There is great fun in groping through a tall barrel of books and pamphlets, on the lookout for startling pictures; and there are chestnuts in the garret drying, which you have discovered on a ledge of the chimney; and you slide a few into your pocket, and munch them quietly,—giving now and then one to Nelly, and begging her to keep silent, -for you have a great fear of its being forbidden fruit.

Old family garrets have their stock, as I said, of castaway clothes of twenty years gone by; and it is rare sport to put them on, buttoning in a pillow or two for the sake of good fulness; and then to trick out Nelly in some strange-shaped head-gear, and ancient brocade petticoat caught up with pins, and in such guise to steal cautiously down-stairs, and creep slyly into the sitting-room,-half afraid of a scolding, and very sure of good fun,-trying to look very sober, and yet almost ready to die with the laugh that you know you will make. And your mother tries to look harshly at little Nelly for putting on her grandmother's best bonnet; but Nelly's laughing eyes forbid it utterly; and the mother spoils all her scolding with. a perfect shower of kisses.

After this you go, marching very stately, into the nursery, and utterly amaze the old nurse, and make a deal of wonderment for the staring, half-frightened baby, who drops his rattle, and makes a bob at you as if he would jump into your waistcoat-pocket.

But you grow tired of this; you tire even of the swing, and of the pranks of Charlie; and you glide away into a corner with an old, dog's-eared copy of "Robinson Crusoe," and you grow heart and soul into the story, until you tremble for the poor fellow with his guns behind the palisade, and are yourself half dead with fright when you peep cautiously over the hill with your glass and see the cannibals at their orgies around the fire.

Yet, after all, you think the old fellow must have had a capital time with a whole island to himself; and you think you would like such a time yourself, if only Nelly and Charlie could be there with you. But this thought does not come till afterward: for the time you are nothing but Crusoe; you are living in his cave with Poll the parrot, and are looking out for your goats and man Friday.

You dream what a nice thing it would be for you to slip away some pleasant morning-not to York, as young Crusoe did, but to New York-and take passage as a sailor; and how, if they knew you were going, there would be such a world of good-byes; and how, if they did not know it, there would be such a world of wonder!

And then the sailor's dress would be altogether such a jaunty affair; and it would be such rare sport to lie off upon the yards far aloft, as you have seen sailors in pictures, looking out upon the blue and tumbling sea. No thought now, in your boyish dreams, of sleety storms, and cables stiffened with ice, and crashing spars, and great icebergs towering fearfully around you!

You would have better luck than even Crusoe; you would save a compass, and a Bible, and stores of hatchets, and the captain's dog, and great puncheons of sweetmeats (which Crusoe altogether overlooked); and you would save a tent or two, which you could set up on the shore, and an American flag, and a small piece of cannon, which you could fire as often as you liked. At night you would sleep in a tree,-though you wonder how Crusoe did it, and would say the prayers you had been taught to say at home, and fall to sleep, dreaming of Nelly and Charlie.

At sunrise, or thereabouts, you would come down, feeling very much refreshed, and make a very nice breakfast off of smoked herring and sea-bread, with a little currant jam and a few oranges. After this you would haul ashore II.-V ff

41

a chest or two of the sailors' clothes, and, putting a few large jack-knives in your pocket, would take a stroll over the island, and dig a cave somewhere, and roll in a cask or two of sea-bread. And you fancy yourself growing after a time very tall and corpulent, and wearing a magnificent goat-skin cap trimmed with green ribbons and set off with a plume. You think you would have put a few more guns in the palisade than Crusoe did, and charged them with a little more grape.

After a long while, you fancy, a ship would arrive which would carry you back; and you count upon very great surprise on the part of your father and little Nelly, as you march up to the door of the old family mansion, with plenty of gold in your pocket, and a small bag of cocoanuts for Charlie, and with a great deal of pleasant talk about your island far away in the South Seas.

Or perhaps it is not Crusoe at all that your eyes and your heart cling to, but only some little story about Paul and Virginia;-that dear little Virginia! how many tears have been shed over her,-not in garrets only, or by boys only!

You would have liked Virginia,-you know you would; but you perfectly hate the beldame aunt who sent for her to come to France; you think she must have been like the old schoolmistress who occasionally boxes your ears with the cover of the spelling-book, or makes you wear one of the girls' bonnets, that smells strongly of pasteboard and calico.

As for black Domingue, you think he was a capital old fellow; and you think more of him and his bananas than you do of the bursting, throbbing heart of poor Paul. As yet Dream-life does not take hold on love. A little maturity of heart is wanted to make up what the poets call sensibility. If love should come to be a dangerous, chi

valric matter, as in the case of Helen Mar and Wallace, you can very easily conceive of it, and can take hold of all the little accessories of male costume and embroidering of banners; but as for pure sentiment, such as lies in the sweet story of Bernardin de St. Pierre, it is quite beyond you.

The rich, soft nights, in which one might doze in his hammock, watching the play of the silvery moon-beams upon the orange-leaves and upon the waves, you can understand; and you fall to dreaming of that lovely Isle of France, and wondering if Virginia did not perhaps have some relations on the island, who raise pineapples, and such sort of things, still.

-And so, with your head upon your hand, in your quiet garret corner, over some such beguiling story, your thought leans away from the book into your own dreamy cruise over the sea of life.

THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.

TIMOTHY DWIGHT.

[Our present selection is from one of the American authors of the eighteenth century. The list of these authors is not a long one, yet it contains several names which have attained a high position in the literary world, and among these that of Timothy Dwight must be included. He was a native of Massachusetts, where he was born in 1752. He died in 1817. His first literary work was in verse, and consisted of "The Conquest of Canaan," an epic poem completed when he was twenty-two years of age. He wrote much other poetry, but his reputation rests upon his prose works, which are of high literary value. They are mainly theological. His "Theology Explained and Defended" has been one of the most widely read of such works in the

English language. Of secular writings his chief work is "Travels in New England and New York," from which our selection is taken. It is in four volumes, and is highly valuable for its historical, statistical, and topographical information, and for its record of American society and manners in the early part of the present century. It is written in a fluent and glowing style, and displays close observation and an ardent love of the beauties of nature.]

THE Notch of the White Mountains is a phrase appropriated to a very narrow defile, extending two miles in length between two huge cliffs apparently rent asunder by some vast convulsion of nature. . . . The entrance of the chasm is formed by two rocks standing perpendicu larly at the distance of twenty-two feet from each other; one about twenty feet in height, the other about twelve. Half of the space is occupied by the brook mentioned as the head-stream of the Saco; the other half by the road. The stream is lost and invisible beneath a mass of fragments partly blown out of the road and partly thrown down by some great convulsion.

When we entered the Notch we were struck with the wild and solemn appearance of everything before us. The scale on which all the objects in view were formed was the scale of grandeur only. The rocks, rude and ragged in a manner rarely paralleled, were fashioned and piled on each other by a hand operating only in the boldest and most irregular manner. As we advanced, these appearances increased rapidly. Huge masses of granite, of every abrupt form, and hoary with a moss which seemed the product of ages, recalling to the mind the saxum vetustum of Virgil, speedily rose to a mountainous height. Before us the view widened fast to the southeast. Behind us it closed almost instantaneously, and presented nothing to the eye but an impassable barrier of mountains.

About half a mile from the entrance of the chasm we