That beauteous head, if it did go down,
Carried sunshine into the sea.

Out in the fields one summer night

We were together, half afraid

Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade
Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,-

Loitering till after the low little light

Of the candle shone through the open door, And over the hay-stack's pointed top,

All of a tremble, and ready to drop,

The first half-hour, the great yellow star,
That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,

Had often and often watched to see

Propped and held in its place in the skies.
By the fork of a tall red mulberry-tree,

Which close in the edge of our flax field grew,Dead at the top,-just one branch full

Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool,
From which it tenderly shook the dew
Over our heads, when we came to play
In its hand-breadth of shadow, day after day.
Afraid to go home, sir; for one of us bore
A nestful of speckled and thin-shelled eggs,-
The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat:
The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her bill,
So slim and shining, to keep her still.

At last we stood at our mother's knee.
Do you think, sir, if you try,
You can paint the look of a lie ?
If you can, pray have the grace

To put it solely in the face Of the urchin that is likest me:

I think 'twas solely mine, indeed : But that's no matter,-paint it so;

The eyes of our mother-take good heed-
Looking not on the nestful of eggs,

Nor the fluttering bird, held so fast by the legs,
But straight through our faces down to our lies,
And, O, with such injured, reproachful surprise!
I felt my heart bleed where that glance went, as
though

A sharp blade struck through it.

You, sir, know

That you on the canvas are to repeat

Things that are fairest, things most sweet;—

Woods and corn-fields and mulberry-tree,—

The mother,—the lads, with their bird, at her knee: But, O, that look of reproachful woe!

High as the heavens your name I'll shout,

If you paint me the picture, and leave that out. ALICE CARY.

Biography.-Alice Cary was born near Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1820, and died in New York City in 1871.

Her first poems were published in periodicals, and soon attracted general attention. In 1850, in company with her sister Phoebe, she removed to New York, where she continued her literary labors until the time of her death.

Miss Cary's genius in both prose and poetry has not been excelled by any other woman in America. Her style has a peculiar charm-the charm of the woman as well as of the poet.

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Her principal works are "Clovernook Sketches," "Lyra and Other Poems," "Hagar," 'Ballads, Lyrics, and Hymns," "Pictures of Country Life," and "Stories Told to a Child."

Elocution. With what tone of voice, rate, and force, should the different parts of the poem be read? Point out the places where a change of feeling occurs.

You climb the pyramid of steps and enter halls and rooms that with their stone floors, walls, and ceilings, are rocky as the Mammoth Cave. Every thing reverberates. The voice has a sepulchral ring. If you can fancy a vehement ghost calling the cows, you know how it sounds.

Your gentle-spoken friend talks so loud you can not hear him. You are in the mill where money is made. You see the raw material, fresh from the mines, piled around like bricks in a kiln. They are bricks. Here is enough in this vault to build a stone wall of gold around your garden spot.

The precious metals run to brick here, brick without straw. Ah, if the poor Israelites had possessed such material to work, there would have been · no complaint in Pharaoh's brick-yard. Here are four gold cubes. They weigh about ninety pounds apiece. You can carry a couple for the gift of them, and you would have fifty thousand dollars.

Yonder are two pieces of hardware from Mexico. They are gold and silver together, and shaped a little like blacksmiths' anvils before their horns are

grown. They are awkward things to handle, for they have no bails to them, and they weigh more than five hundred pounds apiece. They are made to be robber proof, for if Mexican bandits attacked the train, they could not very well get off with such hardware at their saddle-bows.

Nothing here puzzles you like values. They are condensed into a wonderfully small compass. You are in the gold ingot room, and you pick up a bar about a foot long, an inch and a half wide, and three times as thick as the snug-setting maple ruler with which you used to be feruled. You could slip it up your sleeve if that gray-eyed man, who would be your "man of destiny" if you did it, were not looking at you. You mentally cut it into eagles as you hold it, and it turns out sixty of them, but the melter quietly tells you it is worth fifteen hundred dollars. I laid mine down immediately.

You follow a brick of gold into the Melting Department. Here is weather for you. The twelve furnaces are glowing all about you. The iron eyelid of one of them is thrown up, and the very essence of fire winks at you. When you are 108° it is your last fever. When the steam is 212° away dashes the locomotive. But here is a crucible in the heart of a fire urged to a volcanic glow of 2,112°. In the crucible is gold, and the gold boils like a tea-kettle. If you are curious to know what the salamander of a crucible is made of, it is sand and plumbago. The air you breathe before the furnace doors is 130°.

The men-some of them are giants-are stripped like athletes. Sweat rolls off like rain. The floor is stone, and carpeted with iron lattice.

Every day

this is removed, the dust swept up and saved for the precious particles that may be in it. There is no such thing as a trifle in this mint.

Gold and silver are in unsuspected places. They are in the air, in the water, under foot. There is little you can call "dirt" in most parts of the Mint without being guilty of a misnomer. And just here we may as well gossip by the way about the curious domestic fashions within these walls.

For one of them, they wash their clothes once a year! The rough dresses of the men in the furnace room, and out of which they husk themselves daily when the work is done, never leave the Mint after they enter it, until they have been washed span-clean. The method of washing is unique. They just put them in the furnaces, and they are cleansed in a twinkling. A ten-dollar suit may be worth five after it is burned up, and an old apron bring money enough to buy a new one.

When they take up carpets they do not beat them with whips and broomsticks, after the manner of good housewives, filling their lungs with dust and the premises with confusion, but they just bundle them bodily into the fire; and it is generally calculated that the destruction of an old carpet, after three years of wear, will about buy a new

one.

A mint is the only place in the world where a conflagration produces its own insurance money. The ashes of these clothes and carpets are carefully gathered, sifted and washed, and out come the truant gold and silver they contain.

You see scales, the most delicate pieces of mechanism.

The wave of a butterfly's wing could blow