Many a thorn and breezy bush;

When the redbreast and the thrush
Gayly raised their early lay,
Thankful for returning day.

2. Every thicket, bush, and tree
Swelled with grateful harmony:
As it mildly swept along,

Echo seemed to catch the song;
But the plain was wide and clear-
Echo never whispered near.
From a neighboring mocking-bird
Came the answering notes I heard.

3. Soft and low the song began:
I scarcely caught it as it ran
Through the melancholy trill
Of the plaintive whip-poor-will-
Through the ring-dove's gentle wail,
Chattering jay and whistling quail,
Sparrow's twitter, cat-bird's cry,
Redbreast's whistle, robin's sigh;
Blackbird, bluebird, swallow, lark,
Each his native note might mark.

4. Oft he tried the lesson o'er,
Each time louder than before;
Burst at length the finished song,
Loud and clear it poured along;
All the choir in silence heard,
Hushed before this wondrous bird.

All transported and amazed,
Scarcely breathing, long I gazed.

5. Now it reached the loudest swell; Lower, lower, now it fell,

Lower, lower, lower still,

Scarce it sounded o'er the rill.
Now the warbler ceased to sing;
Then he spread his russet wing,
And I saw him take his flight,
Other regions to delight.

J. R. Drake.

THE SHELL.

I. SEE what a lovely shell,
Small and pure as a pearl,

Lying close to my foot,
Frail, but a work divine,

Made so fairily well.

With delicate spire and whorl,
How exquisitely minute,
A miracle of design!

2. What is it? A learned man
Could give it a clumsy name.
Let him name it who can,
The beauty would be the same.

3. The tiny cell is forlorn,

Void of the little living will

That made it move on the shore.
Did he stand at the diamond door
Of his house in a rainbow frill?
Did he push, when he was uncurled,
A golden foot or a fairy horn
Through his dim water-world?

4. Slight, to be crushed with a tap
Of my finger-nail on the sand!
Small, but a work divine!
Frail, but of force to withstand,
Year upon year, the shock
Of cataract seas that snap
The three-decker's oaken spine
Athwart the ledges of rock,

Here on the Breton strand!

Alfred Tennyson.

THE CONFEDERATE'S RETURN.

1. You of the North have had drawn for you with a master's hand the picture of your returning armies. You have heard how, in the pomp and circumstance of war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread, reading their glory in a nation's eyes.

2. Will you bear with me while I tell you of

another army that sought its home at the close of the late war-an army that marched home in defeat and not in victory, in pathos and not in splendor?

3. Let me picture to you the footsore Confederate soldier, as, buttoning up in his faded gray jacket the parole which was to bear testimony to his children of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865. Think of him as ragged, half-starved, heavyhearted, enfeebled by want and wounds; having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and lifting his tear-stained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot the old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful journey.

4. What does he find let me ask you who went to your homes eager to find in the welcome you had justly earned full payment for four years' sacrifice-what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful?

5. He finds his house in ruins, his farms devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status, his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very

traditions are gone; without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and beside all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence-the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves.

6. What does he do this hero in gray, with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrows; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plow, and fields that ran red with blood in April were green with the harvest in June.

7. Never was nobler duty confided to human hands than the uplifting and upbuilding of the prostrate and bleeding South, misguided, perhaps, but beautiful in her suffering. In the record of her social, industrial, and political evolution, we await with confidence the verdict of the world.

Henry Grady.

EVENING IN WINTER.

I. ROBED like an abbess the snowy earth lies, While the red sundown fades out of the skies. Up walks the evening veiled like a nun,

Telling her starry beads one by one.