He curls his lips, he lies in wait
With lifted teeth as if to bite;

Brave Admiral, say but one good word,
What shall we do when hope is gone?"
The words leaped like a leaping sword,
"Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!"

Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck,

And peered through darkness. Ah, that night Of all dark nights! and then a speck,

"A light! A light! A light! A light!"

It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!

It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.

He gained a world; he gave that world
Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!"

Cincinnatus Heine Miller (Joaquin Miller). By permission of the Whitaker and Ray Co., Publishers, San Francisco.

THE AMERICAN INDIAN.

Not many generations ago, where you now sit encircled by all that exalts and embellishes civilized life, the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared. Here lived and loved another race of beings. Beneath the same sun that rolls over your head, the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; gazing on the same moon that smiles for you, the Indian lover wooed his dusky mate. Here the wigwam-blaze beamed on the tender and helpless, the council-fire glared on the wise and daring.

Now they dipped their noble limbs in your sedgy lakes, and now they paddled the light canoe along your rocky shores. Here they warred; the echoing whoop, the bloody grapple, the defying death-song, all were here; and, when the tiger strife was over, here curled the smoke of peace. Here, too, they worshiped, and from many a dark bosom went up a pure prayer to the Great Spirit.

He had not written his laws for them on tables of stone, but he had traced them on the tables of their hearts. The poor child of nature knew not the God of revelation, but the God of the universe he acknowledged in everything around.

He beheld him in the star that sunk in beauty behind his lonely dwelling; in the sacred orb that flamed on him from his mid-day throne; in the flower that snapped in the morning breeze; in the lofty pine that defied a thousand whirlwinds; in the timid warbler that never left its native grove; in the fearless eagle whose untired pinion was wet

in clouds; in the worm that crawled at his feet; and in his own matchless form, glowing with a spark of that light to whose mysterious source he bent, in humble, though blind, adoration.

-Charles Sprague.

LO, THE POOR INDIAN!

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;

Yet simple nature to his hope has given

Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world, in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,

Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christian thirsts for gold;
To be, contents his natural desire,

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

From the "Essay on Man."

-Alexander Pope.

Show me the man you honor, I know by that symptom, better than by any other, what kind of a man you yourself For you show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of a man you long inexpressibly to be.

are.

-Thomas Carlyle.

One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow.

The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to

be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet.

But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers.

The children dwelt in a city and had no wider playplace than a little garden before the house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a pear-tree and two or three plum-trees overshadowing it, and some rose-bushes just in front of the parlor windows.

"Yes, Violet-yes, my little Peony," said their kind mother, "you may go out and play in the new snow." Accordingly, the good lady bundled up her darlings and gave them a kiss apiece, by way of a spell to keep away Jack Frost.

Forth sallied the two children, with a hop-skip-andjump, that carried them at once into the very heart of a huge snow-drift, whence Violet emerged like a snowbunting, while little Peony floundered out with his round face in full bloom. Then what a merry time had they!

To look at them frolicking in the wintry garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for Violet and Peony, and that they themselves had been created, as the snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white mantle which it spread over the earth.

At last, when they had frosted one another all over