have been a scene of dissolute idleness into a hive of industry and order. Newly admitted prisoners were sometimes refractory and unmanageable, and refused to take advantage of Sarah Martin's instructions. But her persistent gentleness invariably won their acquiescence, and they would come to her and beg to be allowed to take their part in the general course. Men old in years and in crime, pert London pickpockets, depraved boys and dissolute sailors, profligate women, smugglers, poachers, the promiscuous horde of criminals which usually fill the gaol of a seaport and county town,-all beat themselves under the benign influence of this good woman, and under her eyes they might be seen striving, for the first time in their lives, to hold a pen, or master the characters in a penny primer. She entered into their confidences-watched, wept, prayed, and felt for all by turns-she strengthened their good resolutions, encouraged the hopeless, and sedulously endeavoured to put all, and hold all, in the right road of amendment.

What was the nature of the religious instruction given by her to the prisoners, may be gathered from Captain Williams's account of it, as given in the "Second Report of the Inspector of Prisons" for the year 1836:

"Sunday November 29, 1835. — Attended divine service in the morning at the prison. The male prisoners only were assembled; a female resident in the town officiated; her voice was exceedingly melodious, her delivery emphatic, and her enunciation extremely distinct. The service was the Liturgy of the Church of England; two psalms were sung by the whole of the prisoners-and extremely wellmuch better than I have frequently heard in our best-appointed churches. A written discourse, of her own composition, was read by her; it was of a purely moral tendency, involving no doctrinal points, and admirably suited to the hearers. During the performance of the service, the prisoners paid the profoundest attention and the most marked respect; and, as far as it was possible to judge, appeared to take a devout interest. Evening service was read by her, afterwards, to the female prisoners."

Afterwards, in 1837, she gave up the labour of writing out her addresses, and addressed the prisoners extemporaneously, in a simple, feeling manner, on the duties of life, on the connection between sin and sorrow on the one hand, and between goodness and happiness on the other, and inviting her fallen auditors to enter the great door of mercy which was ever wide opened to receive them. These simple, but earnest addresses were attended, it is said, by

very beneficial results; and many of the prisoners were wont to thank her, with tears, for the new views of life, its duties and responsibilities, which she had opened up to them. As a writer in the Edinburgh Review has observed, in commenting on Sarah Martin's gaol sermons," The cold, laboured eloquence which boy-bachelors are authorized by custom and constituted authority to inflict upon us; the dry husks and chips of divinity which they bring forth from the dark recesses of the theology (as it is called) of the fathers, or of the middle ages, sink into utter worthlessness by the side of the gaol addresses of this poor uneducated seamstress."

But Sarah Martin was not satisfied merely with labouring among the prisoners in the gaol at Yarmouth. She also attended in the evenings at the workhouse, where she formed and superintended a large school; and afterwards, when that school had been handed over to proper teachers, she devoted the hours so released to the formation and superintendence of a school for factory girls, which was held in the capacious chancel of the old Church of St. Nicholas. And after the labours connected with the class were over, she would remain among the girls for the purpose of friendly intercourse with them, which was often worth more than all the class lessons. There were personal communications with this one and with that; private advice to one, some kindly inquiry to make of another, some domestic history to be imparted by a third; for she was looked up to by these girls as a councillor and friend, as well as schoolmistress. She had often visits also to pay to their homes; in one there would be sickness, in another misfortune or bereavement; and everywhere was the good, benevolent creature made welcome. Then, lastly, she would return to her own poor solitary apartments, late at night, after her long day's labour of love. There was no cheerful, readylit fire to greet her there, but only an empty, lockedup house, to which she merely returned to sleep. She did all her own work, kindled her own fires, made her own bed, cooked her own meals. For she went on living upon her miserable pittance, in a state of almost absolute poverty, and yet of total unconcern as to her temporal support. Friends supplied her occasionally with the necessaries of life, but she usually gave away a considerable portion of these to people more destitute than herself.

She was now growing old; and the borough authorities at Yarmouth, who knew very well that her self-imposed labours saved them the expense of of a schoolmaster and chaplain (which they were now bound by law to appoint), made a proposal of an annual salary of £12 a year! This miserable remuneration was, moreover, made in a manner coarsely offensive to the shrinkingly sensitive woman; for she had preserved a delicacy and pure-mindedness throughout her life-long labours, which, very probably, these Yarmouth bloaters could not comprehend. shrank from becoming the salaried official of the corporation, and bartering for money those labours which had, throughout, been labours of love.

She

"Here lies the objection," she said, "which oppresses me: I have found voluntary instruction, on my part, to have been attended with great advantage; and I am apprehensive that, in receiving payment, my labours may be less acceptable. I fear, also, that my mind would be fettered by pecuniary payment, and the whole work upset. To try the experiment, which might injure the thing I live and breathe for, seems like applying a knife to your child's throat to know if it will cut." * * * "Were you so angry [she is writing in answer to the wife of one of the magistrates, who said she and her husband would "feel angry and hurt" if Sarah Martin did not

accept the proposal.] Were you so angry as that I could not meet you, a merciful God and a good conscience would preserve my peace; when, if I ventured on what I believed would be prejudicial to the prisoners, God would frown upon me, and my conscience too, and these would follow me everywhere. As for my circumstances, I have not a wish ungratified, and am more than content."

But the gaol committee savagely intimated to the high-souled woman- If we permit you to visit the prison, you must submit to our terms;" so she had no alternative but to give up her noble labours altogether, which she would not do, or receive the miserable pittance of a "salary” which they proffered her. And for two more years she lived on, in the receipt of her official salary of £12 per annum-the acknowledgment of the Yarmouth Corporation for her services as gaol chaplain and schoolmaster!

In the winter of 1842, when she had reached her fifty-second year, her health began seriously to fail, but she nevertheless continued her daily visits to the gaol," the home," she says, "of my first interest and pleasure "-until the 17th of April, 1843, when she ceased her visits. She was now thoroughly disabled; but her mind beamed out with unusual brilliancy, like the flickering taper before it finally expires. She resumed the exercise of a talent which she had occasionally practised during her few moments of leisure-that of writing sacred poetry. In one of these, speaking of herself on her sick bed, she says,—

I seem to lie

So near the heavenly portals bright,
I catch the streaming rays that fly
From eternity's own light.

Her song was always full of praise and gratitude. As artistic creations, they may not excite admiration in this highly critical age; but never were verses written truer in spirit, or fuller of Christian love. Her whole life was a noble poem-full also of true practical wisdom. Her life was a glorious comment upon her own words:

The high desire that others may be blest
Savours of heaven.

She struggled against fatal disease for many months, suffering great agony, which was partially relieved by opiates. Her end drew nigh. She asked her nurse for an opiate to still her racking torture. The nurse told her that she thought the time of her departure had come. Clasping her hands, the dying Sister of Mercy exclaimed, "Thank God! Thank God!" And these were her last words. She died on the 15th of October, 1843, and was buried at Caister, by the side of her grandmother. A small tombstone, bearing a simple inscription, written by herself, marks her resting-place; and, though the tablet is silent as to her virtues, they will not be forgotten:

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.

BIRCH AND BROOMSTICKS.

I am sent with broome before,
To sweep the dust behind the doore.
MID. N. DREAM.

SUNSHINE prosper thee, sweet lady-birch! Softest of dews and holiest of showers fall upon thy tasselled sprays and trembling foliage, and ruddiest of morning glances break upon thy silver bark! And thou,

bonny broom, hiding thyself in the moorland hollows, how many belted bees have visited thy ringlets since the spring began? how many wanderers hath thy perfume solaced? over how many aching heads hast

thou shook thy rushy branches, hushing the lone wayfarer into Elysian dreams as he lay on the pliant moss beneath thee? It is in the greenest of glens and the mossiest of woody nooks that broomstaffs flourish,— on the healthiest of wild moorlands that the bonny broom comes to birth. Blue and golden flowers watch over them in infancy, and bearded oaks bend above their lusty youth. A broomstick! Are " proper people" shocked at the suggestion-to them, of the vileness and scullery-refuse which the broom is used to sweep away? no matter,-what is mere fuel to them shall be philosophy to us; and with the reverent stump of a superannuated besom before us, we will let the caprice have its course, and see for once what suggestions may come from a broomstick.

Were you ever young-of course you were, and made your first triumph before family friends by trotting, full speed, into the midst of little Jemima's muslin friends astride a broomstick, and had at least a hundred kisses from dear old Granny, who sat in the corner, and vowed it was vulgar to trot broomsticks in-doors, while she secretly loved you all the more for it. There, too, was the old Captain, in his skull-cap, and barnacles, and purple nose, who gloried in a romp, and yet, for fear of offending the young ladies, suffered innumerable pangs when he said, "Charley, you're a naughty boy, sir!" Well, that time has gone into the land of memory, and the broomstick is the only talisman to summon its pictures to the present.

From the age

That children tread the worldly stage,
Broomstaff, or poker, they bestride,
And round the parlour love to ride.
PRIOR.

The broomstick went the way of all toys,-petted to-day, burnt to-morrow; and to avenge the degradation inflicted upon it then, its ghost came back to us at school, inflicting stripes, and, in the compound of foolscap and pickled birch, torturing the affections as well as the flesh, and making youth's season of song and sunshine one of wailings and tears. The pickled birch-how barbarous in itself, and still more barbarous in its frequent and untimed use, marking more the phases of the teacher's temper than the dulness of the pupil's mind. Stupid old doctrine! to imagine that what the mind was incapable of grasp ing could be beaten into the body,-that to make an impression on the memory blood must trickle from the skin. Well, that time is past also, and memory seems to hallow even those barbarities: and when we catch sight of the modern cane, so sparingly used by men who have adopted love as an element of education in the place of the old sottish spite,-when we see that, we sometimes imagine that things have sadly degenerated since we went to school, for to us now the pickled birch is a thing of poetry, if it be the poetry of pain, while the cane is mere prose, and suggestive of sugar-candy at the highest. But the birch has its moral for after-life,

But leaving private experience, which ever lacks largeness and universality, let us take this crippled stump, worn as it is to a mere shadow in the service of that which is next to godliness. It was once a comely, upright, lusty broom, with a stout birchen body, and a green bushy head; and though ever standing with its one leg in the air, yet always ready to be useful, and run the risk of apoplexy for the service of a good cause. Its wretched stump, now reduced to the last extremity of vegetable suffering, was, in time gone by, a waving branch of lady-birch, and was clothed in silver bark, and tasselled over with delicate twigs and little fairy leaves. When Spring came, it danced to and fro in the sunlight, and its shadow glided up and down the white ledges of the rocks, over which its pensile sprays peeped to see the water trickle down the ravine. Glorious was the lady-birch at any season; glorious, too, the hale green broom; the one gleaming in the morning sun, where the woodpigeon built her nest, the other dressing the stony moor with yellow livery, and both living to make the world more beautiful. It is this birch which supplies the best of wood for broomsticks, and whose young feathery branches often take the place of the green broom in the completion of the besom. In the Highlands they use it for tanning, for dyeing wool yellow; its bark supplies Highland candles and Norway bread; its wood, charcoal and printers' ink; its leaves, fodder for horses, kine, sheep, and goats; and its seed, food for that pretty songster of the wood, the aberdevine. The sap of the birch makes the birchwine of English housewifery, of which those who know how to make it are not a little proud :

And though she boasts no charms divine,
Yet she can make and serve birch-wine.

WARTON.

It will flourish in English woods, and there is not a wood worth rambling in which has not many of these light, fairy creatures, pencilling the sky with their trembling spidery network of leaves and branches. It was this same birch from which the Gauls extracted bitumen, and which the Russians now use to prepare the celebrated Russian leather; which the carpenter finds best of all wood for rafters, ploughs, spades, and carts; which the Highland peasants use for harness, ropes, and basket-work, and by which they symbolize under the name of Betu or am beatha, the clan of the Buchanans. It is the same birch as that from which our poor imbecile stump was cut which forms the great forests of the freezing North; which climbs up rugged mountain-sides to peep over the precipices, and fling the light of vegetable grace and beauty over the giant solitudes of snow. It is the same larch which fills us with forest lore when we see its silvery stem towering up, straight as an arrow, to the sky, and waving its plumes of pensile beauty in the sunlight; which listens to the liquid whistle of the early thrush, and the full melody of sunny May; and which shelters the robin and the blackbird with its boughsA thing of beauty is a joy for ever

a broomstick, then, shall be a joy to us.
The bonny broom,

Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed,
Her blossoms

used by the good housewifes of old to brush the
crumbs from the dressing-board, and the soiled
sand from the kitchen floor, is no less dear for its
touches of memory, and pictures of green imagery,
than the lady-birch.
It grows on the moorland,
where there is no shelter from the blast of winter or
the fierce heat of summer; where drought, and
swamp, and keenest frost have each unmitigated
vigour, and where the earth lies flat beneath the

blue sky, as if it had fallen prostrate, and had no friend but the broom to cover it with garments. It is on the dreary waste where the red deer loves to wander, and the ptarmigan finds a home, that the bonny broom sprinkles its round tufts of green, fresh as infancy amid the fiercest frost,-golden as daybreak through the laughing summer. There it creeps up and down the hills, and amid the wild forest dells, far away from the haunts of men, in company of creeping things, of gaps of sunshine, and of passing shadows.

There lacked no floure to my dome,
Ne not so much as floure of brome.

CHAUCER.

In yonder greenwood blows the broom; Shepherds, we'll trust our flocks to stray,Court Nature in her sweetest bloom,

And steal from Care one summer day.

LANGHORNE.

It was the rushy branches of the broom which supplied the old Greeks with ropes and cordage; which now provides the "simple sheep" with the best of food, the cattle with the best of litter, the cottager with the best of thatch,

He made carpenters to make the houses and lodgynges of great tymbre, and set the houses like stretes, and covered them with rede and brome, so that it was lyke a lyttel towne. -FROISSART.

and the wild bee with the most delicious honey. It is the bonny broom which serves us as well whether we cut its tufts for sweeping, for tanning leather, or for the manufacture of coarse cloth; which is almost as useful as hops in brewing; which furnishes a wood capable of the most exquisite polish; which, in its ashes, gives a pure alkali, and in its pods and blossoms perfume and medicine,-Drs. Cullen and Mead both esteemed the broom in cases of dropsy.

E'en humble broom and osiers have their use, And shade for sheep and food for flocks produce. It was the bonny broom which the Scottish clan of the Forbes wore in their bonnets when they wished to arouse the heroism of their chieftain, and which, in their Gaelic dialect, they called bealadh, in token of its beauty. It was this very broom from which the long line of Plantagenets took their name, and which to the last they wore on their helmets, crest, and family seal. It was thus:-Fulke, Earl of Anjou, having committed a crime, was enjoined by a holy father of the church to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by way of penance. He went, habited in lowly attire, and with a sprig of broom in his hat to denote his humility,

His beaver'd brow a birchen garland bears.

POPE.

The expiation finished, he adopted the name of Plantagenet, from Planta and Genista, the old name of the broom, and transmitted this to his princely descendants.* As an emblem of humility, too, it was worn by St. Louis in 1234, on the occasion of his marriage with Margaret, eldest daughter of Raymond Berengarius, Count of Provence, and a new order of knights was instituted to commemorate the event. The motto of the order was "Exaltat humiles," and the collar of the order was made up of the flowers and seed-pods of the common broom, enamelled and intermixed with fleur-de-lys of gold. This Ordre de la Geneste, or Order of the Broom, continued till the death of Charles the Fifth.

Though the feeblest thing that Nature forms,
A frail and perishing flower art thou;
Yet thy race has survived a thousand storms
That have laid the monarch and warrior low.

* Sandford's Genealogical History.

The storied urn may be crumbled to dust,
And Time may the marble bust deface;
But thou wilt be faithful and firm to thy trust,—
The memorial-flower of a princely race.

Then hail to thee, fair Broomstick! herald of a thousand years, memorial of human trials, triumphs, and sufferings. Abide with us, oh tough and welltried friend; and now, too feeble for thy office of cleanliness, hint to us of the old Roman pageant, when the noblesse of Rome assembled, and the officers swept the hall with a green broom affixed to a sturdy broomstick. That was the honour paid by Roman patricians to intellect, energy, and virtue, which, however humble in their origin, had an equal chance with wealth and ancestral title in sharing the offices and honours of the state. The broom was as conscious of its dignity as the newly-elected councillors just lifted from the ranks of the people; and the moment its green and flowerless branches touched the floor of the assembly, it broke into golden blossoms, a mute symbol of the fertility of virtue.* Hail to thee! for all the legends of old Time thou bringest us, from the state processions of Rome down to the hanging of a broom at the door of a Russian maiden pining for a lover. The broomstick was the chosen Pegasus of the midnight hags, when, gliding like bats through the midnight, they laid plots and counterplots to involve poor human nature in the sufferings of superstition :--

Do not strange matrons mount on high,

And switch their broomsticks through the sky,-
Ride post o'er hills, and woods, and scas,
From Thule to the Hesperides?

SOMERVILLE.

Verily they do; but they are only the embodied sins of men-consciences, which have taken shape and come back again and again to stick pins in sinners' sides; stifle the babe which has been neglected by a harsh mother; fling cattle which want tending into bogs which ought to have been drained; sour milk which has been left by sluttish dairy-maids; and jabber, scoff, and torture men in the reflected images of their own wickedness. Why always in the night? why ever amid

The dark sublime of extra-natural scenes ?
The vulgar magic's puerile rite demeans;
Where hags their cauldrons, fraught with toads, prepare,
Or glide on broomsticks through the midnight air.
AMWELL SCOTT.

Why, but that all evil spirits are but human vices riding on the broomsticks of memory, and compounding in the cauldron of remorse the toads and snakes of retribution? The diseased mind peoples the night with hags and witches, and influences dire, as excuses-lame as they are-for their own wickedness and folly, which dare not face the daylight.

Some strange old customs suggest themselves in connection with broomsticks. There is the salutation of the broom, which, like the throwing of old shoes for luck, has a smack of poetry in it, and recals Arbuthnot's remark on the brooming of servants, who "if they came into the best apartment to set anything in order were saluted with a broom." The hanging out of the broom at the mast-heads of ships offered for sale originated from that period of our history when the Dutch admiral, Van Tromp, with his fleet, appeared on our coasts in hostility against England; and to indicate that he would sweep the English navy from the seas, hoisted a broom at the mast-head of his ship. To repel this insolence the English admiral hoisted a horsewhip, equally indicative of his intention to chastise the Dutchman. The

This story is related by Marcellinus Ammianus. The custom of publicly sweeping the hall on occasion of those assemblies was maintained for a long period.