which were firmly fastened four stakes or supports for the cross-pieces which held the box or body of the sleigh; the box was usually made of rough boards, with a board across the top for a seat, but happy was the young man who could proudly invite his young lady to a drive in a crockery crate rather than in the ordinary rough box.

In no phase of life is the social element, in its truest and best sense, so well developed as in these narrow circles, where each is dependent on the other for all that makes life pleasurable. Who has not felt utter isolation, oppressive and perfect loneliness, in a crowded city thoroughfare? In looking over old letters and journals which vividly recall past experiences, it is surprising to find how constant was the interchange of brotherly feeling; the hand of good-fellowship was extended to one and to all. In this hurried, feverish, business life, how strange it seems to remember that once an invitation to tea implied an afternoon visit, beginning at one or two o'clock and returning home by the light of the moon; if invited to spend the day, one was expected as soon as the morning's work was done. Neither was it necessary to wait for an invitation, especially when it was known that a sister neighbor had an extra hard day's work before her; a number would frequently join together into a sort of surprise party, and with many hands and happy stories make light and pleasant that which had seemed such a heavy burden to the housekeeper. It was not until what was known as "wild cat times," when everybody went speculation mad, that this agreeable social feeling began to decline. The landspeculation fever brought to Michigan many who had no interest in establishing homes or improving the country-merely a floating population, that bane of social existence. Stages would bring and carry these people; bringing, but alas! not taking away the germs of discontent created.

The little village is a miniature embodiment of the growth of our country; as the town grew in numbers it lost much of its social character, and there was great longing for the free and happy days departed. We are thankful that this pioneer life contained nothing of the wild, adventuresome spirit of the Oklahoma settlers; nor the poverty, the uncertain crops, the dreary stretches of the frozen, wind-swept country of Dakota; nor had these settlers forsaken home and country for conscience' sake as did our forefathers, willing to suffer that they might be free. Viewed in these comparative lights, the pioneers of southern Michigan had very few hardships to endure.

KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN.

Mary V. Gitts

OUR OLD WEBSTER'S SPELLING-BOOK

It lies before me-the genuine article; not the identical copy I used and was brought up on, long time ago, but of the same edition. It is nearly as old as I am, and has come spelling its way along down through two-thirds of a century, to these odd times. How long it has lain in the Boston Antiquarian bookstore where I found it thirty-five years ago, I cannot tell. It is an institution-yes, a university. It has trained and strained more heads than any other book of the kind ever did, or perhaps ever will. Later editions have been sent out; but give me the old wine, which to my liking is better. Very plain, even homely in outward appearance. Never mind. Homely people are generally the best. The back of the cover is of coarse linen cloth-very coarse-threads within sight of each other. The sides of cover are of layers of brown paper, with an over-all of thin blue paper. The paper and pages within look as if they might have come from a mill using bleached straw and slacked lime, with a little sulphur thrown in to give the tinting.

And now as to the contents, the meat and marrow. Quite a book in size-one hundred and sixty-eight pages. The preface we did not have to read. But the next half-dozen pages, "Analysis of Sounds," we in our school had to commit to memory and recite. This amazed us, and does still. Just to think of a child eight or nine years old required to recite understandingly the opening sentence: "Language, in its more limited sense, is the expression of ideas by articulate sounds." You might about as well set a child to comprehending those vast themes, verities so important, but how profound, viz.: The wherefore of the why, the thingness of the this, and the thusness of the though. Makes one think of Horace Greeley, who, after reading a grandiloquent communication sent to him for the press, said of it, that it" obfuscated all his intellects, and circumgumfrigobrighisticated all his comprehensibilities."

And come to the A B C page. In my times of old we children learned our A B C's at school, and not at home from lettered blocks and other knick-knacks as in these latter days. Some of those first days at school were quite impressive to the looker-on and listener. High day when we advanced to table No. 2-bag, big, bog. But the almost dizzy elevation when we ascended and attained to-baker, brier, cider, crazy. It is very observable this placing crazy after cider. Here are fact and

philosophy, cause and effect; indeed, a temperance lecture entire.

In my ancient times the spelling lesson was studied column by column from the spelling-book, and speiled by the classes old and young standing on the floor-the scholar taking his place, and keeping it if he could the month in and out, without having his head cut off every night, a rather discouraging operation to an aspiring lad or lass. One winter is remembered when a boy kept such headship all through the term, and carried off the great prize-a punched and pendent silver ninepence, tow-string and all. At a noted spelling-match in a neighboring town, visitors were invited to give in their names and take part in the contest. Sides were chosen. Came out even at eight o'clock P.M. Another choosing up. Came out even again at nine. "Let us have this out." One from each side must go upon the floor and spell for the side. Against aforesaid boy was placed an older person, a teacher who had taught school four summers. Plied and pumped with the spelling-book fore and aft, and aft and fore. "The combat deepens." By and by the word apropos was put to the fairer and gentler, and she spelled it “appropos," putting in too many p's, and the boy getting it right carried off the glitter.*

66

hill-top of human

No man may put

And what a day that was when we stood on the greatness and grappled with our first reading lesson! off the law of God;" "my joy is in his law all the day." See that boy in his mighty wrestlings to spell out the words! Lips move vigorously; brow knit; book turned this way and that, to give room for the great idea to come in; his whole frame writhing and screwed down hard and tight to the supreme task. Perhaps he will "fetch it," perhaps not; but will come out of the throes as an older boy did from the word picturesque-pronouncing it picture-squee. But don't you give that small boy up. There is promise for him in such energy and bent as that.

Then a succession of easy and familiar lessons. But come to the fables and the pictures. Here is richness. Putting on the spectacles of my ancientness, I have been looking anew through the old spelling-book to see how, on the whole, the old friend would appear to one in these latter days to which it and I have come down. Grandly, sir, is my ready answer; never before handsomer than now-I mean the book. And so will it appear to you, from the glance or the scrutiny, if you be the sensible man I take you for.

A. M. COLTON

*These charming reminiscences of the Rev. A. M. Colton, extracted from The Old MeetingHouse and Vacation Papers, recently published by Worthington Company, will touch many a tender chord in the memory of readers familiar with the old New England spelling-school.

SOME LITERARY STATESMEN

When, some years ago, bluff 'old Senator Cameron referred to the newspaper men of the capital as "them literary fellows," with an expletive supplying the blank, he unwittingly bestowed a cognomen which has ever since stuck by the tribe.

It is not the purpose of this article to treat of the particular class of writers to which the Pennsylvania statesman immediately referred, but rather of those members of the literary guild to be found in the great official household, of which he was himself an honored and exalted member. There has been more or less of the literary instinct in our congress ever since the days of the illustrious Benton of Missouri, when he gave to the world his ponderous Thirty Years' View, being principally a résumé of public events during the period of his service in the senate, which extended, as he was accustomed to say, through "six Roman lustrums." Indeed, it may be stated that this instinct has been manifest in our national legislators during the whole history of the government, from the pamphleteering days of 1790, down through the intermediate era of heavy leaders and three column communications, to the present time.

Whether there is something in the atmosphere of legislative halls conducive to the growth of this literary spirit, or the inspiration comes from the manifold and splendid opportunities which our libraries and scientific institutions in the capital afford the literary worker, it is not material to inquire. The only purpose of the present writing is to glance briefly at the work in this field a few of our statesmen are doing in the present, or have done in the immediate past.

Of those placed in the past tense unfortunately by the hand of death, the mind at once reverts to the late Samuel S. Cox, so long known to the political and the literary world by his title of "Sunset Cox." The story of how this cognomen attached to him early in his career, from a bit of florid writing in the columns of an Ohio newspaper, has been told again and again. It is conceded by friend and foe alike that he was one of the brightest all-around men who ever graced the halls of our national legislature. His statesmanship was equaled by his keen and delicate wit, and these in turn did not surpass his learning and scholarly attainments. During a most busy life he found time to give to the world many books, among which may be mentioned A Buckeye Abroad, published by G. P. Putnam of New York in 1852; Eight Years in Congress, from 1857 to 1865,

from the press of D. Appleton in 1865; A Search for Winter Sunbeams in the Riviera, Corsica, Algiers, and Spain, from the same press in 1870; Why We Laugh, published by Harper Brothers in 1876; Free Land and Free Trade, from the Putnams in 1880; and from the same in 1882, Arctic Sunbeams, or, From Broadway to the Bosphorus by Way of the North Cape; and Orient Sunbeams, or, From the Porte to the Pyramids by Way of Palestine. Then came Three Decades of Federal Legislation, from the press of the Reids in Providence in 1885, being personal and historical memoirs covering the long period of his service in the house, and perhaps his most important work. The list closes with Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey, from C. L. Webster & Co., in 1887, and The Isles of the Princes, or, The Pleasures of Prinkipo, from the Putnams in the same year.

Among the statesmen of the present congress no one takes a higher place as a littérateur than the Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, the representative from the sixth Massachusetts district. He was a writer of books before he became a legislator, and his reputation to-day, both as a man of letters and as a law-giver, is one to be envied. He is a graduate of Harvard, a Doctor of Philosophy, was for three years Harvard lecturer on American history, also a lecturer in Lowell Institute, and has been in turn associate editor of the North American Review and the International Review. His Short History of the English Colonies was planned while he lectured at Harvard, and was afterward delivered in the Lowell course. His published works embrace Life and Letters of George Cabot, the author's great-grandfather, published in 1877; Albert Gallatin, from the Scribners' press in 1879; Ballads and Lyrics, from Houghton, Mifflin & Company in 1880; Last Forty Years of Town Government, J. R. Osgood & Co., in 1881; A Short History of the English Colonies in America, from the Harpers in the same year.

Then came his Alexander Hamilton, and Daniel Webster, in 1882 and 1883, being two notable contributions to the American Statesman series. From the same press came in 1884 Studies in History, comprising eleven notable subjects; and in 1889 he published George Washington, another of the American Statesman series. But perhaps the crowning work of Mr. Lodge in the field of letters has been the editing of the works of Alexander Hamilton, brought out in 1886, in nine superb volumes, from the press of G. P. Putnam's Sons. The Short History of the English Colonies, already mentioned, is also a most marked and valuable contribution to our literature, covering as it does, in a manner never heretofore done, the story of the colonies from the foundation of each, down to the time when they were fused into one by the fires of the revolution.