THE SYCAMORES.

In the outskirts of the village,
On the river's winding shores,
Stand the Occidental plane-trees,
Stand the ancient sycamores.

One long century hath been numbered,
And another half-way told,
Since the rustic Irish gleeman
Broke for them the virgin mould.

Deftly set to Celtic music,

At his violin's sound they grew, Through the moonlit eves of summer, Making Amphion's fable true.

Rise again, thou poor Hugh Tallant !
Pass in jerkin green along,
With thy eyes brimful of laughter,
And thy mouth as full of song.

Pioneer of Erin's outcasts,
With his fiddle and his pack;
Little dreamed the village Saxons
Of the myriads at his back.

How he wrought with spade and fiddle,
Delved by day and sang by night,
With a hand that never wearied,
And a heart forever light,

Still the gay tradition mingles

With a record grave and drear, Like the rolic air of Cluny,

With the solemn march of Mear.

When the box-tree, white with blossoms, Made the sweet May woodlands glad, And the Aronia by the river

Lighted up the swarming shad,

And the bulging nets swept shoreward,
With their silver-sided haul,
Midst the shouts of dripping fishers,
He was merriest of them all.

When, among the jovial huskers,
Love stole in at Labor's side
With the lusty airs of England,

Soft his Celtic measures vied.

Songs of love and wailing lyke-wake, And the merry fair's carouse;

Of the wild Red Fox of Erin
And the Woman of Three Cows,

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By the blazing hearths of winter, Pleasant seemed his simple tales, Midst the grimmer Yorkshire legends And the mountain myths of Wales. How the souls in Purgatory

Scrambled up from fate forlorn, On St. Keven's sackcloth ladder, Slyly hitched to Satan's horn.

Of the fiddler who at Tara

Played all night to ghosts of kings; Of the brown dwarfs, and the fairies Dancing in their moorland rings !

Jolliest of our birds of singing,

Best he loved the Bob-o-link. "Hush!" he 'd say, "the tipsy fairies! Hear the little folks in drink!"

Merry-faced, with spade and fiddle, Singing through the ancient town, Only this, of poor Hugh Tallant, Hath Tradition handed down.

Not a stone his grave discloses ;
But if yet his spirit walks,
'T is beneath the trees he planted,
And when Bob-o-Lincoln talks ;

Green memorials of the gleeman ! Linking still the river-shores, With their shadows cast by sunset, Stand Hugh Tallant's sycamores!

When the Father of his Country

Through the north-land riding came, And the roofs were starred with banners, And the steeples rang acclaim,

When each war-scarred Continental, Leaving smithy, mill, and farm, Waved his rusted sword in welcome, And shot off his old king's arm, —

Slowly passed that august Presence Down the thronged and shouting street;

Village girls as white as angels,
Scattering flowers around his feet.

Now a thousand Saxon craftsmen Stitch and hammer in his place.

All the pastoral lanes so grassy
Now are Traffic's dusty streets;
From the village, grown a city,
Fast the rural grace retreats.

But, still green, and tall, and stately,
On the river's winding shores,
Stand the Occidental plane-trees,
Stand Hugh Tallant's sycamores.

THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE

OF NEWBURY.

"Concerning ye Amphisbæna, as soon as I received your commands, I made diligent inquiry: . . . . he assures me yt it had really two heads, one at each end; two mouths, two stings or tongues."- REV. CHRISTOPHER TOPPAN to COTTON MA

THER.

FAR away in the twilight time
Of every people, in every clime,
Dragons and griffins and monsters dire,
Born of water, and air, and fire,
Or nursed, like the Python, in the mud
And ooze of the old Deucalion flood,
Crawl and wriggle and foam with rage,
Through dusk tradition and ballad age.
So from the childhood of Newbury town
And its time of fable the tale comes
down

Of a terror which haunted bush and brake,

The Amphisbæna, the Double Snake!

Thou who makest the tale thy mirth, Consider that strip of Christian earth On the desolate shore of a sailless sea, Full of terror and mystery,

Half-redeemed from the evil hold Of the wood so dreary, and dark, and old,

Which drank with its lips of leaves the dew

When Time was young, and the world

was new,

And wove its shadows with sun and moon,

Ere the stones of Cheops were squared and hewn.

Think of the sea's dread monotone,

Of the mournful wail from the pinewood blown,

Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North,

Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth,

And the dismal tales the Indian told. Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold,

And he shrank from the tawny wizard's boasts,

And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts,

And above, below, and on every side, The fear of his creed seemed verified; And think, if his lot were now thine own,

To grope with terrors nor named nor known,

How laxer muscle and weaker nerve And a feebler faith thy need might

Whether he lurked in the Oldtown fen

Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's
Den,

Or swam in the wooded Artichoke,
Or coiled by the Northman's Written
Rock,

Nothing on record is left to show;
Only the fact that he lived, we know,
And left the cast of a double head
In the scaly mask which he yearly shed.
For he carried a head where his tail
should be,

And the two, of course, could never agree,

But wriggled about with main and might,
Now to the left and now to the right;
Pulling and twisting this way and that,
Neither knew what the other was at.
A snake with two heads, lurking so

near !

Judge of the wonder, guess at the fear! Think what ancient gossips might say, Shaking their heads in their dreary way,

Between the meetings n Sabbathday!

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How urchins, searching at day's decline The Common Pasture for sheep or kine,

The terrible double-ganger heard
In leafy rustle or whir of bird!
Think what a zest it gave to the sport,
In berry-time, of the younger sort,
As over pastures blackberry-twined,
Reuben and Dorothy lagged behind,
And closer and closer, for fear of harm,
The maiden clung to her lover's arm;
And how the spark, who was forced to
stay,

By his sweetheart's fears, till the break of day,

Thanked the snake for the fond delay!

Far and wide the tale was told,

Like a snowball growing while it rolled. The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry;

And it served, in the worthy minister's eye,

To paint the primitive serpent by.
Cotton Mather came galloping down
All the way to Newbury town,
With his eyes agog and his ears set
wide,

And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;

Stirring the while in the shallow pool Of his brains for the lore he learned at school,

To garnish the story, with here a streak Of Latin, and there another of Greek : And the tales he heard and the notes he took,

Behold! are they not in his WonderBook?