no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and it is safe!

Ah! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. Such a secret can be safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has neither nook nor corner where the guilty can bestow it, and say it is safe. Not to speak of that eye which glances through all disguises, and beholds everything as in the splendor of noon; such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection, even by men. True it is, generally speaking, that "murder will out." True it is that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern things, that those who break the great law of Heaven by shedding man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. Especially, in a case exciting so much attention as this, discovery must come, and will come, sooner or later. A thousand eyes turn at once to explore every man, everything, every circumstance connected with the time and place; a thousand ears catch every whisper; a thousand excited minds intensely dwell on the scene, shedding all their light, and ready to kindle the slightest circumstance into a blaze of discovery.

Meantime, the guilty soul can not keep its own secret. It is false to itself, or rather it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labors under its guilty possession, and knows not what to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such an inhabitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment, which it dares not acknowledge to God nor man. A vulture is devouring it, and it can ask no sympathy or assistance either from heaven or earth. The secret which the murderer possesses soon comes to possess him; and, like the evil spirits of which we read, it overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it will. He feels it beating at his heart, rising to his throat, and demanding disclosure. He thinks the whole. world sees it in his face, reads it in his eyes, and almost hears its workings in the very silence of his thoughts. It

has become his master. It betrays his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence. When suspicions from without begin to embarrass him, and the net of circumstance to entangle him, the fatal secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth. It must be confessed, it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.

-Daniel Webster.

NOTE. The above extract is from Daniel Webster's argument in the trial of John F. Knapp for the murder of Mr. White, a very wealthy and respectable citizen of Salem, Mass. Four persons were arrested as being concerned in the conspiracy; one confessed the plot and all the details of the crime, implicating the others, but he afterwards refused to testify in court. The man who, by this confession, was the actual murderer, committed suicide, and Mr. Webster's assistance was obtained in prosecuting the others. John F. Knapp was convicted as principal, and the other two as accessaries in the murder.

C. THE CLOSING YEAR.

George Denison Prentice, 1802-1870, widely known as a political writer, a poet, and a wit, was born in Preston, Connecticut, and graduated at Brown University in 1823. He studied law, but never practiced his profession. He edited a paper in Hartford for two years; and, in 1831, he became editor of the "Louisville Journal," which position he held for nearly forty years. As an editor, Mr. Prentice was an able, and sometimes bitter, political partisan, abounding in wit and satire; as a poet, he not only wrote gracefully himself, but he did much by his kindness and sympathy to develop the poetical talents of others. Some who have since taken high rank, first became known to the world through the columns of the "Louisville Journal."

'TIS midnight's holy hour, and silence now

Is brooding like a gentle spirit o'er

The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds,
The bell's deep notes are swelling; 't is the knell
Of the departed year.

No funeral train

Is sweeping past; yet, on the stream and wood,
With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest
Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred
As by a mourner's sigh; and, on yon cloud,
That floats so still and placidly through heaven,
The spirits of the Seasons seem to stand-

Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form, And Winter, with his aged locks-and breathe

In mournful cadences, that come abroad

Like the far wind harp's wild and touching wail,
A melancholy dirge o'er the dead year,

Gone from the earth forever.

"Tis a time

For memory and for tears.

Within the deep,

Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim,

Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time,
Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold

And solemn finger to the beautiful

And holy visions, that have passed away,
And left no shadow of their loveliness
On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts
The coffin lid of Hope, and Joy, and Love,

And, bending mournfully above the pale,

Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers O'er what has passed to nothingness.

The year

Has gone, and, with it, many a glorious throng
Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow,
Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course
It waved its scepter o'er the beautiful,
And they are not. It laid its pallid hand
Upon the strong man; and the haughty form

Is fallen, and the flashing eye is dim.
It trod the hall of revelry, where thronged
The bright and joyous; and the tearful wail
Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song
And reckless shout resounded. It passed o'er
The battle plain, where sword, and spear, and shield
Flashed in the light of midday; and the strength
Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass,
Green from the soil of carnage, waves above
The crushed and moldering skeleton. It came,
And faded like a wreath of mist at eve;
Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air,

It heralded its millions to their home
In the dim land of dreams.

Remorseless Time!

Fierce spirit of the glass and scythe!-what power
Can stay him in his silent course, or melt
His iron heart to pity! On, still on

He presses, and forever. The proud bird,
The condor of the Andes, that can soar

Through heaven's unfathomable depths, or brave
The fury of the northern hurricane,

And bathe his plumage in the thunder's home,
Furls his broad wings at nightfall, and sinks down
To rest upon his mountain crag; but Time

Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness;
And Night's deep darkness has no chain to bind
His rushing pinion.

Revolutions sweep

O'er earth, like troubled visions o'er the breast
Of dreaming sorrow; cities rise and sink
Like bubbles on the water; fiery isles

Spring blazing from the ocean, and go back

To their mysterious caverns; mountains rear

To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow
Their tall heads to the plain; new empires rise,
Gathering the strength of hoary centuries,
And rush down, like the Alpine avalanche,
Startling the nations; and the very stars,
Yon bright and burning blazonry of God,
Glitter awhile in their eternal depths,

And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train,
Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away,
To darkle in the trackless void; yet Time,
Time the tomb builder, holds his fierce career,
Dark, stern, all pitiless, and pauses not
Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path,
To sit and muse, like other conquerors,
Upon the fearful ruin he has wrought.

CI. A NEW CITY IN COLORADO.

Helen Hunt Jackson, 1830-1885, was the daughter of the late Professor Nathan W. Fiske, of Amherst College. She was born in Amherst, and educated at Ipswich, Massachusetts, and at New York. Mrs. Jackson was twice married. In the latter years of her life, she became deeply interested in the Indians, and wrote two books, "Ramona," a novel, and "A Century of Dishonor," setting forth vividly the wrongs to which the red race has been subjected. She had previously published several books of prose and poetry, less important but charming in their way. The following selection is adapted from "Bits of Travel at Home."

GARLAND CITY is six miles from Fort Garland. The road to it from the fort lies for the last three miles on the top of a sage-grown plateau. It is straight as an arrow, looks in the distance like a brown furrow on the pale gray plain, and seems to pierce the mountains beyond. Up to within an eighth of a mile of Garland City, there is no trace of human habitation. Knowing that the city must be near, you look in all directions for a glimpse of it; the