the world. And then, in the dusk of the evening, Dilly Bal must take each star from the bag in which he carries it, polish it bright, and put it in its proper place.

Sometimes, as you may have observed, a star will fall while Dilly Bal is handling it. This happens when he is nervous for fear that King Sun, instead of going to bed in his tent, has crept back and is watching from behind the cloud mountains. Sometimes a star falls quite by accident, as when Lucindy or Patience drops a plate in the kitchen. You will be sure to know Dilly Bal when you see him, for, in handling the stars and dusting the sky, his clothes get full of yellow cobwebs which he never bothers himself to brush off.

But Dilly Bal's most difficult job is with the Moon. Regularly the Moon blackens her face in a vain effort to

hide from King Sun. If she used smut or soot, Dilly Bal's task would not be so difficult; but she has found a lake of pitch somewhere in Africa, and in this lake she smears her face till it is so black her best friends wouldn't know her. The pitch is such sticky stuff that it is days and days before it can be rubbed off. The truth is, Dilly Bal never does succeed in getting all the pitch off. At her brightest, the Moon shows signs of it. So said Thomas Tid, and so we all firmly believed.

-JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.

A FAIRY SONG

COME, follow, follow me,
Ye fairy elves that be,

Light tripping o'er the green,
Come follow Mab your queen;
Hand in hand we'll dance around,
For this place is fairy ground.

When mortals are at rest,
And snoring in their nest,
Unheard and unespied,

Through the keyholes we do glide;
Over tables, stools, and shelves,
We trip it with our fairy elves.

And, if the house be foul
With platter, dish, or bowl,
Upstairs we nimbly creep

And find the sluts asleep:

Then we pinch their arms and thighs;
None us hears, nor none espies.

But if the house be swept,
And from uncleanness kept,
We praise the household maid,
And duly she is paid:
Every night before we go
We drop a tester in her shoe.

Then o'er a mushroom's head,
Our tablecloth we spread;
A grain of rye or wheat,
The diet that we eat;

Pearly drops of dew we drink,
In acorn cups filled to the brink.

The brains of nightingales,
With unctuous fat of snails,
Between two cockles stewed,

Is meat that's easy chewed;

Tails of worms and marrow of mice

Do make a dish that's wondrous nice.

The grasshopper, gnat, and fly,

Serve for our minstrelsy,

Grace said, we dance awhile,
And so the time beguile;

And if the moon doth hide her head,
The glow-worm lights us home to bed.

O'er tops of dewy grass

So nimbly do we pass,

The young and tender stalk

Ne'er bends where we do walk;

Yet in the morning may be seen

Where we the night before have been.

-OLD SONG.

WOODS IN WINTER

PEOPLE who never visit the country except in the season between May and October are prone to imagine that the forest is only really beautiful when it is covered with foliage. But painters, hunters, and those generally who frequent the woods in all seasons, know that this is not the case.

Winter reveals to us a different aspect of sylvan nature, in which there is a severer grandeur, a more delicate, a soberer coloring, a more mysterious silence. The poet Lenau claimed that a mountain is only truly beautiful when it is bald; one might say also that to judge of the true beauty of a tree it must be seen when it has lost its leaves. When once its clothing has fallen off, it appears in the mighty ordering of its architecture.

We can admire at leisure the bold upshooting of its trunk, the robust framework of its boughs, and better grasp its character and personality. The beech then shows us fully the slender roundness of its silvery column and the graceful drooping of its delicate branches; the oak shows the strong frame of its gnarled trunk and the dramatic attitude of its passionate, black, wild branches; the birch, the free grace of its stem, with its satin-like bark and its waving twigs.

A SKATING SONG

AWAY! away! our fires stream bright
Along the frozen river;

And their arrowy sparkles of frosty light
On the forest branches quiver.
Away! away! for the stars are forth,
And on the pure snows of the valley,
In a giddy trance, the moonbeams dance -
Come, let us our comrades rally!

Away! away! o'er the sheeted ice,

Away, away we go ;"

On our steel-bound feet we move as fleet
As deer o'er the Lapland snow.

What though the sharp north winds are out,

The skater heeds them not —

'Midst the laugh and shout of the jocund rout, Gray winter is forgot.