one cold October day, and how he wept as he looked at the little white slab; and you looked steadily at it too, absently watching the sunshine glinting across it. You venture a remark, intended to call up some one of the memories common to both. "Aw yes, I remem People get doosed bloo in a country place, don't they, Frarnk?" You hasten to change the subject. Long dissertations follow, respecting "our house," "our firm," " we do business with Biteem & Co." You wonder at the change in your friend. There is not one thing in the insipid, affected being before you, to remind you of the boy whom you once knew, and as you think of him as he once was, and as he now is, you find yourself reciting vacation lesson No. 2. "Without charity I am nothing," it should be, but most of us "fizzle" it sadly; get entirely on the wrong track, (?) and recite promptly, "What a stupendous snob! Intolerable bore! Regular squirt! Don't know anything!" By vacation lessons, we mean those feelings of commingled disgust and sadness, which we learn first, when we find buds that promised fairly, blossoming into worm-eaten, odorless, dying and worse than dying flowers. Those feelings which arise when we see gallant ships, before their voyage is well begun, already split upon the rocks, the paint already soiled and dim, the masts and spars snapped, the torn sails flapping idly, the precious cargo wasted, and the lading taken in exchange, worthless sand. By this time, however, your health needs recruiting. Nothing can save you but a trip to the sea-side, the mountains or the springs. You have been to the sea so often that you conclude that there is nothing like the mountains. You become poetic, filled with the “divine afflatus," and talk earnestly about "Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest," and all that sort of thing. In short, you go to the mountains. That is one thing, and a very pleasant one too. Next, you go up the mountains. That's quite a different thing. Stage crowded, driver crabbed and stupid, and says there's room for three on the box. You submit with as good a grace as you can, and begin to look out for remarkable scenery, and you find remarkable scenery with a vengeance. SCENE 1ST. Road in front, inclining upward at an angle of seventy-five degrees. Two rods ahead of you, "a mighty cloud of dust," which doesn't long preserve that respectful distance, but the next instant is in and around your eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth. (I here found that what had seemed stupidity in the driver, viz., a remarkable aptitude for keeping his mouth shut, was, in fact, the result of maturest wisdom. Also a brother editor has since informed me, that this little piece of sapiency, which I learned from experience, was embodied in a maxim by his maternal relative, and in his tender years was freqently quoted for his or her especial benefit. We give it for the convenience of future travelers: "Shet yer hed." However, I find upon consulting history, that I am not the first who has "bitten the dust," for not keeping the mouth shut.) SCENE 2D. Dust so thick all around that you cannot see anything. This is a wonderful opportunity for pensive thought. The gross external world is all shut out, and you think of the "wild goats" again, but just here the cloud in front breaks a little, and you see, dimly figured in the atmosphere of sand, the long ears of a herd of jackasses. You abandon the goat theory instantly, but do your best, you cannot gather up the reins of your imagination, before that brilliant faculty has supplied a long linen duster, an umbrella, and a carpetbag to a few pairs of the above mentioned ears. Singular freak of the fancy, you soliloquize. Wonderful illustration of the influence of our sensations upon the imaginative portion of the mind. You wonder if Reid was ever conscious of such a process within him. But there's an end to all things, and so there is to a mountain road. A little before sunset, the stage stops at a large white house, and you are politely requested by the driver to "come down with your dust," which being done, you eat an excellent and then you learn the grand finale of vacation lesson No. 3, out of what Horace Smith so finely calls the "vast three leaved bible-Earth, Sea and Sky." It is on page first, which was never so spread out before you, until you came among the Catskills. The sun, almost down, is taking leave of the valley for the night, "imprinting its last kiss," and you are looking at a picture of evening painted by the Master's hand, on canvas which was woven of rock and mould and tough fibres, when the stars sang, and the world had yet to wait over four thousand years for her Titian and Raphael and Angelo. There are hills and valleys, forests and plains, orchards and streams, lying at your feet, all displaying every variety of color, all blushing in supper, "the glow of even tide." Then fainter and fainter, the rosy tinting slowly fades from the green forest, brown hill, and gray rock, then the outlines of these grow dim and obscure, and as you gaze at the fading, darkening picture, the grand old chant of the Romish church rises spontaneously to your lips, and you recite once more, "Te Deum Laudamus." Kind reader, we have given you a summary of three lessons, which we deem it very possible you have learned by heart already, learned from the same sources with ourselves, with all the bitter and sweet blended and mingled indiscriminately. If you learned them as pleasantly as we did, you will not murmur at their rehearsal. There are many which nature and experience teach, many bright and holy ones too; lessons of sadness from breaking hearts; lessons of beauty from purple sunsets; lessons of joy from the forests and the fields; lessons of sublimity from the hills and the sea. Το students of dry books, vacations are, or should be, natures lecture hours, and to all who will listen, she speaks with magic eloquence; now humorous and amusing, now grand and sublime, now moving to tears as she discourses in the outgushings of a bleeding heart, of misery and anguish and blighted hopes, now filling the soul with hope and joy, as she points with the crimson fingers of the "dying day," up, up, to the last, saying as it were, 'God o'er head." "Sermons in stones, learn from everything." 66 A. H. W. Leonore. As to deeper shades are turning the glowing sunset skies As these crowding shades are marking the departure of the Sun, I do not mourn with weeping for the beauty that is dead, For the golden glory sleeping on thine early-coffined head; Like the strong wave's steady beating on a moveless, helpless shore, Though I know thy presence glided from my vision as a star Though on earth thou wert not given-thee my spirit hands implore, What to me a cold faith, telling that an angel's harp is thine, That thy raptured voice is swelling in a harmony divine When I know thy spirit, leaving all these new-born joys, would store And as midnight's shroud effaces every ray that noonday flings, I cannot pray to meet thee-e'en the mourning, hopeless song In the far land where thou'rt dwelling, Leonore. The Devil-. I. Is there innate in the heart of every man a desire which prompts him at times to make a fool of himself? Can the path of any individual be traced through life by words and acts of folly, which have found expression and manifestation, in spite of the resistance of the higher nature, not because they were natural, but apparently because they violated the plainest laws of common sense? Perhaps every one who has stood looking from the top of any high elevation on the vast depth which lies directly below him, has felt, on some particular occasion, that almost insane desire which urges him to throw himself down. Perfectly conscious as he is that he shall be dashed to pieces, yet the love of life seems to forsake him, the reason to desert him, and high over all reigns as sovereign of the moment, that morbid feeling, which proclaims the weakness and teachery of the human will. Nor is it in this particular alone that the mind manifests its faithlessness to all those higher attributes, which the man so proudly claims for himself. There are moments in the life of every one, there are peculiar situations in the history of every one, when the mad wish to commit some act which he knows will be attended by consequences ruinous to himself, hurries the individual forward as if with an irresistible impulse. Disguise it as we may, in the heart lurks some innate principle of evil, which at times, overleaping the barriers of reason and philosophy, gains control of the mind, and tempts the man to deeds of folly and crime, the melancholy results of which can be traced only in the pointless regrets and idle wishes of a wasted life. Down in the most secret places of the soul slumber those feelings of treason to our higher nature, which lie unknown and unnoticed until some crisis in our destiny rouses them up into open rebellion, to repeat in the manifestation of their power the original temptation and fall of the race. But with most persons, such exhihitions are not habitual, but only occasional. They do not act as a constant force influencing the conduct, but only as passing temptations working upon the will, and which though often yielded to, are still more often resisted. Yet there are species of monomania, which sometimes fasten themselves upon the character, in which this morbid propensity to commit acts of folly or of crime, usually remaining so inactive, manifests itself constantly in one particular way. Such was the case in the story I am about to relate. From the time of my earliest recollection, I had been the slave of a habit, apparently trivial in itself, but important by reason of the influence it had always exerted over my destiny. It consisted in a constant use of the words "the devil," uttered without any regard to the time or place in which I was speaking, or the character and position of the person I was addressing. All efforts to break up this peculiarity of conduct had been of no avail. It had clung to me in spite of the entreaties and reproofs of parents, in spite of the exhortations and warnings of deacons and divines. For "the devil" had not fastened itself upon my mode of speech, simply in the light of an exclamation or even of an intensive expression. It was the steps by which I ascended the staircase of conversation, the vehicle in which I was carried through the intricate paths of a sentence. Always blaming my weakness in yielding to this habit, I was yet unable to free myself from its control; until through it had fallen upon my youth the first great sorrow of manhood. II. There is no time in the ever-changing variety of the seasons more beautiful, or more suggestive of emotions, painful and pleasant, |