POLITICAL. thority to transform a portion of the Sahara UR Record is closed on the 20th of Feb- Desert into an inland sea. OUR on of portant items of business transacted in Congress: The House, January 21, voted (185 to 11) to abolish the iron-clad oath.-The Greely Relief Expedition Bill passed the House January 22, and Senate January 24.-The Senate, January 22, instructed the Committee on Foreign Relations to inquire into the matter of the exclusion of American pork from France and Germany, and to report what legislation is needed to protect our interests.-Mr. Hoar's bill to provide against a possible vacancy of the Presidential office passed the Senate January 25. In case there is no President or VicePresident, it vests the office, in order, in the Secretaries of State, the Treasury, War, the Attorney-General, Postmaster-General, and Secretaries of the Navy and Interior.-The Sherman resolution of inquiry into the Danville massacre and the Copiah County murder was passed by the Senate January 29.-A bill to restore General Fitz-John Porter to the army, and directing the President to place him on the retired list, passed the House February 1.-A new tariff bill was introduced by Mr. Morrison in the House of Representatives February 4. In general terms it proposes an average reduction of twenty per cent. throughout the list.-The Mexican Land Grant Bill was passed by the Senate February 8.-Both Houses passed joint resolutions appropriating $500,000 for the relief of sufferers by the Western floods. A horrible massacre took place in Tonquin. One priest, 22 catechists, and 215 Christians were put to death, and 108 mission houses were destroyed. DISASTERS. January 15.-Forty natives killed in West Africa by an explosion of gunpowder. January 24.-Fifty-seven miners killed by fire-damp explosion at Crested Butte, Colorado. January 25.-Ship Simla sunk in the English Channel. Twenty-two of the crew drowned. January 26.-Many ships wrecked and lives lost in a storm off the coast of Great Britain. January 27.-Fourteen miners killed by an explosion in a Rhondda Valley Colliery, Wales. January 30.-Steamer Rhywabons wrecked near Cardiff, Wales. Captain and ten men lost. January 31.-Six persons killed and eight wounded by the fall of a railroad train through a bridge near Indianapolis, Indiana. February 1.-Gasoline explosion in a store in Alliance, Ohio. Eight persons killed. February 3.-News from Corunna, Spain, of the sinking of a Spanish vessel and the loss of nineteen men. February 11.-Thirty-five members of a wedding party drowned by breaking through the ice on the river Theiss, Hungary. February 14.-Fifty fishermen on the Caspian United States Senator W. B. Allison, of Iowa, the worst ever known. At Cincinnati the wawas re-elected January 22. The British Parliament was opened February 5. The Queen's speech was delivered by royal commission. Mr. Charles Bradlaugh was excluded from the British House of Commons February 11, and on the following day he resigned. The French Chamber of Deputies, February 2, by a vote of 254 to 249, appointed a committee to inquire into the needed reforms of the working classes. The Senate, by a vote of 136 to 117, rejected the clause of the Trades' Syndicate Bill legalizing federation trades meetings. The Egyptian forces in the Soodan met with serious reverses. On February 4 Baker Pasha's army of 3500 men was almost annihilated near Tokar, and on the 12th Sinkat was captured, and Tewfik Bey and his garrison of 600 men were massacred.-General Gordon, whose mission is the adjustment of the Soodan difficulty, reached Port Said January 23. The Khedive appointed him Governor, with full powers. On February 16 he reached Khartoom, where he posted a proclamation recognizing El Mahdi as Sultan of Kordofan, remitting half the taxes, and placing no restriction on the slave-trade. The Bey of Tunis has given M. Roudaire au ter was over seventy feet deep. Among the disastrous incidents was the fall of a large boarding-house in Cincinnati, killing fourteen of the inmates. OBITUARY. January 22.-In London, Earl Grosvenor, aged thirty-one years. January 26.-In Lexington, Virginia, exGovernor John Letcher, aged seventy-one years. January 28.-In Washington, D. C., Hon. E. W. M. Mackey, Representative from South Carolina, aged thirty-eight years. January 31.-In Albany, Dr. Elisha Harris, Secretary of the State Board of Health, aged sixty years. February 2.-In Boston, Massachusetts, Wendell Phillips, in his seventy-third year. February 3.-In Paris, Eugène Rouher, in his seventieth year. February 8.-At Princeton, New Jersey, Professor A. H. Guyot, in his seventy-seventh year. February 9.-In London, England, Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald. February 11.-In Brooklyn, New York, Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Eagle, aged fifty-two years. In London, Thomas Chenery, editor of the Times, aged fifty-eight years. H Editor's Drawer. TOW shall we meet the spring? This would be an easier question to answer if we knew how the spring, in this latitude, would meet us-whether half-way, or, indeed, at all. For in this matter we are not guided by experience. Hope springs eternal in the Northern breast. And we allow ourselves to be deceived by many artificial conditions we have created. We get seventy and eighty degrees Fahrenheit by telegraph, and fancy we are warmed. We eat green pease and strawberries and the shad out of season, and fancy that we have changed the course of nature. Lulled into negligence by these appearances, man leaves off his overcoat, and next day sends for the doctor. The doctor, who has all seasons for his own, regards spring as his harvesttime. He saves more lives then than in any other season. And lives are worth saving then, for the man who gets through spring is likely to be a good patient all the year. There never was a notion so without foundation as this, that doctors do not want patients all the year. This faith in spring is a beautiful trait in human nature. We always expect that this spring will be early and will be mild, and fifty years of disappointments do not sour us. If the winter is hard and heavy, we say that is a sign of early spring; if it is open and tolerable, we know that we shall have an open spring. More than this: our memory is colored like our hope, and as we go on in years we say that in our youth spring was early, mild, and jocund. No trout rise so readily and are so gamy as the trout of our youth— except the trout we expect to throw a fly to this spring. This is the nature of man. No wonder that the Psalmist exclaimed, What is man that Thou art mindful of him! How shall we meet the spring? We have stood a long siege, from November to April. A part of the garrison have been "braced up" by it, as they call it; others are weary and worn out, and would have surrendered long ago if a flag of truce had appeared. Their energies are exhausted, and just when they need a tonic there comes upon them at a leap the debilitating heat of summer. This is, however, only one way of looking at it. More subtle influences are at work. The plants, the trees, have had as hard a time as we have; some of them are dead. But those that survive, as soon as they feel the coaxing sun and the increasing warmth in the soil, begin to get up their circulation, to quicken the pulse of their sap, and to bourgeon into the most exquisite life. We are much like them. 'Grumble as we will, we, too, feel to the core of our being the thrill of life newly beginning, and are born again. This is a delicious feeling, this tender sympathy in the renaissance of all things, this sentiment we feel about the voice of the frog, and the first flush of pink and green on the trees, and the south wind. For some days everybody, however old, is a possible lover, and for some hours everybody is a poet. He experiences a sensation that the poets never have fully expressed, and that he can not put into words, or even into music. The song of a bird swinging on a spray of apple blossoms comes nearest to expressing his emotion. It may not last long, but while it does last it is like a taste of paradise. This is one of the compensations of our climate. The people in the tropics know nothing of this sensation. They are not born again annually. They know nothing of the joy in contrast and change. Consequently they produce no poetry, no literature; they invent nothing; they make no "progress." And they are not unhappy. We should go forth to meet the spring, as the poet says, with a stout heart. We have had a long rest from the innumerable insect, from the busy fly, and the expectant worm. We shall go forth to sow, and to fight all these enemies with new courage. Science is on our side to name all these destroyers of our labors and our peace, and to describe their habits. We feel a consciousness of superiority in this knowledge. There is an excitement in taking up again the life arrested for so many months. There is a perennial charm in the colored Easter eggs, although we know by experience that they will not all hatch. It does not matter. Hope is a thousand times better than fruition. In the spring everybody requests his mother to wake and call him early. THE discussion in the January Drawer of the "appearance" to the mind of the weeks, the months, and of the numerals seems to have met, as we say, "a long-felt want." A correspondent, writing of the far South, says: "December always seems to me set on a high hill very near the stars, and this I trace to seeing, when a child, the lanterns attached to long poles, and set up all along the San Pedro ridge, in San Antonio, on Christmas-eve, to light our Lord down to earth. During the last week I dip into the valley of humiliation, and then come out in January upon a new and beautiful stretch of country, just as one might in walking. After a while one begins to see that the spire is that of the church we know, and the woodland Farmer Dale's, and the thread of silver a brook we well know and love, and that only the point of view has changed it, and that yonder stretches the level high-road leading to the end of the world, along which we have trudged so or so many miles. The spring months I always spend in the South, no matter where I am, in a little heaven of warmth and color and sweet odors. You should see one of our swamps at that season, and the gardens, and the wonderful skies, and the moonlight. At the North, moonlight is but a feeble, dreary business, and seems to come from a dead world; but there it is living, vivid, enchanting, in its effects. Summer always lies in a valley for me-one of those prosperous, smiling meadow, field, and copse, river, castle, and hamlet, daisy-starred, cloud-shadowed, sun-lit, cattle-dotted valleys of the English midland counties that I so love-where I stay until October takes me up into the mountains. November has properly three months in it, and leads through a tunnel with a faint gleam of light at the end-another spring. I suppose it would be impossible to trace the source of such impressions with accuracy, but most of them in us all are doubtless made on the other side of seven." Another correspondent has this conceit: "In my own mind the months always assume the form of a half-ellipse-a road shady at the beginning, growing lighter, then sunny and bright, passing into shade again at the end; for between December 31 and January 1 is a long, dreary void. The two days seem as far apart in imagination as the north and south poles. The years seem like successive flights of stairs of ten steps each." Another psychologist writes: "I always see the days of the week, from Monday to Saturday inclusive, as small squares arranged side by side in a straight row. Sunday is an oblong, of the same width, but twice as high, and is placed on the same line, but, from its greater height, extending a little above or below the others. The months take no form in my mind, but a young niece tells me that she sees them in a straight line, but shaded, January being very dark, February lighter, and so on to July, when they grow darker again till December is reached. I wish I could show you my mental image of the word soul. I can not well describe it without a drawing, but I can tell you with truth that never in my life have I uttered, read, or thought that word without seeing instantly a small object, a little like a comma, perhaps even more like a tadpole, only colorless and translucent." POE seems destined to furnish material for contradictory reminiscences to the end of the chapter. A letter from an old resident of Philadelphia says: "In the Editor's Drawer of Harper's for December I read, 'An intimate friend from boyhood of Edgar Allan Poe says he never saw him smile in his life,' the evident intention of the article being to show he had 'melancholy and peculiar ways, in keeping with his weird writings.' I was never an intimate friend of Poe, but I have often seen him smile, both in the Western technical acceptation of that term and in the ordinary and a very jolly way. When he came from Baltimore he brought to us a letter from my uncle, and we gave him the run of Peale's Museum, then in the old Arcade, where he spent many of his evenings. He became editor of Burton's Magazine, and I think his rooms were either over or next door to a restaurant on Decatur Street-a little street running from Market Street, between Sixth and Seventh streets, and ending against Carpenter Street, in the rear of the Arcade, which thus became the thoroughfare between Market and Chestnut streets. The restaurant was the nearest good one to the old Chestnut Street Theatre; a little room in its rear was the lunch- or dining-room of Burton and several others of the theatre people. My brother and myself often lunched with them in this little room, and there I have seen Poe so convulsed with laughter at some whimsicality of Burton or some of the others as to slide from his chair to the floor, crying, 'Oh, stop! for God's sake stop, or you will kill me! Now the poor fellow is dead and gone, we would be made to believe he was so dismally weird as hardly to be considered human." IT is a pity to raise such a question, but is "Woodman, spare that tree," the poem upon which the reputation of George P. Morris largely depends, a plagiarism? Did Mr. Morris know any more Chinese than he found on tea chests? Did he know the lovely ode "Kan-tang"? This ode can be found among the odes and songs collected by Wăn Wang and Duke Chan at the beginning of the Chan dynasty (B.C. 1126). The dates of this collection, says Dr. Wells Williams, in his great book on The Middle Kingdom, extend from B.C. 1719 to not later than B.C. 585. There is no telling how a Chinese compiler could include in his collection in B.C. 1120 a poem not perhaps composed till centuries after, but it is enough to say that Mr. Williams refers the ode "Kantang," or "The Sweet Pear-Tree," to the time of Wăn Wang, a contemporary of Saul. Here it is: 1. Oh, fell not that sweet pear-tree! For Shao's chief laid 2. Oh, clip not that sweet pear-tree! "Tis sacred now, Since the lord of Shao, 3. Oh, touch not that sweet pear-tree! As the stories show, Oft halted the chief of Shao. What is this but the Chinese way of saying: Woodman, spare that tree; THE Drawer does not pretend that there is anything new under the sun, and is not surprised to learn that a French epigram, of which the following is a translation, anticipated the point of an anecdote about Early and Ma- | inside of his own field, near a line fence, he hapgruder in our January number: The vine on the cot is blowing, Sir Strephon his love is sighing, Above the lake in the hollow Sir Strephon his love is sighing, POSTSCRIPT. If this poetic daisy Should make you sad and sore, To spill me on the floor, * EPITAPH. Beneath this stone lies Johnny Green, R. K. M. pened to notice what he supposed was the head of a horse raised above a top rail as if just about to jump over. Thinking to save trouble, he lifted his hand with a motion to wave the intruder away, when, to his horror, the supposed horse's head loomed up into a monster, lifting black brawny arms, and chattering like a maniac, all accompanied by the rattling of a chain. He waited not to take a second look, but started with a jump on a run for home. He cleared an intervening fence at a bound, and rushed against the door of his domicile with such a dash as to sorely frighten his already uneasy wife. 'The devil is after me, wife!' he exclaimed, and they hurriedly barred doors and windows. Presently they heard the chain rattling, as his Majesty rushed around the house. Trembling and sleepless, they watched till the morning brought relief. News of what had happened spread rapidly among the neighbors, and others had heard the rattling chain of some strange prowler of the night. My uncle would never have doubted to his dying day but that he had actually seen the devil had it not been discovered within a few days that a monkey had escaped from a menagerie, and was wandering about the country, dragging the chain of his captivity." Being in a lawyer's office a few evenings later, I related this story to a circle of friends, when Deacon Potter was reminded of something similar. Said he: "There were three of us on business in Hardin County, and night coming on, we, being somewhat bewildered, sought lodging in a cabin among the hills. Our host was an old settler, and for our entertainment narrated some of his early experiences. "It was my habit to work hard all week, and on Sundays take a little recreation in hunting. There was a pass near by between the hills, where deer and other game were accustomed to cross from one range to another. One Sunday morning in autumn I arose about three o'clock, and went by moonlight to the foot of the pass to watch for deer. Scarcely had I taken my position in a corner close by some great rocks, when up the pass there was heard a most unearthly scream, accompanied It has occurred to me that the Drawer would by a sharp bleating. Then a monster arose in be the proper place to preserve a group of an- the air, having gigantic wings and a great ecdotes and incidents which have come to my body, with long limbs dangling below. I felt knowledge recently, and which I have reason myself riveted to the spot, and was conscious to believe to be strictly true. The first was that my hair was stiffened into perpendicular related to me by Principal Lemen, of Shawnee-bristles lifting my hat aloft. Suddenly the town public schools. monster dropped down again ont of sight, only to re-appear flopping as before, and with the same fiendish shriek. I thought it was the devil come for his prey, and I prayed the Lord to deliver me, with the vow that I would never be caught hunting on Sunday again. Presently an eagle, with talons clutched in the back of a spring fawn, fell under his too great load within a few paces of where I was stand ing. Gentlemen, from that day to this I have somewhat troubled in conscience. I dreamed never hunted on Sunday.'" "Now, Robert, it is your turn," exclaimed we all to a typical Scotch elder. After a modest hesitation he was reminded of a ghost story. "It happened in Scotland. One moonlight night my father was several miles distant from home, toward which he set out on foot along a pike. Happening to look up to the left, he saw a woman, dressed in a light garb, about a hundred yards distant. Frightened by the unexpected sight, he quickened his pace, and looked again, only to see the strange woman still there, and moving with like speed. Thoroughly alarmed, he broke into a run, and ran until he was out of breath and compelled to pause. The ghostly apparition continued to hold the same relative position, stopping as he stopped and moving as he moved. The perspiration in great drops was rolling down his face. He lifted his handkerchief to wipe his brow, and in the act brushed away a straw from over his eye, and the ghost vanished." The next call was upon S-, a young lawstudent. He was reminded of a vow he had recently made. of ghosts, and awoke with the nightmare. A bright fire was blazing in the grate. With a mighty effort I turned myself out upon the floor. Still I could hardly get my breath, and in my alarm I went to an adjoining room and waked the dentist, and asked him to go for a doctor. He laughed at my fears, and put me to bed again; but the moment I lay down my breathing grew quicker, and I imagined that I was dying. He shook me up, and succeeded in breaking the spell that bound me, but I promised the Lord then and there that, as I hoped to be forgiven, I would never again play upon the superstitious fears of the weak or ignorant." Recounting these tales of a night in a lawyer's office to a physician of extensive practice in the country, he was reminded of what he had seen of the deadly aim of an eagle. "Riding along a ridge in the woods one day, my attention was attracted to a flock of wild turkeys that appeared to be in great consternation, and running about in a circle, each trying to hide his head under another's wing. All at once they scattered, except one that crouched helpless to the ground. The next instant an eagle, dropping on it like a shot, fastened its talons in the neck and head. The flock seemed to be aware that some one of their number was doomed, and that the head is the point aimed at, hence their efforts to shelter the vital part. When once some one discovers that he is singled out as the victim, he is paralyzed by the very helplessness of his situation, and sinks prostrate to the earth, while the rest make their escape." "A dentist was stopping at our boardinghouse. He said to me one day, 'I know a trick or two of sleight of hand, and as her kind are very superstitious, we can have some fun out of Nell, the cook.' That evening we were all gathered in a big room around a glowing grate. I opened the way by telling two or three ghost stories. Then the doctor caused a hat to dance and a poker to take strides across the floor. By this time the cook was beginning to breathe short, when the doctor, It is the habit of an eagle, when about to looking, said he could make Nell bound against seize such prey, to circle around at a considthe ceiling. We joined with her in begging erable height above the object in view; then, him not to do it. To this he reluctantly con- as if the aim is fixed, he folds his wings, sented, but said he could and would call up and drops down like a bullet shot from a spirits. At this juncture a young girl, who gun. Sometimes his talons become fixed on was in the secret, slipped out of the room. a weight too great, and he labors in vain to The doctor called out: 'Are there any spirits disengage himself. A fisherman of these parts about? Answer.' There came three thump-relates that he once saw an eagle fall upon a ing knocks on the outside of the house. 'Is the spirit any departed friend of mine? No answer. 'Of S-?' No answer. 'Of Nell?' Three knocks again. By this time the poor girl was almost in a frenzy. Her eyes rolled up their whites, and her breath was labored. It was known that her mother was dead. 'Whose spirit is it? Her cousin?' No answer. 'Her brother? No answer. 'Her mother? Three knocks. At this poor Nell fell prostrate, her limbs rigid and her eyes glassy. We aroused her, and endeavored to allay her fears by telling her that it was all a hoax, and we were trying to scare her. She would not be comforted, neither would she stay in such a haunted house, and against our protests took her departure at once, making it necessary for our good landlady to find another cook. I retired to my room and to bed fish, but instead of rising with his booty, he YOUR story of General Hardee, writes an esteemed correspondent, brings to my mind another. When the C. S. army was in camp at Tupelo, Mississippi, after we had run the Federals out of Corinth (i. e., we ran, and they ran after us), among the troops which flocked to the standard came a fine Alabama regiment-the Thirty-ninth-under Colonel Clayton, afterward general, who now wears the ermine of an Alabama judge with the same credit that he wore the gray. Upon reporting to General Bragg for assignment to |