The stars look coldly down when man is dying,

The moon still holds its way;

Flowers breathe their perfume round us; winds keep sighing;
Naught seems to pause or stay.

A N AFRIC. N LEGEND.

BY MISS MARY A. E. TUTTLE.

Ir is long years since I heard a tale,
A legend wild and strange,

Of a burning clime, where the sultry air
Is never known to change;

But oft I think, in my mournful hours,
Of that legend sad and strange.

"T was of a traveller, young and bold,
In Afric's fatal land:

The lordly Niger had tempted him
To tread the glittering sand;
To leave the cot where his sisters dwelt,
A happy household band.

But he grew lonely and sick at heart,
And pined to see again

His childhood's home, where the fragrant flowers
Crept over the window-pane;

And longed for the welcome waiting him

Far over the tossing main.

He thought of one, with her earnest eyes,
In that far land away,

Whose sunny hair and radiant brow

He dreamed of night and day;
Till, starting, he cried, in Afric's land
He would no longer stay.

But, alas! ere he could reach the shore,
Came tidings o'er the wave,

That she he loved with a love intense
Lay shrouded in the grave;

Then blanched the cheek of that trav❜ler bold,
And trembled then the brave!

But a strange light shone in his deep dark eye;
He laughed in frantic glee:

'I will go,' he said, 'and seek the lost

In desert wild and free;

I shall find her where the sand lies piled
In billows, like the sea.'

"T was in vain they told him she had died
In his own sunny land;

That the willows waved above her grave,
By summer breezes fanned;

And the earth was heaped upon her breast,
Instead of desert sand.

It was all in vain: She is not dead,'

Said he, with cheerful air;

'I hear her voice, which the scented winds
Have hasted here to bear;

Her silver tones from the desert waste,
They bid me seek her there.'

And he went forth, that desolate one,
To the desert, bleak and vast,
Where the snow-white sand in columns high
Its glittering wreaths did cast;
But he heeded not the eddying sand,
Nor yet the scorching blast.

But at last he weary grew, and faint,
And dimmer was his eye;

Till with parchéd lip and fevered brow,
He laid him down to die,

Where the burning sand in many a wave
Went wildly surging by.

There came to him, as he fainting lay,
A white-plumed message-bird;
And strangely like was the tune she sung
To one he oft had heard;

And her earnest eyes within his heart
A thousand memories stirred.

"T was the eye, the voice of her, the lost,
That bird with plume of snow;
With dew from her wing she wet his lips,
And fanned him soft and low,

Till the fever was quenched within his veins,
And cooled his brow's fierce glow.

Then he rose refreshed, and journeyed on; But hovering round him there

Was that wondrous bird, with radiant eyes,
And pinions brightly fair;

And she sung, in music sweet and wild,
Full many a plaintive air.

When the desert breath came thick and hot,
She, fluttering, waved her wing,

Till, fresh from its folds of living light,
The soft, cool air would spring;
As the perfumed incense sweetly floats,
Which silver censers fling.

And when the angry simoom came,

All closely she would fold

Her pinions pale round his trembling form, Upon the dreary wold,

And shelter him, till darkly by

The mighty storm had rolled.

The legend tells that he wanders yet,
With strength that ne'er shall fail;

And trav❜lers say they have sometimes seen
That bird with snowy sail,

Or heard the sound of her music sweet

Borne on the desert gale.

FANCIES ON FEMALES.

'ECOUTEZ ici jouvencelles,
Ecoutez aussi demoiselles!'

'FOR of one thousand men, saith SOLOMON, I found one good man; but certes of all women, good woman found I never.'-TALE OF MELIBUS.

SOME old cynic says that women are like coin: you can not tell what they are worth until you ring them. He should, according to Hood, have called them belles for that reason; but probably recollecting the apostrophe of the thief to the chimes, mentioned by the brothers Percy, his gallantry may have gotten the better of his veracity, and suffered many an Alcestis to go uninsulted. If the worth of women be unknown till one wrings them, their simile should be chickens, even if they were 'no chickens;' not at all to insinuate that they were not game, or were chicken-hearted, and would n't come up to the scratch,' but merely to suggest that their excellences came out, like Mark Tapley's, best under the most discouraging circumstances.

Thinking on this most delicious subject, it occurred to us to follow up the strain of the old misogynist, and see what his visions of wifedom, and womandom, and babydom were; in fact, as the Southerns have it, 'to run it in the mud.' And we know of no better method to cominence than that adopted by that most intelligent of persons, the critic of the Eatanswill Gazette, who, it will be remembered, when composing an elaborate article on Chinese metaphysics, looked in the Encyclopædia for the word 'China,' and then for 'metaphysics,' and combined the information thus obtained. First we eviscerate the 'wo,' and find that it is either an exclamation of stoppage or hindrance, first applied to females who, in the good old times, were doing their duty in front of the plough, (this we have literally, good reader, from the Norman-French' Devoirs de Fem,' or the legal duties of women, by Plow-den, a great rake in those days,) instead of bothering their heads over What are we going to have for dinner today?' or the last crochét stitch, and afterward, by an anti-hyperbole, to horses; or else it is that concentration of misery which, however debased by philologists, appears conclusively to me to be the future tense of the owl-like verb to woo. Having got thus far, what can be clearer? It may be derived from the German verb wo-mann, (Whither, O husband!) in which miserable combination of words any body possessing that demivision not accurately defined in optics as half an eye, can tell the original of that stoppage, let, or hindrance, which bawls out in a shrill sfogato, from a vapid wrapper at the top of the stairs, 'Where are you going tonight? Can't you 'The rest is fortunately lost in a vain attempt to get up stairs slip-shod without losing one slipper every alternate third step. Or if it is not Woh! man, what can be better than this plain, unaltered, merely bisected banner of grief, wo-man? It don't require a Champollion or a Gell to decipher that. It stares you in the face, (I was about to say on the first blush, but the word is obsolete.) Every schoolboy can tell you how, from Mrs. Eve in Paradise to Mrs. Rush the Eng

lish murderess, the lady race (race des dames) has been the spring from which all have drunk their first misery.

'WOMEN! Help, HEAVEN! Men their creation mar
In profiting by them.'

The old language-makers knew this so well, that they made. that unfortunate conjunction of persons in orange-blossoms and tears but a synonyme of bitterness. The word 'marry,' unde derivatur? Why, not from any French nonsense signifying trousseaux, or cadeaux, or scented handkerchiefs, or any thing like that, but from the stern Hebrew marah, meaning bitterness. Therefore, when any antediluvian youth or damsel were 'taken out of the shafts (being minors) and put in double harness,' every body knew what was coming, and they were said to be marah'd,' i. e., embittered; whence married. There is no denying this induction: it's too plain to be avoided.

'NEEDLES and pins! needles and pins!
When a man marries his trouble begins,'

says Solomon; and he, with his three hundred wives, ought to know if any body should. Marriages in the east were always celebrated in the afternoon, so that any body who chose to go to old Mehemet Guy's or Ali Hassan Delmonico's and get their morning bitters — Allah! hu? were not said to be married, but only merried; and this is a nice distinction for love-sick potators, either great or small, Irish or sweet. Byron understood this so well, that we have it on the best authority that the original celebrated lines in Childe Harold ran thuswise:

THE child of love,

Born in bitters, and nurtured in a cocktail;'

at

and was only dissuaded from so publishing them by the Countess Guiccioli, who pointed out to him the anachronism in the last sentence that time no mint having been produced in Europe.

But we have got from off our subject, and must return. We think it proved that man and woman were never intended, and are totally unfit, for one another. But the only person who ever did know any thing about the sex, says that

'Two women placed together makes cold weather.'- HENRY VIII.

That she

Now, leaving out of the calculation the disagreeable consequences of a continued hibernation, and the rise in blankets and black velvet, it must appear to every candid mind that a very important question here suggests itself to the politico-economist. That woman can't live with man without a marriage, (which is bitterness,) we have clearly seen. can't exist with another woman without spoiling the spring vegetables, is equally positive. Then where can she live? What can she do? The old opinion that women are angels- - which, thank HEAVEN, has not been left for us to refute-might have settled the question. But Eloisa and Mde. Brinvilliers have smashed that doctrine. So we have hit on a solution for which we claim no little praise, and for which we expect an osculatory vote of thanks from all the oppressed, from fifteen years up to twenty. This is it: Women, knowing their own deficiences, and this extreme frigidity of atmosphere consequent on their self-connection, feel