The spring that bubbled 'neath the hill, close by the spreading beech,

Is very low,—'twas then so high that we could scarcely reach;
And, kneeling down to get a drink, dear Tom, I started so,
To see how sadly I am changed, since twenty years ago.

Near by that spring, upon an elm, you know I cut your name,
Your sweetheart's just beneath it, Tom, and you did mine the

same;

Some heartless wretch has peeled the bark, 'twas dying sure but slow,

Just as she died, whose name you cut, some twenty years ago.

My lids have long been dry, Tom, but tears came to my eyes;
I thought of her I loved so well, those early broken ties;
I visited the old church-yard, and took some flowers to strow
Upon the graves of those we loved, some twenty years ago.

Some are in the church-yard laid, some sleep beneath the sea;
But few are left of our old class, excepting you and me:
And when our time shall come, Tom, and we are called to go,
I hope they'll lay us where we played, just twenty years ago.

GOING OUT AND COMING IN.

Going out to fame and triumph,
Going out to love and light,

Coming in to pain and sorrow,

Coming in to gloom and night.

Going out with joy and gladness,
Coming in with woe and sin;

Ceaseless streams of restless pilgrims
Going out and coming in.

Through the portals of the homestead,
From beneath the blooming vine,
To the trumpet tones of glory,
Where the bays and laurels twine;
From the loving home caresses
To the chill voice of the world,
Going out with gallant canvass
To the summer breeze unfurled. .

Coming back all worn and weary,
Weary with the world's cold breath;
Coming to the dear old homestead,
Coming in to age and death;

Weary of all empty flattery,
Weary of all ceaseless din,
Weary of its heartless sneering;
Coming from the bleak world in.

Going out with hopes of glory,
Coming in with sorrow dark;
Going out with sails all flying,
Coming in with mastless barque;
Restless stream of pilgrims, striving,
Wreaths of fame or love to win;
From the doorways of the homesteads
Going out and coming in.

Mollie E. Moore

THE LEPER.

Day was breaking,

When at the altar of the temple stood

The holy priest of God. The incense lamp

Burned with a struggling light, and a low chant

Swelled through the hollow arches of the roof,

Like an articulate wail; and there, alone,

Wasted to ghastly thinness, Helon knelt.

The echoes of the melancholy strain

Died in the distant aisles, and he rose up,

Struggling with weakness, and bowed down his head

Unto the sprinkled ashes, and put off

His costly raiment for the leper's garb,

And with the sackcloth round him, and his lip
Hid in a loathsome covering, stood still,

Waiting to hear his doom :

"Depart! depart, O child

Of Israel, from the temple of thy God!

For he has smote thee with his chastening rod,
And to the desert wild,

From all thou lov'st, away thy feet must flee,
That from thy plague his people may be free.

"Depart! and come not near

The busy mart, the crowded city, more;
Nor set thy foot a human threshold o'er;
And stay thou not to hear

Voices that call thee in the way; and fly
From all who in the wilderness pass by.

"Wet not thy burning lip

In streams that to a human dwelling glide;
Nor rest thee where the covert fountains hide;
Nor kneel thee down to dip

The water where the pilgrim bends to drink,
By desert well, or river's grassy brink.

"And pass not thou between

The weary traveller and the cooling breeze;
And lie not down to sleep beneath the trees
Where human tracks are seen;

Nor milk the goat that browseth on the plain;
Nor pluck the standing corn, or yellow grain.

"And now depart! and when

Thy heart is heavy, and thine eyes are dim,
Lift up thy prayer beseechingly to him
Who, from the tribes of men,

Selected thee to feel his chastening rod;-
Depart, O leper! and forget not God."

And he went forth alone. Not one of all
The many whom he loved, nor she whose name
Was woven in the fibres of the heart

Breaking within him now, to come and speak
Comfort unto him. Yea, he went his way,
Sick, and heart-broken, and alone,―to die!
For God had cursed the leper.

It was noon,

And Helon knelt beside a stagnant pool
In the lone wilderness, and bathed his brow,
Hot with the burning leprosy, and touched
The loathsome water to his fevered lips,
Praying he might be so blest,-to die!

Footsteps approached, and with no strength to flee,
He drew the covering closer on his lip,

Crying, "Unclean! unclean!" and in the folds
Of the coarse sackcloth shrouding up his face,
He fell upon the earth till they should pass.
Nearer the stranger came, and bending o'er
The leper's prostrate form, pronounced his name,
"Helon!" The voice was like the master-tone
Of a rich instrument, most strangely sweet;
And the dull pulses of disease awoke,
And for a moment beat beneath the hot
And leprous scales with a restoring thrill.
"Helon, arise!" And he forgot his curse,
And rose and stood before him.

Love and awe

Mingled in the regard of Helon's eye,

As he beheld the Stranger. He was not
In costly raiment clad, nor on his brow
The symbol of a lofty lineage wore;

No followers at his back, nor in his hand
Buckler, or sword or spear; yet in his mien
Command sat throned serene, and if he smiled,
A kingly condescension graced his lips,
The lion would have crouched to in his lair.
His garb was simple, and his sandals worn;
His statue modelled with a perfect grace;
His countenance, the impress of a God
Touched with the open innocence of a child;
His eye was blue and calm, as is the sky
In the serenest noon; his hair, unshorn,
Fell to his shoulders; and his curling beard
The fulness of perfected manhood bore:
He looked on Helon earnestly awhile,

As if his heart was moved; and stooping down,
He took a little water in his hand

And laid it on his brow, and said, "Be clean!"
And lo! the scales fell from him, and his blood
Coursed with delicious coolness through his veins,
And his dry palms grew moist, and on his brow
The dewy softness of an infant's stole.
His leprosy was cleansed, and he fell down
Prostrate at Jesus' feet, and worshipped him.

N. P. Willis.

PLEADING EXTRAORDINARY.

MAY IT PLEASE THE COURT,-Gentlemen of the Jury: You sit in that box as the great reservoir of Roman liberty, Spartan fame, and Grecian polytheism. You are to swing the great flail of justice and electricity over this immense community, in hydraulic majesty, and conjugal superfluity. You are the great triumphal arch on which evaporates the even scales of justice and numerical computation. You are to ascend the deep arcana of nature, and dispose of my client with equiponderating concatenation, in reference to his future velocity and reverberating momentum. Such is your sedative and stimulating character. My client is only a man of domestic eccentricity and matrimonial configuration, not permitted, as you are, gentlemen, to walk in the primeval and lowest vales of

society, but he has to endure the red-hot sun of the uni verse, on the heights of nobility and feudal eminence. He has a beautiful wife of horticultural propensities, that hen-pecks the remainder of his days with soothing and bewitching verbosity, that makes the nectar of his pandemonium as cool as Tartarus.

He has a family of domestic children, that gathers around the fireplace of his peaceful homicide in tumultitudinous consanguinity, and cry with screaming and rebounding pertinacity for bread, butter, and molasses. Such is the glowing and overwhelming character and defeasance of my client, who stands convicted before this court of oyer and terminer, and lex non scripta, by the persecuting pettifogger of this court, who is as much exterior to me as I am interior to the judge, and you,--gentlemen of the jury.

This Borax of the law here has brought witnesses into this court, who swear that my client has stolen a firkin of butter. Now, I say every one of them swore to a lie, and the truth is concentrated within them. But if it is so, I justify the act on the ground that the butter was necessary for a public good, to tune his family into harmonious discord. But I take no other mountainous and absquatulated grounds on this trial, and move that a quash be laid upon this indictment.

Now I will prove this by a learned expectoration of the principle of the law. Now butter is made of grass, and it is laid down by St. Peter Pindar, in his principle of subterraneous law, that grass is couchant and levant, which in our obicular tongue, means that grass is of a mild and free nature; consequently my client had a right to grass and butter both.

To prove my second great principle, "let facts be submitted to a candid world." Now butter is grease, and Greece is a foreign country, situated in the emaciated regions of Liberia and California; consequently my client cannot be tried in this horizon, and is out of the benediction of this court. I will now bring forward the ultima tum respondentia, and cap the great climax of logic, by quoting an inconceivable principle of law, as laid down in Latin, by Pothier, Hudibras, Blackstone, Hannibal, and Sangrado. It is thus: Hæc hoc morus multicaulis,