ant, purring way some damsels have, about the joys of the sea-shore, — the happy summer that was, alas! drawing to a close, her own enjoyment of life, -and kindred topics, — till Charley saw an excellent opportunity to interrupt with some aspirations of his own, which, he averred, must be realized before his life could be considered a satisfactory

success.

---

If you have ever been placed in analogous circumstances, you know, of course, just about the sort of thing that was being said by the two gentlemen at nearly the same moment: Ned, loitering slowly along the sands with Laura on his arm, and Charley, stretched in indolent picturesqueness upon the rocks, with Hattie sitting beside him. If you do not know from experience, ask any candid friend who has been through the form and ceremony of an orthodox proposal.

When the pedestrians returned, the two couples looked very hard at each other. All were smiling and complacent, but devoid of any strange or unusual expression. Indeed, the countenance is subject to such severe education, in good society, that one almost always looks smiling and complacent. Demonstration is not fashionable, and a man must preserve the same demeanor over the loss of a wife or a glovebutton, over the gift of a heart's whole devotion or a bundle of cigars. Under all these visitations, the complacent smile is in favor, as the neatest, most serviceable, and convenient form of non-committalism.

The sun was approaching the blue range of misty hills that bounded the main-land swamps, by this time; so the skipper was signalled, the dinner-paraphernalia gathered up, and the party were soon en route for home once more.

"And you were "
"Rejected, by Jove!"
"So was I!"

The day following this disastrous pienic, the baggage of Mr. Edwin Salisbury and Mr. Charles Burnham was sent to the depot at Wikahasset Station, and they presented themselves at the hoteloffice with a request for their bill. As Jerry Swayne deposited their key upon its hook, he drew forth a small tri-cornered billet from the pigeon-hole beneath, and presented it.

"Left for you, this morning, gentle

men."

It was directed to both, and Charley read it over Ned's shoulder. It ran thus:

"DEAR BOYS, The next time you divert yourselves by throwing dice for two young ladies, we pray you not to do so in the presence of a valet who is upon terms of intimacy with the maid of one of them.

"With many sincere thanks for the amusement you have given us, — often when you least suspected it, we bid you a lasting adieu, and remain, with the best wishes,

"Brant House, "Wednesday.

-

HATTIE CHAPMAN, LAURA THURSTON."

"It is all the fault of that, aw, that confounded Thomas!" said Ned. So Thomas was discharged.

SNOWING: the checkered fields below are traceable now only by the brown lines of fences and the sparse trees that mark the hedge-rows. The white of the houses and of the spires of the town is seen dimly through the snow, and seems to waver and shift position like the sails and spars of ships seen through fog. And straightway upon this image of ships and swaying spars I go sailing back to the farm-land of the past, and sharpen my pen for another day's work among The Old Farm-Writers.

I suspect Virgil was never a serious farmer. I am confident he never had one of those callosities upon the inner side of his right thumb which come of the lower thole of a scythe-snath, after a week's

mowing. But he had that quick poet's eye which sees at a glance what other men see only in a day. Not a shrub or a tree, not a bit of fallow ground or of nodding lentils escaped his observation; not a bird or a bee; not even the mosquitoes, which to this day hover pestiferously about the low-lying sedge-lands of Mantua. His first pastoral, little known now, and rarely printed with his works, is inscribed Culex.*

Young Virgil appears to have been of a delicate constitution, and probably left the fever-bearing regions of the Mincio for the higher plain of Milan for sanitary reasons, as much as the other, -of studying, as men of his parts did study,

"Lusimus: hæc propter Culicis sint carmina dicta."

Greek and philosophy. There is a story, indeed, that he studied and practised farriery, as his father had done before him; and Jethro Tull, in his crude onslaught upon what he calls the Virgilian husbandry, (chap. ix.,) intimates that a farrier could be no way fit to lay down the rules for good farm-practice. But this story of his having been a horse-doctor rests, so far as I can discover, only on this flimsy tradition, — that the young poet, on his way to the South of Italy, after leaving Milan and Mantua, fell in at Rome with the master-of-horse to Octavianus, and gave such shrewd hints to that official in regard to the points and failings of certain favorite horses of the Roman Triumvir (for Octavianus had not as yet assumed the purple) as to gain a presentation to the future Augustus, and rich marks of his favor.

It is certain that the poet journeyed to the South, and that thenceforward the glorious sunshine of Baiæ and of the Neapolitan shores gave a color to his poems and to his life.

Yet his agricultural method was derived almost wholly from his observation in the North of Italy. He never forgot the marshy borders of the Mincio nor the shores of beautiful Benacus (Lago di Garda); who knows but he may some time have driven his flocks afield on the very battle-ground of Solferino?

But the ruralities of Virgil take a special interest from the period in which they were written. He followed upon the heel of long and desolating intestine wars, -a singing-bird in the wake of vultures. No wonder the voice seemed

strangely sweet.

The eloquence of the Senate had long ago lost its traditionary power; the sword was every way keener. Who should listen to the best of speakers, when Pompey was in the forum, covered with the spoils of the East? Who should care for Cicero's periods, when the magnificent conqueror of Gaul is skirting the Umbrian Marshes, making straight for the Rubicon and Rome ?

Then came Pharsalia, with its bloody

trail, from which Cæsar rises only to be slaughtered in the Senate-Chamber. Next comes the long duel between the Triumvirate and the palsied representatives of the Republican party. Philippi closes that interlude; and there is a new duel between Octavianus and Antony (Lepidus counting for nothing). The gallant lover of Cleopatra is pitted against a gallant general who is a nephew to the first Cæsar. The fight comes off at Actium, and the lover is the loser; the pretty Egyptian Jezebel, with her golden-prowed galleys, goes sweeping down, under a full press of wind, to swell the squadron of the conqueror. The winds will always carry the Jezebels to the conquering side.

Such, then, was the condition of Italy, -its families divided, its grain-fields trampled down by the Volscian cavalry, its houses red with fresh blood-stains, its homes beyond the Po parcelled out to lawless returning soldiers, its public security poised on the point of the sword of Augustus, — when Virgil's Bucolics appear: a pastoral thanksgiving for the patrimony that had been spared him, through court-favor.

There is a show of gross adulation that makes one blush for his manhood; but withal he is a most lithesome poet, whose words are like honeyed blossoms, and whose graceful measure is like a hedge of bloom that sways with spring breezes, and spends perfume as it sways.

The Georgics were said to have been written at the suggestion of Mæcenas, a cultivated friend of Augustus, who, like many another friend of the party in power, had made a great fortune out of the wars that desolated Italy. He made good use of it, however, in patronizing Virgil, and in bestowing a snug farm in the Sabine country upon Horace; where I had the pleasure of drinking goats' milk-"dulci digne mero"-in the spring of 184

There can be no doubt but Virgil had been an attentive reader of Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of Varro; otherwise he certainly would have been un