fore them, and Nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters and all present, without leaving the box or any manner of consultation whatever they brought in a simultaneous verdict of "Not guilty." MY CASTLE IN SPAIN. THE garret I live in is lonely; I keep up no sumptuous state: A park of old oak trees caresses The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision, and when the court was dismissed went privily and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days In a few days His Lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insuranceoffices, one and all, shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architec-Through my grounds winds a river sedately, every ture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious, arts make their way amongst mankind. CHARLES LAMB. (At present my life is all plain): Oh, it warms me to build, when I'm chilly, My castle in Spain. Unlike that old pump in the yard ; Come over and share in my reign- My castle in Spain. WHAT THE SKULL SPAKE. FROM THE PERSIAN OF SADI (1175-1291). AY not sultans are mighty; think not largely of thrones; SAY king of diadem'd ones. TH ANCIENT LIFE UNFOLDED. HE discovery of the remains of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum first revealed to the moderns the The realm of the beggar is safer than the familiar side of ancient Roman life, and since then the archæologist, the romanceThe woe of a darweesh is measured by his writer, and the artist have so diligently want of an oaten crust: labored to interpret these and other remains On the heart of the king sit always his to us that we are on easier terms of acquaintempire's toil and trust. ance with the leaders of the world's civilization of two thousand years ago—with their strange, and often startling, similarities and When the darweesh has munched at sunset his hunk of yesterday's bread, He sleeps in his rags more sweetly than the equally strange dissimilarities to ourselves and our modern ways of thinking and doing king on his golden bed. Be grieved for whoso ruleth, and pity his than we are with our own ancestors of five sorrowful fate; The beggar is verily monarch, though he hides with a clout his state. I heard it told of a darweesh, long ago, in a distant land, hundred years ago. During the past forty years artists have devoted themselves with great assiduity to the production of pictures which have for their object the representation of antique life-not according to some more or less fanciful ideas, but, referring always to undoubted authorities, putting the men and women and children of the dead-and-gone civilizations of the past before us much as they must have been amid their proper surroundings. These pictures, there can be no doubt, have accomplished far more than any writings on I was king of the two great rivers: I was the subject to make the people of our time Babylonia's lord. understand rightly and appreciate keenly the I had in my heart the purpose to seize Kara- conditions under which the subjects of the mania's plain, When, lo! in the wink of an eyelid the worms were eating my brain." From the ear of wisdom, darweesh, the cot ton of carelessness pluck, That counsel of dead men, darweesh, may bring thee, by lowliness, luck. Translation of SIR EDWARD ARNOLD. Cæsars lived and moved and had their being, and to entertain a hearty human sympathy for them instead of regarding them, as we must needs in a great measure regard people whom we know only through the instrumentality of books, as very much in the nature of abstractions. LOUIS EDWARD LEVY. POOR JACK. H, yes! poor Jack! I mind "I shall be home again, and, love, His father's white-haired And now--even now-there stood a ship On the far horizon-sea. joy : A grand old gentleman was he (Luff, Jack, lad!-Ship ahoy!), But he is dead now, and poor Jack Is only a sailor-boy. He heard her voice, when, lo! O God! And the flash of a light of distress. Down, down the bellying tempest swooped With death in its blackening womb; Blinding the flash of the lights of distress, The white sheet flared through the gloom, And, deadening the sound of the gun, she heard The thundering breakers' boom. And now red lights like beacon-fires Blaze from the ship's black hull, Flaring the dread rocks round. O God! How many a ghastly skull Of drowned men lies, where they lie now, On the reef of Innishtrahull ! Anon, in a huge sea-swoop, the ship The tumbling seas swoop; the plunging foam bursts, And the drenched lamps glimmer between. Father of life, will they see on shore The sinking ship's signal sheen? O God of storm, thou art God of love: Ye are seen, pale lights, ye are seen! "Out with the lifeboat !" rang the shout, And the stormy winds did blow; "Out with the lifeboat!-Steady, my lads! Down with her! Steady, boys-so. Bend to it, all; together, lads, now! Hurrah! away we go!" |