was flying; they watched her come to her moorings, and their hearts sank within them.

"Any news from the Atlantic?

"Has not the Atlantic arrived?"

"No! She sailed fifteen days before we did, and we have heard nothing from her;" and the people said, "there is no use hoping against hope, she has made her last port."

Day after day passed, and those who had friends on board began to make up their mourning.

Day after day passed, and the captain's wife was so ill that the doctor said she would die, if suspense were not removed.

Day after day passed, and men looked at one another and said, "Ah, it is a sad thing about the Atlantic?"

At length one bright and beautiful morning the gun boomed across the bay, and a ship was seen coming into port.

Down went the people to the Battery and Castle Garden. It was a British ship again, and their hearts seemed to die within them. But up she came, making a ridge of white foam before her, and you could hear a heavy sigh from that crowd, as if it were the last hope dying out. Men looked at one another blankly; by and by some one cried out, "She has passed her moorings, she is steaming up the river?"

Then they wiped away the dimness of grief and watched the vessel. Round she came most gallantly, and as she passed the immense crowds on the wharves and at Castle Garden, the crew hoisted flags from trucks to main chains. An officer leaped upon the paddle-box, put his trumpet to his lips, and cried out, "The Atlantic is safe. She has put into port for repairs!

Then such a shout! Oh, how they shouted!

Shout! shout! shout! "THE ATLANTIC IS SAFE!" Bands of music paraded the streets, telegraph wires worked all night long, "The Atlantic is safe," bringing joy to millions of hearts; and yet not one in a hundred thousand of those who rejoiced had a friend or relative on board that steamer.

It was sympathy with the sorrows of others, with whom they had no tie in common, save that which God created when He made of one blood all the nations of the earth, and permitted us, as brethren, to call Him the common Father of us all.

J. B. Gough.

SIMPLE NARRATIVE STYLE.

A STORY OF THE BAREFOOT BOY.

WRITTEN FOR J. G. WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY.

"I was once a Barefoot Boy."

ON Haverhill's pleasant hills there played,
Some sixty years ago,

In turned-up trowsers, tattered hat,
The "Barefoot Boy " we know.

He roamed his berry-fields content;
But while from bush and brier
The nimble feet got many a scratch,
His wit, beneath its homely thatch,
Aspired to something higher.

Over his dog-eared spelling-book,
Or school-boy's composition,
Puzzling his head with some hard sum,
Going for nuts, or gathering gum,

He cherished his ambition.

He found the turtles'-eggs, and watched
To see the warm sun hatch 'em ;
Hunted with sling, or bow and arrow,
Or salt to trap the unwary sparrow,
Caught fish, or tried to catch 'em.

But more and more to rise, to soar
This hope his bosom fired,-
He shot his arrow, sailed his kite,
Let out the string and watched its flight,
And smiled while he aspired.

"Now I've a plan- I know we can!"
He said to Matt-another

Small shaver of the barefoot sort;

His name was Matthew - Matt, for short,
Our barefoot's younger brother.

"What! fly?" says Matt. "Well, not just that," John thought; "for we can't fly;

But we can go right up," says he; "Oh, higher than the highest tree! Away up in the sky!"

"Oh, do," says Matt; "I'll hold thy hat,
And watch while thee is gone."
For these were Quaker lads, and lisped
Each in his pretty Quaker speech.
"No, that won't do," says John,

"For thee must help; then we can float
As light as any feather.

We both can lift; now don't thee see?
If thee lift me while I lift thee,
We shall go up together!"

An autumn evening, early dusk,

A few stars faintly twinkled;

The crickets chirped; the chores were done; 'Twas just the time to have seen fun

Before the tea-bell tinkled.

They spat upon their hands and clinched,
Firm under hold and upper;

"Don't lift too hard, or lift too far,"

"Hold fast to me, now: one, two, three!
And up we go." They jerk,
They pull and strain, but all in vain!
A bright idea, and yet, 't was plain,
It somehow would n't work.

John gave it up; ah, many a John
Has tried and failed as he did.
'Twas a shrewd notion, none the less,
And still, in spite of ill success,

It somehow has succeeded.

Kind nature smiled on that wise child,
Nor could her love deny him
The large fulfilment of his plan,
Since he who lifts his brother man
In turn is lifted by him.

He reached the starry heights of peace
Before his head was hoary;

And now, at threescore years and ten,
The blessings of his fellow-men

Waft him a crown of glory.

7. T. Trowbridge.

DESCRIPTIVE STYLE.

VIEW FROM MOUNT TYNDALL, CALIFORNIA.

THE serene sky is grave with nocturnal darkness. The earth blinds you with its light. That fair contrast we love in lower lands between bright heavens and dark cool earth here reverses itself with terrible energy.

You look up into an infinite vault, unveiled by clouds, empty and dark, from which no brightness seems to ray, an expanse with no graded perspective, no tremble, no vapory mobility, only the vast yawning of hollow space.

There is no sentiment of beauty in the whole scene; no suggestion, however far remote, of sheltered landscape; not even the air of virgin hospitality that greets us explorers in so many uninhabited spots, which, by their fertility and loveliness of grove or meadow, seem to offer man a home, or us nomads a pleasant camping-ground. Silence and desolation are the themes which nature has wrought out under this eternally serious sky. A faint suggestion of life clings about the middle altitudes of the eastern slope, where black companies of pine, stunted from

breathing the hot desert air, group themselves just beneath the bottom of perpetual snow, or grow in patches of cloudy darkness over the moraines, those piles of wreck crowded from their pathway by glaciers long dead. There is something pathetic in the very emptiness of these old glacier valleys, these imperishable tracks of unseen engines. One's eye ranges up their broad, open channel to the shrunken white fields surrounding hollow amphitheatres which were once crowded with deep burdens of snow, -the birthplace of rivers of ice now wholly melted; the dry, clear heavens overhead blank of any promise of ever rebuilding them. I have never seen Nature when she seemed so little "Mother Nature" as in this place of rocks and snow, echoes and emptiness. It impresses me as the ruins of some by-gone geological period, and no part of the present order,- like a specimen of chaos which has defied the finishing hand of Time. The one overmastering feeling is desolation, desolation!

Next to this, and more pleasing to notice, is the interest and richness of the granite forms; for the whole region, from plain to plain, is built of this dense solid rock, and is sculptured under the chisel of cold in shapes of great variety, yet all having a common spirit, which is purely Gothic.

In the much discussed origin of this order of building, I never remember to have seen, though it can hardly have escaped mention, any suggestion of the possibility of the Gothic having been inspired by granite forms.

Yet, as I sat on Mount Tyndall, the whole mountains shaped themselves like the ruins of cathedrals,-sharp roof-ridges, pinnacled and statued; buttresses more spired and ornamented than Milan's; receding doorways with pointed arches carved into blank façades of granite,—doors never to be opened,— innumerable jutting points with here and there a single cruciform peak, its frozen roof and granite spires so strikingly Gothic that I cannot doubt the Alps furnished the models for early cathedrals of that order.

I thoroughly enjoyed the silence, which, gratefully contrasting with the surrounding tumult of form, conveyed to me a new sentiment. I have lain and listened through the heavy calm of a tropical voyage, hour after hour, longing for a sound; and in desert nights the dead stillness has many a time awakened me from sleep. For moments, too, in my forest life, the groves made