the gentlemanly clerk, with a pitying smile, informs you, 'O, we cannot help that! There are mice all over the house!"

Moral reflection: If ever the education of a soaring human boy be intrusted to my care, I will endeavor to model his manners on those of a clerk in a hotel. For conscious superiority, tempered with benevolence and swathed in suavity; for perfect self-possession; for high-bred condescension to the ignorance and toleration of the weakness of others; for absolute equality to circumstances, and a certain grace, assurance, and flourish of bearing, — give me a clerk in a hotel. We may see generals, poets and philosophers, indistinguishable from the common herd; but a true hotel clerk wears on his beauteous brow, and in his noble mien, the indubitable sign of greatness.

From Albany to Niagara is a pleasant day's journey, and the Niagara mice are not quite so large, nor quite so lively, as those of Eastern New York. They do not appear till the second day. Then, resting quietly after a walk, you see a mouse creep timidly from under the bureau. You improvise a sort of pontoon bridge to the bell, out of your chairs and tables, and, as it is day-time, secure a chambermaid and superintend a mouse hunt. She whisks about the room enthusiastically, peers under all the furniture, assuring you the while that it is four years now she has been in the house and never saw a mouse in the chambers, though she confesses to having seen them in the kitchen, and, being hard pressed, well, she has seen them in the passages; but in the chambers, no! never! and you are led to believe that, though a mouse might stand shivering on the brink of your room, he would fear to step foot over the threshold. No, there is no mouse here, not a sign of a mouse.

"No sign of a mouse, except the mouse itself," you suggest. "Ah! but you must have been mistaken. It was a shadow. Why" (with a grand flourish of the valance with her right hand, and in the air with her left), "you can see for yourself there is no mouse here," — and she thinks she has made her point.

You look at her, debating within yourself whether it is worth while to attempt to acquaint her with the true province of negatives, the proper disposition of the burden of proof, and the sophistry of an undue assumption of the major premise, and decide that it

is not.

Moral and philological reflection: We see now the reason why trunks and traveling-bags are called traps. Synecdoche: Because the mouse-traps are the most important part of your luggage.

Gail Hamilton. 1838

A Legend of Bregenz

Girt round with rugged mountains,

The fair Lake Constance lies;

In her blue heart reflected

Shine back the starry skies;
And, watching each white cloudlet

Float silently and slow,

You think a piece of Heaven

Lies on our earth below!

Midnight is there: and Silence,

Enthroned in Heaven, looks down

Upon her own calm mirror,

Upon a sleeping town:
For Bregenz, that quaint city
Upon the Tyrol shore,

Has stood above Lake Constance
A thousand years and more.

Her battlements and towers,

From off their rocky steep,
Have cast their trembling shadow
For ages on the deep:
Mountain, and lake, and valley,

A sacred legend know,

Of how the town was saved, one night,
Three hundred years ago.

Far from her home and kindred,

A Tyrol maid had fled,

To serve in the Swiss valleys,

And toil for daily bread;

And every year that fleeted

So silently and fast,

Seemed to bear farther from her

The memory of the Past.

She served kind, gentle masters,
Nor asked for rest or change;

Her friends seemed no more new ones,

Their speech seemed no more strange; And when she led her cattle

To pasture every day,

She ceased to look and wonder
On which side Bregenz lay.

She spoke no more of Bregenz,
With longing and with tears;
Her Tyrol home seemed faded
In a deep mist of years;
She heeded not the rumors

Of Austrian war and strife;
Each day she rose contented,
To the calm toils of life.

Yet, when her master's children
Would clustering round her stand,
She sang them ancient ballads

Of her own native land;
And when at morn and evening
She knelt before God's throne,

The accents of her childhood
Rose to her lips alone.

And so she dwelt: the valley
More peaceful year by year;
When suddenly strange portents
Of some great deed seemed near.
The golden corn was bending
Upon its fragile stalk,

While farmers, heedless of their fields,

Paced up and down in talk.

The men seemed stern and altered,

With looks cast on the ground; With anxious faces, one by one,

The women gathered round;

All talk of flax, or spinning,

Or work, was put away;
The very children seemed afraid
Το go alone to play.

One day, out in the meadow

With strangers from the town, Some secret plan discussing,

The men walked up and down. Yet now and then seemed watching A strange uncertain gleam,

That looked like lances 'mid the trees That stood below the stream.

At eve they all assembled,

Then care and doubt were fled; With jovial laugh they feasted; The board was nobly spread.

The elder of the village

Rose up, his glass in hand,
And cried, "We drink the downfall
Of an accursed land!

"The night is growing darker,
Ere one more day is flown,
Bregenz, our foemens' stronghold,
Bregenz shall be our own!"
The women shrank in terror

(Yet Pride, too, had her part),

But one poor Tyrol maiden

Felt death within her heart.

Before her stood fair Bregenz;

Once more her towers arose; What were the friends beside her? Only her country's foes!

The faces of her kinsfolk,

The days of childhood flown, The echoes of her mountains, Reclaimed her as their own.

Nothing she heard around her
(Though shouts rang forth again),
Gone were the green Swiss valleys,
The pasture, and the plain;
Before her eyes one vision,

And in her heart one cry,
That said, "Go forth, save Bregenz,
And then, if need be, die!"

With trembling haste and breathless, With noiseless step, she sped; Horses and weary cattle

Were standing in the shed; She loosed the strong, white charger, That fed from out her hand,

She mounted, and she turned his head Toward her native land.

Out-out into the darkness

Faster, and still more fast;
The smooth grass flies behind her,

The chestnut wood is past;
She looks up; clouds are heavy;
Why is her steed so slcw?.
Scarcely the wind beside them
Can pass them as they go.

"Faster!" she cries, "O faster!"
Eleven the church-bells chime:

"O God," she cries, "help Bregenz,
And bring me there in time!"
But louder than bells' ringing,
Or lowing of the kine,
Grows nearer in the midnight
The rushing of the Rhine.

Shall not the roaring waters

Their headlong gallop check? The steed draws back in terror,— She leans upon his neck