thee," whispered the good spirit as she led the young girl back to her home. "The waters of Judgment have subdued the brightness of the rose-leaves, and it is in their false radiance alone that consists the danger of thy Fairy Gift."-Eliza Cook's Journal.

MANKIND, FROM A RAILWAY BAR-MAID'S POINT OF VIEW.

MANKIND is composed of great herds of rough looking persons, who occasionally rush with frightful impetuosity into our refreshment-rooms, calling for cups of coffee, and hot brandy and water, which they tumble into themselves scalding, and pay for in furious haste; after which they rush out again, without exchanging a single word with anybody. Mankind, even of the first class, are dressed queerly in pea-coats, paletôts, cloaks, and caps, with no sort of attention to elegance. They indulge much in comforters, and green and red handkerchiefs, and sometimes little is seen of their visages beyond the mouth and the point of the nose. While they stand at the bar eating or drinking, they look much like a set of wild beasts in a menagerie, taking huge bites and monstrous gulps, and often glaring wildly askance at each other, as if each dreaded that his neighbor would rob him of what he was devouring. It is a very unamiable sight, and hes given me a very mean opinion of mankind. They appear to me a set of beings devoid of courtesy and refinement. None of them ever takes off hat or cap when eating, and not one of even those whom I suppose to be clergymen, ever says grace before the meat I hand him. A soup or a sandwich is no better in this respect than a brandy and water. When a lady comes in amongst these rude ungracious animals, unless she has a husbacd or other friend to take some care of her, she is left to forage for herself; and I have seen some forlorn examples of the sex come very poorly off, while gentlemen were helping themselves to veal and ham pies, and slices of the cold round. I don't note any difference in mankind for a great number of years. They are just the same mufled-up, confused-looking' munching, glaring, bolting crew, as when I first became acquainted with them at the station. They are not conversable creatures. They seem to have no idea of using the mouth and tongue for any purpose but that of eating. They can only ask for the things they wish to eat or drink, and what they have to pay for them. Now and then, I hear some one making a remark to another, but it seldom goes beyond such subjects as the coldness of the night; and this, by a curious coincidence, I always find to be alluded to just before I am asked for a tumbler of punch, as if there were a necessary cennection between the two ideas. Sometimes a gentleman, when the bell suddenly rings for seats, and he has only begun his cup of coffee and biscuits, will allow a naughty expression to escape him. Beyond this, mankind are a taciturn, stupid set; for though I hear of speeches, and lectures, and conversaziones, I never hear or am present at any, and I can hardly believe that such things exist.

I am, indeed, rather at a loss to understand how all those things that one hears of in the newspa

pers come about. We are told there of statesmen who conduct public affairs, of soldiers who fight gallantly for their country, of great poets and novelists who charm their fellow-creatures, and of philosophers and divines who instruct them. A few will lay their heads together, and raise a Crystal Palace. Some will combine and throw a tubular bridge across a strait of the sea. things are a complete mystery to me, for I see nothing of mankind but coarse eating and drinking, and most undignified runnings off when the bell rings. There must surely be another mankind who do all the fine things.

These

One detestable thing about the mankind that comes under my observation, is their gluttony. Every two or three hours they rush in, demanding new refreshments, and eating them with as much voracity as if they had not seen victuals for a week. They eat eight times a day on our line, and the last train is always the hungriest, besides taking the most drink. It is a perfect weariness to me, this constant feed-feed-feeding. What with the quantity they eat, and what with the haste of the eating, we must send out hundreds of indigestions from our rooms every day.

On account of these shocking habits on the part of mankind, I have for some time past entertained a great contempt for them, insomuch, that I almost wish to see them scald themselves with my cups of tea, and choke upon my pies. For me to think of marrying any specimen of so coarse a crew, is entirely out of the question; so it is quite as well that Tom Collard, the guard, left me for Betsy last summer, and that, as yet, no other follower has come forward. It will be best for them all to keep their distance-so assures them their humble servant,

- Chamber's Journal.

SOPHIA TANKARD,

DAY-DREAMS.

I LOVE my day-dreams, warm and wild,
Whate'er ungentle lips may say;
I dearly love, e'en as a child,
To sit and dream an hour away
In visions which heaven's blessed light
Makes but the holier to my sight.

'Tis well that Time, corroding Care,
And bitt'rest Ill have left me this:
Life's real sorrows who could bear,
Did not some dear imagined bliss,
Like Spring's green Footsteps, wake up flowers,
To cheer and bless Time's waste of hours?

Tis well at times to get one home
'To childhood's birthplace, and to see
The loved-the lost ones-round one come,
Just as of old they used to be,
And feel that neither change nor care
Can veil the soul's communion there.

From every Ruin of the past,
An echo comes to charm mine ear.
Love woke the utt'rance first and last,
And love, when lost, how doubly dear.
Such concords how shall time impart,
As the first music of the heart?

AUERBACH'S LAST "VILLAGE TALE."

HOPS AND BARLEY.

Why have they painted a device of hops and barley over the door of the great farmer's house? The tale is a very long one, but I can relate it with the greatest circumstantiality. Thus:

IN FOUR CHAPTERS.-CHAP. I.

THE LAZY LOON.

ASTRIDE upon the work-bench at the door there sat a young man, who kept taking up long rods of fir-wood, screwing them fast into the vice, and cutting them thin, while he fastened, at the other end, a rope of straw, which he wound round the top. He was evidently employed upon some agricultural manufacture. Notwithstanding that he was whistling a merry military march, his countenance seemed clouded, and ever and anon he tossed his head uneasily. He wore a soldier's cap upon it.

The gendarme of the village, who bore a copper mark of honor on his blue coat-sleeve, came down from the police-office; when, however, he came to the young man he stopped, and said :

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Morning, comrade." The person addressed thanked him with a motion, and the old soldier continued:"Why were you not at the tithe

sale?"

"I am not yet a citizen," replied the young soldier; "the property still belongs to my mother and the family in general."

The gendarme seated himself upon the withes that were completed, and remarked:-"It was capital fun. For years the three fat brothers had always farmed the tithes, because they could not bear to see the titheman in their fields, and they always wanted to be free. But this time Waterboots kept bidding higher and higher, and it ended by his obtaining it. Your cousin, the great farmer, got into such a tantary, they all thought that he would choke with his envy and jealousy; and so it ended amidst oaths and curses. And it won't end here Franz'seph; it won't end here,-mark my words." Francis Joseph who was called Franz'seph "for short," took another withe, and and replied:

"It isn't right, and never will be, that the whole village, and particularly the great farmer, should have such a hatred of Faber; and in the end nobody knows the reason why. Faber is a strauger here, he bought Lucian's farm with good honest cash, and he harms no one. And if he should dress a little grandly, that's nobody's business, and he can laugh at their nickname of Waterboots. The great farmer has always been at me, and tried to induce me to have nothing to say to Faber; but I know better what I ought to do, and I'll have nobody-no, not even my own father, if he were alive-interfere with me, and lay down the law as to whom I should be friends with, and who not! And just because everybody nicknames him Waterboots, and just because everybody sets against him.

"Well, well, you're a good fellow, everybody agrees," interrupted the gendarme.

All the blood in the youth's body flew to his face at this remark, and he broke a withe ali to bits, threw the pieces far away, exclaiming with restrained anger:-"Don't say that; I am no

good fellow, and I won't be. Crossthunderweather! (Kreutz Donner Wetter.) I'd like to show you that I am no good fellow. Say that again and I'll

"

made a mistake. Why you're! Well, what "That was wrong of me! Well, I certainly then? Madeleine will give in, and the pretty girl will marry school-master Claus,"

"If the cow were worth a groat!" Franz'seph replied, suddenly laughing, and his countenance assumed a mollified shade, and lighted up with a wondrous gleam.

"Since Easter, when you came back from the regiment," continued the other, "you're just as if you were bewitched. What's the matter, man? Of course I can easily imagine that you can't accustom yourself to a farm life yet; you've got to forget the goosesteps and learn the oxsteps. Am I right? Isn't it therefore that you seem so down-spirited?"

"May be," replied Franz'seph, after a long pause; and then he went on, raising himself up at the same time: "Yes, you were with my father in the same company, and were his best comrade; I'll think that I'm speaking to my father. D'ye see, when I returned from the regiment, I felt that, there was no occasion to wait,—but everybody in the village must have felt my return and acted so, and said: 'Well, there's Franz'seph back again.' I have often thought to myself, well, at home, there is a bright paradise; and I had much trouble in persuading myself how much strife and hazard there was, and how one would give an eye that his neighbor had none. Of course I never liked being a soldier, but still it is the finest life; and now I wish a thousand times a day that I were yet in the army."

"Well, it's getting worse here every day. Mark my words: there'll never be peace in the village till all the hop-poles in the garden yonder are torn up, and used in a general thrashing."

"About the hop-garden," Franz'seph began again; "there it was; about that, I first began to quarrel with the great farmer. I was glad that Faber had fertilized the waste hill out there so well; then comes to me the great farmer, and draws me his plough right through it all. And then, forsooth, he hides his puling hatred behind a consideration for the honor of the place. At one time, says he, our village was famous for growing the best spelt in the country, now the saying will change, and we shall hear everlastingly that the people of Weissenbach grow the worst hops of anywhere. When I get my fields, then I'll grow hops in defiance of him. There's a splendid limesoil there, right facing the south. The old farmers here, who never made any advance or improvement, they fancy that one should work like a horse and that's all; but I say, work like a man, with understanding and forethought. I haven't been in the regiment, and I haven't seen the world for nothing, mind you. Then the great farmer is savage that I don't send away the man that my mother took while I was in the regiment. I can't send him away so directly, and I must accustom myself to field-work, and, besides, I'm proud, and if any one says to me: Work! I'll do nothing. I know what I've got to do, and nobody shall say that I nad waited till he came to put me to rights. The praise isn't for him.”

A great many people when they go to law, won't hear of the slightest truth in the assertions of their opponents, or at most, they will allow only inappropriate testimony to be the fact; and thus they imagine that they have already won their cause. Even so was it with Franz'seph in his conversation with the district gendarme.

Just back from the lazy life in a regiment, and not under the wholesome constraint of a father, the young man entered upon his field duties with great nuwillingness. For a like reason he took a fancy to Faber, or Waterboots as he was called. Faber was neither a gentleman-owner nor a peasant, and his manner of dress manifested that at once. Educated at a scientific agricultural school, set forward in the world by a moderate fortune, which had been much increased by a marriage with the daughter of an inukeeper in town, Faber belonged to that order of men for whom no labor is too low, but who at the same time enlarge the sphere of their activity with an ever-watchful spirit, and who probably see mentally before them the renewal of the strong and unshaken interest in the soil. Faber gladly saw that Franz'seph took an interest in his experiments and studies for the better use of the powers of the soil, and Franz'seph was glad to be present, partly for the honor that the permission to remain conferred upon him, and partly because Faber, ever somewhat ceremonious, did not interfere with him by advice, while, everywhere else, he heard nothing but rougher or finer remarks upon his inexertion, which rankled in his bosom.

Lazy people-and, if the truth must be told. Franz'seph was of that class-generally seek the companionship of half-strangers, or cringing flatterers; in Franz'seph's case, Faber was among the former, and the village gendarme among the latter. Therefore he associated mostly with them, and appeared to be gay and gladsome. Yet the true spirit of enjoyment was wanting; everything was to him as if covered with a heavy fog, through which his love for the great farmer's daughter, Madeleine, often gleamed like a bright star. Sometimes he almost feared their union, and imagined himself going forward to slavery, in which he would have to give a reckoning of every hour and every duty; sometimes he hoped that when he could call Madeleine quite his own, fresh activity would arise within him, and the inexplicable depression hanging abont him would depart. This hope was now getting further and further a-field, for the great farmer grew more unbearable every day; he would listen to no promises, and demanded an entire estrangement from Faber, as the very first condition of reconciliation. Franz'seph only saw in it an extention of the feeling of hostility, as the great farmer had said that it was impossible that a farmer who had no capital, and had to live upon his harvest, could do such things as Waterboots did. Franz'seph scarcely replied to

worked weals into his hands and perspiration on his forehead. In lazy scorn he rode and drove to town for every trifle, and looked as if he sought something at home, or as if he had a secret sorrow. In truth, his face grew so red, that his friends began to fear for his health. His mother thought of applying to the doctor, and one day, when she was complaining of it to her cousin, the great farmer, Franz'seph, who was smoking a cigar in his room, heard him say :

"Cut off the red cord from your son's military cap and he will be well. Don't allow him to smoke cigars,-that wants a third hand, and nothing can be done at the same time. But after all's said and done it's very simple. Your son Franz'seph is a lazy loon, and he turns himself seven times in bed in the morning, like the devil's spirit."

Franz'seph dashed the door open, and cried :66 Say that again to my face, frecly!"

If you choose. You're a lazy loon, then." have been lying on the ground by this." "If you were not Madeleine's father, you would

"Oh, I should have had my share. Certainly, you haven't wasted your strength, you have rested; but as to what concerns my Madeleine, you needn't that matter is at an end; I tell you so that you restrain yourself, for if you begin in this manner, may remember it."

The great farmer hereupon was seized with another fit of that dreadful cough, and the mother began to deprecate the quarrel, and told Franz'seph to go back to his room; then she accompanied her cousin to the door, and Franz'seph heard her say as they went out:

"But my Franz'seph means well; he's kindhearted enough, notwithstanding." "That's true," returned the other; "but he's angry and proud. I'll none of such."

"I'm a lazy loon;" cried Franz'seph from the window, and he thought to have won a great victory by his ingenuous confession; but the farmer never looked back, and Franz'seph never crossed his cousin's threshold again. Madeleine he only met secretly, and she was generally downcast and sorrowful. What was to be the event of this quarrel between her father and Franz'seph? and if he complained to her that everything looked so dismal to him, and he could never be merry, she was obliged to keep silence, for once she had said :

"Well, I think it is because you don't work enough."

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"Oh! I'm a lazy loon!" returned Franz'seph, savagely.

"I don't say that," replied Madeleine, "but-" "There, that'll do!" interrupted Franz'seph. Vroul lives over there; ask your father why she is a widow. Her husband was ill in bed at harvest time, then she goes to her father and says: He's going to lie in bed this heavy harvest time,' Oh! I'll soon cure him of that,' says the old man,-takes his whip and lashes away at the sick man till he gets up:-two days after this, he's dead and in his grave. Do you think, Madeleine, that I'd have that done to me?"

"But you are not ill," urged Madeleine.

From that time Madeleine had said nothing more on the subject, and Franz'seph probably felt himself that he ought to do otherwise, but he could not persuade himself to take the appearance of having been induced to work by the advice of others; so he seldom went out with the horses to the field, never carried anything anywhere, came in and out as if there was nothing to be done, and conducted himself generally as if he were only home upon leave of absence, and that every bit of work that he undertook, he was particularly to be thanked for.

One of the blessings of labor is certainly destroyed by the obligation to work, but Franz'seph could not overcome the childish pride which was within him, and thus he suffered by it ;—while he was not carrying the withes to the brook himself, and transporting his pitchfork thither like a walk ing-stick and not on his back, then the oftenrepressed thought came into his head, that he would go straight away to the great farmer, and say: "Cousin, you are right, and you will see that I shall be industrious." But his breath came and went quicker at the thought of such a thing, though he could not get rid of it, and he thrust the prongs of the fork deep into the ground, for it had become clear to him that his previous laziness, had put him in a false position; no matter how well he might act in future, the great farmer would ever look upon him with a suspicious eye, and he would then become still more open to the jeers of the village; if he had never obtained the character of an idler by his own actions, he would be in a vastly different position. The ending of this was, of course, anger and sorrow at his misspent time, and lazy uncertainty, mixed, indeed, with curses at the coming days,-at which season he always wished himself back again with the soldiers, for there is a fixed discipline to be followed, and that is followed, and no one need pay attention to anybody else's hints and observations. But this time he could not stop as he was; on Monday the harvest began, and the mutual defiance and strife between him and the world must end one way or another.

Franz'seph sent the man home, and steeped the withes in the stream with the pitchfork. For this purpose he had picked out a very comfortable place where some planks supported on piles driven into the mud formed a kind of landing place. Besides, one could see from here excellently whatever passed at the great farmer's. Presently Franz'seph perceived Madeleine coming along with her father, they couldn't have observed him, for he had concealed himself behind the withes, yet he heard the farmer, as he crossed the steppingstones over the streamlet, coughing violently, and saying:

A healthy person that wastes his time is worse than a beggar. Why, a common thief thinks, Lord! how good am I,-because he isn't stealing anything from anybody; and he lies down, and rolls about in his lazy skin, and says to himself: What a kind, good, easy soul I am!-Pooh! pooh !"

Franz'seph doubled his fists, and tried to answer and to swear, but the sounds stuck in his throat and almost threatened to stifle him. He stared

-he was as stunned as if he had received a heavy blow from a hammer; at length he collected himself, and the single thought lived within him as to how he could revenge himself for this affront; he could think of nothing, and yet he burned to make manifest by some great stroke what wrong had been done him. Again the thought flashed through his mind that he would show them all how mistaken they were, by restless labor; but he quickly condemned this humility again. Should he call upon each to witness his activity, and demand that all should bear him testimony by their opinions? Franz'seph was a soldier,—and dared these uncouth clod-poles judge of his honor? Of course he had to live among these people, but they must learn that he was something better than they. Therefore it seemed better to him that he should compel them to it, by showing that he despised them all. Therefore he would saunter about in his Sunday clothes and smoke his cigars amidst the slaving harvesters, and he would idle about in the village till all should beg his pardon at having mistaken him, and not having recognised his inward love of industry. But how would the people acknowledge him to possess a virtue the very opposite of which he put before their eyes? However, they should do it, for what is that esteem and love worth, that requires the proofs to awaken it?

In the soul of this young man there arose a strife which he could not have expressed in words, and yet, there it was, working strange works within him, and passion opening unexpected fountains.

Far, far out in the middle of the stream did Franz'seph push the withes, so that they floated away with the current, as if he were thrusting from him with them every thought of labor, and he rejoiced in the coming time of idleness.

In idleness there is a peculiar pleasure,—indeed, it might be said there is a kind of passion in it of unfathomable enjoyment; shapes and feelings seem to dash into it in half-waking slumber, and to lose in the waves the life self-sacrificed. Of Madeleine, Franz'seph would hear nothing more, as of himself no more. He was just going to throw the fork after the withes, when a voice exclaimed: "Franz'seph, what dost?" and Madeleine stood before him."

"I'm idling," returned the other, perversely; but the maiden took his hand, and observed:"Say not so: you wrong yourself."

"I who wrongs me? I'm worse than any beggar on God's earth, and will be so! Don't you believe, too, that I am a lazy loon?

"No, God witness me, I do not. Let the folk say what they like,-a dog's bark is worse than his bite, often. I know you better. You cannot yet accustom yourself to our life, after the easy existence of a soldier. I have perceived it in your face these two days past, that you are going to show what you can do this harvest; but, I pray you, do not overwork yourself,-you are unaccus tomed to it now, and one is so easily taken ill, and how one cannot tell."

Touched to the quick, and frightened, Franz'seph gazed upon her. But a few minutes before he had denied this love, in self-destroying caprice, and now her confidence exalted him. He opened