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buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel, who was to inherit those domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.

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IRT round with rugged mountains the Of how the town was saved one night, three fair Lake Constance lies;

In her blue heart reflected, shine back the starry skies;

And watching each white cloudlet float silently and slow,

You think a piece of heaven lies on our earth below!

hundred years ago.

Far from her home and kindred, a Tyrol maid had fled,

To serve in the Swiss valleys, and toil for daily bread;

And every year that fleeted so silently and fast,

Seemed to bear farther from her the memory of the past.

Midnight is there and silence enthroned in heaven, looks down Upon her own calm mirror, upon a sleeping She served kind, gentle masters, nor asked for rest or change;

town:

For Bregenz, that quaint city upon the Tyrol Her friends seemed no more new ones, their shore,

Has stood above Lake Constance, a thousand and more. years

Her battlements and towers, upon their rocky steep,

Have cast their trembling shadows of ages

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speech seemed no more strange;

And when she led her cattle to pasture every day,

She ceased to look and wonder on which side Bregenz lay.

She spoke no more of Bregenz, with longing and with tears;

Her Tyrol home seemed faded in a deep mist of years;

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.

53

She heeded not the rumors of Austrian war or strife;

Each day she rose contented, to the calm toils of life.

Yet, when her master's children would clustering round her stand,

She sang them the old ballads of her own native land;

And when at morn and evening she knelt before God's throne,

The men seemed stern and altered, with looks cast on the ground;

With anxious faces, one by one, the women gathered round;

All talk of flax, or spinning, or work, was put away;

The very children seemed afraid to go alone to play.

One day, out in the meadow with strangers from the town,

The accents of her childhood rose to her lips Some secret plan discussing, the men walked alone.

up and down.

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54

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.

The elder of the village rose up, his glass in "O God," she cries, "help Bregenz, and hand,

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bring me there in time!"

But louder than bells' ringing, or lowing of

the kine,

Grows nearer in the midnight the rushing of the Rhine.

Bregenz, our foemen's stronghold, Bregenz Shall not the roaring waters their headlong

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Out-out into the darkness-faster, and still Bregenz does well to honor the noble Tyrol

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"Faster!" she cries, "Oh, faster!" Eleven They see the quaint old carving, the charger

the church-bells chime;

and the maid.

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And when, to guard old Bregenz, by gateway, "Nine," "ten," "eleven," he cries aloud, street, and tower,

The warder paces all night long, and calls each passing hour:

and then (O crown of fame!)

When midnight pauses in the skies he calls the maiden's name.

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HE streets were empty. Pitiless cold had driven all who had the shelter of a roof to their homes; and the north-east blast seemed to howl in triumph above the untrodden snow. Winter was at the heart of all things. The wretched, dumb with excessive misery, suffered, in stupid resignation, the tyranny of the season. Human

blood stagnated in the breast of want; and death in that despairing hour, losing its terrors, looked in the eyes of many a wretch a sweet deliverer. It was a time when the very poor, barred from the commonest things of earth, take strange counsel with themselves, and, in the deep humility of destitution, believe they are the burden and the offal of the world.

It was a time when the easy, comfortable man, touched with finest sense of human suffering, gives from his abundance; and, whilst bestowing, feels almost ashamed that, with such wide-spread misery circled round him, he has all things fitting, all things grateful. The smitten spirit asks wherefore he is not of the multitude of wretchedness; demands to know for what especial excellence he is promoted above the thousand thousand starving creatures: in his very tenderness for misery, tests his privilege of

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