sprang up and caused the water to dance, glitter and sparkle in the early sunbeams, and to dash with a pleasant rippling noise against the shore.

The lake seemed so strangely familiar that the old couple were greatly perplexed, and felt as if they could only have been dreaming about a village having lain there. But the next moment they remembered the vanished dwellings, and the faces and characters of the inhabitants, far too distinctly for a dream. The village had been there yesterday and now it was gone!

"Alas!" cried these kind-hearted old people, "what has become of our poor neighbors?"

"They exist no longer as men and women," said the elder traveller, in his grand and deep voice, while a roll of thunder seemed to echo it in the distance. "There was neither use nor beauty in such a life as theirs. They retained no image of the better life in their bosoms; therefore the lake that was of old has spread itself forth again to reflect the sky."

"As for you, good Philemon," continued the elder traveller, — -"and you, kind Baucis, you, with your scanty means, have mingled so much heartfelt hospitality with your entertainment of the homeless stranger, that the milk became an inexhaustible fount of nectar, and the brown loaf and the honey were ambrosia. You have done well, my dear old friends. Wherefore, request whatever favor you have most at heart and it is granted."

Philemon and Baucis looked at one another, and then, -I know not which of the two it was who spoke, but that one uttered the desire of both their hearts.

"Let us live together while we live, and leave the world at the same instant when we die!"

ness.

"Be it so!" replied the stranger, with majestic kind"Now look toward your cottage."

They did so. What was their surprise on beholding a tall edifice of white marble, with a wide-open portal, on the spot where their humble residence had stood.

"There is your home," said the stranger.

"Exercise

your hospitality in yonder palace as freely as in the poor hut to which you welcomed us last evening."

The old people fell on their knees to thank him; but, behold neither he nor Quicksilver were there.

So Philemon and Baucis took up their residence in the marble palace, and spent their time in making everybody happy and comfortable who happened to pass that way. The milk pitcher retained its marvellous quality of being never empty when it was desirable to have it full.

Thus the old couple lived in their palace a very great while, and grew older and older, and very old indeed. At length, however, there came a summer morning when Philemon and Baucis failed to make their appearance, as on other mornings, with one hospitable smile overspreading both their faces, to invite the guests of over night to breakfast. The guests searched everywhere in the spa

cious palace, but all to no purpose. After a great deal of perplexity they espied in front of the portal two venerable trees, which no one could remember to have seen there the day before. Yet there they stood, with their roots fastened deep into the soil, and a huge breadth of foliage overshadowing the whole front of the edifice.

While the guests were marvelling how these trees that must have required a century to grow could have come to be so tall and venerable in a single night, a breeze sprang up and set their boughs astir. Then there was a deep murmur in the air, as if the two trees were speaking. "I am old Philemon!" murmured one.

"I am old Baucis!" murmured the other.

But as the breeze grew stronger, the trees both spoke at once," Philemon! Baucis! Baucis! Philemon!" as if one were both and both were one, and talking together in the depths of their mutual heart. And oh, what a hospitable shade did they fling around them. Whenever a wayfarer paused beneath it, he heard a pleasant whisper of the leaves above his head, and wondered how the sound could so much resemble words like these:

"Welcome, welcome, dear traveller, welcome!"

Some kind soul, that knew what would have pleased Baucis and Philemon best, built a circular bench round both their trunks, where the weary and hungry and thirsty could repose themselves and quaff milk abundantly out of the miraculous pitcher.

-NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

The

We have just built our house in an out-of-the-way place, on the bank of a river, and under the shade of some trees which are all that remain of an ancient forest. checkerberry and partridge-plum, with their glossy green leaves and scarlet berries, still carpet the ground in the deep shadows of the wood; and the prince's-pine and other evergreens declare its native wildness, - for these are the children of the wild woods, that never come after plough and harrow have once broken the soil.

When we tried to find a spot for our house, we had to get a surveyor to go before us and cut a path through the dense underbrush that was laced together in a network of boughs and leaves, and grew so high as to overtop our heads. Where the house stands, four or five great oaks and chestnuts had to be cut away to let it in; and now it stands on the bank of the river, the edges of which are still overhung with old forest trees, chestnuts and oaks, which look at themselves in the glassy stream.

1 See note on page 262.

2 Find the definition and pronunciation of these words in the vocabulary.

A little knoll near the house was chosen for a garden spot; a dense, dark mass of trees above, of bushes in midair, and of all sorts of ferns and wild flowers and creeping vines on the ground. All these had to be cleared out, and a dozen great trees cut down and dragged away to a neighboring sawmill, there to be transformed into boards to finish our house.

Then, bringing a machine, such as might be used to pull a giant's tooth, with ropes, pulleys, oxen and men, and might and main, we pulled out the stumps, with their great prongs and their network of roots and fibres; and then, alas! we had to begin with all the pretty, wild, lovely bushes, and the checkerberries and ferns and wild blackberry and huckleberry bushes, and dig them up remorselessly, that we might plant our corn and squashes. And so we found a house and garden in the heart of the wild woods, about a mile from the city.

People said it was a lonely place, and far from neighbors, by which they meant that it was a long way for them to come to see us. But we soon found that whoever goes into the woods to live finds neighbors of a new kind, and some to whom it is rather hard to become accustomed.

For instance, on a fine day early in April, as we were on our way to superintend the building of our house, we were startled by a striped snake who raised himself to look at us with his little bright eyes, and put out his red forked tongue. There is no more harm in these little garden