Professor A. A. Hopkins. Four volumes, two in verse and two in prose, stand before the writer. The former are "Asleep in the Sanctum and Other Poems," 1873, and "Waifs and their Authors," 1875; the latter, "His Prison Bars," 1874, and "Sinner and Saint, 1881. Other works from his pen are "Our Sabbath Evening," a volume of original prose and verse, and the "Life of General Clinton B. Fisk." Here are several hundred pages of story and song. Unnumbered editorials and addresses are not here. Neither are scores of fugitive poems and tales, many of them waifs so sweet and winning that though revealing no paternity, they find welcome in thousands of hearts.

Alphonso Alvah Hopkins was born in Burlington Flats, Otsego County, N. Y., March 27th, 1843. Receiving a common school and academic education, at seventeen he became a teacher; in 1865-66 held a clerkship in Albany and corresponded for the daily press; in 1867 became literary editor of Moore's Rural New Yorker, then published in Rochester, and the same year married Miss Adelia Allyn; in December, 1868, accompanied the Rural New Yorker to its new office in New York; in 1870, his health failing, returned to Rochester, and in December of that year started the Rural Home, of which for fourteen years he was editor and publisher; also, for the two last years of that period, of the American Reformer.

Professor Hopkins published many verses in those papers, chiefly anonymously. Twice he read the annual poem before the New York State Press Association, and he has long been a favorite poet for special occasions. He excels as an orator as well as a poet. With chaste and sinewy English and a magnetic presence his platform efforts are persuasive and eloquent. As a lyceum lecturer and prohibition advocate he has spoken in every state east of the Rocky Mountains. In 1888 he became one of the founders of Harriman, Tennessee, a prohibition educational center, and is now ViceChancellor and Professor of Political Economy and Prohibition in the American Temperance University and editor of the Daily and Weekly Advance.

THE DROWNED BELLS.

JUST over the water from Tintagel
Was an ivy-grown church and quaint,
With never a tenderly pealing bell
To summon the sinner or saint;

S. H. L.

The bells they were cast in a distant land,
And the vessel that brought them home
By balmest breezes was daily fanned,
Till over the white sea foam

The Tintagel chimes came low and clear—
Sweet answer to prayer-to the pilot's ear,
Who reverent said, in his glad delight,
"Thank God! we shall sleep on the shore to-night."

"Thank God on the shore, then," the captain said,
"Here thank but the good, strong ship;"
But the pilot piously shook his head

At the words from the captain's lip.
"Nay, nay, we should thank God everywhere,
Who maketh the winds and the waters fair;"
"Thou fool!" he was angrily then replied,
"Thank but thyself and a favoring tide!"

But the Tintagel chimes scarce died away,
As the sun went out of the sky,
Ere the wind with the waters began to play
And the waves rolled mountain high;
And a thick, black cloud shut the heavens out,
And over the ship came an awful doubt,
While the captain's features were blanched with fear
As the pitiless cliffs came threatening near.

And there, within sight of the quaint, old church,
The good ship grappled her fate;
A crash, then another, a final lurch,

She sank, with her precious freight;
And only the pilot went home to tell,
To the sorrowing people at Tintagel,
Why over the waters they ne'er should hear
The peal of the bells that had cost so dear.

And ever since then have the buried bells
Chimed on with a mournful tone-
A sadder and sweeter than Tintagel's,

In tune with the waves' low moan;
And they who stand now on the neighboring shore,
Above all the pitiless ocean's roar
Can hear, like an echo of Tintagel's,
The saddening chime of the buried bells!

BELIEF.

O DOUBTING heart! cling still to your believing! There is no sweeter way,

No solace that so surely sooths your grieving, No dearer hope to-day;

Μ'

FLORENCE MAY ALT.

ISS FLORENCE MAY ALT was born in Bloomington, Ill., April 29th, 1869. Her parents moved to Rochester soon after, and she recieved her education in the public schools of that city, and there began her career as an author. She wrote verses in childhood, and before her fourteenth year her poems were welcomed by the discriminating editors of leading magazine and papers. At the age of eighteen she was graduated from the Rochester free academy. She contined her studies in English literature, the depth of her researches appearing in the increasing strength of her work. In May, 1891, she gathered together her contributions to the magazines and papers, and issued them in a little book of poems called "A Child of Song, " (Rochester, 1891). The volume was well recieved by the reading public and called forth many commendations from recognized critics. G. F. Her home is in Rochester, N. Y.

FRANCESCO'S ANGEL.

LIKE birds that wing
Across dark forests when they sing,
The days flew in Carrara. I

Was but a quarry slave, they say—
I'd be a quarry slave to-day,
If but Bianca might be by!
Our love folds like a purple haze
Around those old Italian days.

Often, when noon is high, I think
I hear the busy hammers clink
Upon that snow-white rock that seems
A shapeless mass to you; and yet
Each vision of the sculptor's dreams
Within that jealous stone is set!

I was a sculptor too; my hand
And eye were quick to understand
The beauty in the marble locked.
When on the yielding stone I knocked,
White-statued figures answered me!—
But I was slave to poverty.

We peasants were a merry lot!
If life were hard, we knew it not.
Toil melted busy hours like snow.

Clink! Clink! the happy hammers go—
I hear them yet. And when the night
Had set our violet skies alight,
The twanging of the mandolin

Wove our light feet its strains within,
Who tript across its tinkling bars,
And danced beneath the dancing stars
That bent to hear the melody.

Bianca always danced with me,
As light as wind-blown leaves, until
The English signor came to spill
The rich wine of my life, and tear
Away the rose I longed to wear.

This Englishman was hard and cold
As other men whose god is gold.
The workmen feared him from the first,
And as for me, the very worst
And hardest labor he could find
In all the quarry, to his mind,
Belonged to me: t'was hard to bear,
For I had worked with love and care
At such fine tasks as needed skill.
I held myself as something more
Than common peasant; and until
This overseer came, I bore

My share of praise. He always spurred
With muttered curse or bitter word!

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