allusion that the young man was ever to hear her make He declared that, at any After this Daisy stopped

to his invidious kinswoman.

rate, he would certainly come. teasing. Winterbourne took a carriage, and they drove back to Vevay in the dusk; the young girl was very quiet.

In the evening Winterbourne mentioned to Mrs. Costello that he had spent the afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy Miller.

"The Americans-of the courier?" asked this lady.

"Ah, happily," said Winterbourne, "the courier stayed at home."

"She went with you all alone?"

"All alone."

Mrs. Costello sniffed a little at her smelling-bottle. "And that," she exclaimed, "is the young person whom you wanted me to know!"

THE OCKLAWAHA IN MAY.

SIDNEY LANIER.

FOR a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day. The little Ocklawaha steamboat Marion-a steamboat which is like nothing in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously exaggerated back-had started from Pilatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and by seven o'clock. of such a May morning as no words could describe, unless words were themselves May mornings, we had made the twenty-five miles up the St. Johns, to where the Ocklawaha

flows into that stream nearly opposite Welaka, one hundred miles above Jacksonville.

Just before entering the mouth of the river our little gopher-boat scrambled alongside a long raft of pine logs which had been brought in separate sections down the Ocklawaha, and took off the lumbermen, to carry them. back for another descent while this raft was being towed by a tug to Jacksonville.

Observe that man who is now stepping from the wet logs to the bow of the Marion: how can he ever cut down a tree? He is a slim native, and there is not bone enough in his whole body to make the left leg of a good English coal-heaver; moreover, he does not seem to have the least idea that a man needs grooming. He is dishevelled and wry-trussed to the last degree; his poor weasel jaws nearly touch their inner sides as they suck at the acrid ashes in his dreadful pipe; and there is no single filament of either his hair or his beard that does not look sourly and at wild angles upon its neighbor filament. His eyes are viscidly unquiet; his nose is merely dreariness come to a point; the corners of his mouth are pendulous with that sort of suffering which does not involve any heroism, such as being out of tobacco, waiting for the corn-bread to get cooked, and the like; his But, poor devil! I withdraw all these remarks. He has a right to look dishevelled, or any other way he likes. For listen: "Wall, sir," he says, with a dilute smile, as he wearily leans his arm against the low deck where I am sitting, "ef we didn't have ther sentermentillest rain right thar last night, I'll be dad-busted." He had been in it all night.

Presently we rounded the raft, abandoned the broad and garish highway of the St. Johns, and turned off to the right into the narrow lane of the Ocklawaha, the sweetest water-lane in the world,-a lane which runs for more than

a hundred and fifty miles of pure delight betwixt hedgerows of oaks and cypresses and palms and bays and magnolias and mosses and manifold vine-growths; a lane clean to travel along, for there is never a speck of dust in it, save the blue dust and gold dust which the wind blows out of the flags and lilies; a lane which is as if a typical woods-stroll had taken shape, and as if God had turned into water and trees the recollection of some meditative ramble through the lonely seclusions of His own soul.

As we advanced up the stream our wee craft even seemed to emit her steam in more leisurely whiffs, as one puffs one's cigar in a contemplative walk through the forest. Dick, the pole-man, a man of marvellous fine functions when we shall presently come to the short, narrow curves, -lay asleep on the guards, in great peril of rolling into the river over the three inches between his length and the edge; the people of the boat moved not, and spoke not; the white crane, the curlew, the limpkin, the heron, the waterturkey, were scarcely disturbed in their quiet avocations as we passed, and quickly succeeded in persuading themselves after each momentary excitement of our gliding by that we were really, after all, no monster, but only some day-dream of a monster. The stream, which in its broader stretches reflected the sky so perfectly that it seemed a ribbon of heaven bound in lovely doublings along the breast of the land, now began to narrow; the blue of heaven disappeared, and the green of the overleaning trees assumed its place. The lucent current lost all semblance of water. It was simply a distillation of many-shaded foliages, smoothly sweeping along beneath us. It was green trees, fluent. One felt that a subtle amalgamation and mutual give-and-take had been effected between the natures of water and leaves. A certain sense of pellucidness seemed to breathe coolly out of the woods on either

side of us, and the glassy dream of a forest over which we sailed appeared to send up exhalations of balms and odors. and stimulant pungencies.

"Look at that snake in the water," said a gentleman, as we sat on deck with the engineer, just come up from his watch.

The engineer smiled. "Sir, it is a water-turkey," he said, gently.

The water-turkey is the most preposterous bird within the range of ornithology. He is not a bird; he is a neck. with such subordinate rights, members, appurtenances, and hereditaments thereunto appertaining as seem necessary to that end. He has just enough stomach to arrange nourishment for his neck, just enough wings to fly painfully along with his neck, and just big enough legs to keep his neck from dragging on the ground; and his neck is light-colored, while the rest of him is black. When he saw us he jumped up on a limb and stared. Then suddenly he dropped into the water, sank like a leaden ball out of sight, and made us think he was drowned,—when presently the tip of his beak appeared, then the length of his neck lay along the surface of the water, and in this position, with his body submerged, he shot out his neck, drew it back, wriggled it. twisted it, twiddled it, and spirally poked it into the east, the west, the north, and the south, with a violence of involution and a contortionary energy that made one think in the same breath of corkscrews and of lightnings. But what nonsense! All that labor and perilous asphyxiation-for a beggarly sprat or a couple of inches of water-snake!

But I make no doubt he would have thought us as absurd as we him if he could have seen us taking our breakfast a few minutes later. For as we sat there, some half-dozen men at table, all that sombre melancholy which

comes over the American at his meals descended upon us. No man talked; each of us could hear the other crunch his bread in faucibus, and the noise thereof seemed in the ghostly stillness like the noise of earthquakes and of crashing worlds. Even the furtive glances towards each other's plates were presently awed down to a sullen gazing of each into his own; the silence increased, the noises became intolerable, a cold sweat broke out over at least one of us; he felt himself growing insane, and rushed out to the deck with a sigh as of one saved from a dreadful death by social suffocation.

There is a certain position a man can assume on board the steamer Marion which constitutes an attitude of perfect rest, and leaves one's body in such blessed ease that one's soul receives the heavenly influences of the Ocklawaha sail absolutely without physical impediment.

Know, therefore, tired friend that shall hereafter ride up the Ocklawaha on the Marion,-whose name I would fain call legion, that if you will place a chair just in the narrow passage-way which runs alongside the cabin, at the point where this passage-way descends by a step to the open space in front of the pilot-house, on the left-hand side facing the bow, you will perceive a certain slope in the railing where it descends by an angle of some thirty degrees to accommodate itself to the step aforesaid; and this slope should be in such a position as that your left leg unconsciously stretches itself along the same by the pure insinuating solicitations of the fitness of things, and straightway dreams itself off into an Elysian tranquillity. You should then tip your chair in a slightly diagonal position back to the side of the cabin, so that your head will rest thereagainst, your right arm will hang over the chair-back, and your left arm will repose on the railing. I give no specific instructions for your right leg, because