companions. At length he would make a sudden turn, seize one of them and tumble him in the dust; then giving a glånce at us as much as to say, "You see, gentlemen, I can't help giving away to this nonsense," would resume his gravity and jog on as before.

Scott amused himself with these peculiarities. "I make no doubt," said he, "when Maida is alone with these young dogs, he throws gravity aside and plays the boy as much as any of them; but he is ashamed to do so in our company, and seems to say, 'Ha' done with your nonsense, youngsters, what will the laird and the other gentleman think of me if I give way to such foolery?'"

Scott amused himself with the peculiarities of another of his dogs, a little shamefaced terrier with large glassy eyes, one of the most sensitive little bodies to insult and indignity in the world. If he ever whipped him, he said, the little fellow would sneak off and hide himself from the light of day in a lumber garret, whence there was no drawing him forth but by the sound of the chopping knife, as if chopping up his food, when he would steal forth with humbled and downcast look, but would skulk away again if any one regarded him.

While we were discussing the humors and peculiarities of our canine companions, some object provoked their spleen and produced a sharp and petulant barking from the smaller fry; but it was some time before Maida was sufficiently aroused to romp forward two or three bounds and join in the chorus with a deep-mouthed bow-wow!

It was but a transient outbreak and he returned instantly, wagging his tail and looking dubiously in his master's face, uncertain whether he would censure or applaud.

"Aye, aye, old boy!" cried Scott, "you have done wonders. You have shaken the Eildon hills with your roaring; you may now lay by your artillery for the rest of the day. Maida is like the great gun at Constantinople," he continued ; "it takes so long to get it ready that the small guns can fire off a dozen times first, but when it does go off it makes the very earth tremble."

Around the

At dinner, Scott had laid by his half rustic dress, and appeared clad in black. The girls, too, in completing their toilet, had twisted in their hair the sprigs of purple heather which they had gathered on the hillside, and they looked all fresh and blooming from their breezy walk. There was no guest to dinner but myself. table were two or three dogs in attendance. old staghound, took his seat at Scott's elbow, looking up wistfully in his master's eye, while Finette, the pet spaniel, placed herself near Mrs. Scott, by whom I soon perceived she was completely spoiled.

Maida, the

The conversation happened to turn on the merits of his dogs, and Scott spoke with great feeling and affection of his favorite Camp. He talked of him as a real friend whom he had lost. It is this dog, Camp, who is depicted by his master's side in many of the early engravings of Sir Walter Scott.

WASHINGTON IRVING

THE PICNIC IN THE COVE

[The following selection is from "The Pearl of Orr's Island," a very pleasing story of early New England life by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The heroine of the story is Mara, a little girl who lives with her grandparents, Captain and Mrs. Pennel, on a lonely island near the coast of Maine. The only other member of the family is Moses, an orphan who was adopted by Mara's grandparents as a brother and playmate for her. A very interesting and entertaining character in the book is Captain Kittridge, an old sea captain who greatly enjoys telling fanciful extravagant tales to the children, Moses, Mara and his own little girl, Sally, pretending that these wonderful things really did happen in the foreign countries which he had visited in his many voyages.

The picnic comes at the point in the story where Mara and her grandmother are alone, for Captain Pennel has gone on a long sea voyage, taking the boy Moses with him.]

J

UNE and July passed, and the lonely two lived a quiet life in the brown house. Everything was so still and fair, no sound but the coming and going tide, and the swaying wind among the pine trees, and the tick of the clock and the whirr of the little wheel as Mrs. Pennel sat spinning at her door in the mild weather.

Mara read the Roman history through again and began it a third time, and read over and over again the stories and prophecies that pleased her in the Bible and pondered the woodcuts and texts in a very old edition of "Esop's Fables." And as she wandered in the woods, picking fragrant checkerberries and sassafras, she mused on the things that she read,

and invented long dramas and conversations in which the characters performed imaginary parts. It would not have appeared to the child in the least degree surprising either to have met an angel in the woods or to have formed an intimacy with some talking wolf or bear such as she read of in "Esop's Fables."

One day as she was exploring the garret, she found in an old barrel of cast-off rubbish a bit of reading which she begged of her grandmother for her own. It was the play of "The Tempest," torn from an old edition of Shakespeare, and was in that delightfully fragmentary condition which most particularly pleases children.

Little Mara would lie for hours stretched out on the pebbly beach with the broad open ocean before her and the whispering pines and hemlocks behind her, and pore over this poem from which she collected dim, delightful images of a lonely island, an old enchanter, a beautiful girl and a fairylike spirit. As for old Caliban, the slave, she fancied him with a face much like that of a huge skate fish she had once seen drawn ashore in one of her grandfather's nets; and then there was the beautiful young Prince Ferdinand, very much like what Moses would be when he was grown up.

That it was all of it as much authentic fact as the Roman history, she did not doubt, but whether it had happened on Orr's Island or some of the neighboring ones, she had not exactly made up her mind. She resolved at her earliest leisure to consult Captain Kittridge on the subject, wisely considering that it much resembled some of his experiences.