"Do you know him, then ?" "I know all the alcades, sir; and what shows that I little merit the surname which I bear is, that all the alcades do not know me; but, among them all, he who is now seeking you is the most cunning, rapacious, and diabolical." Although I had reasons for thinking this portrait exaggerated, I was somewhat shaken in my resolution. Perico then represented to me, in really touching language, the pleasure his wife and children would feel in giving their benefactor an asylum for the night; and, being obliged to decide between two protectors, equally interested, I chose him whose greediness had the least gloomy appearance, and resolved to follow the lépero. It was night; we traversed suspiciouslooking alleys, deserted squares, dark streets, quite strange to me; lamps were more and more scarce; I was decoyed into the depths of those suburbs where justice dares not penetrate; and I was unarmed, at the mercy of a man whom I had just heard make a terrible confession: to leave him abruptly in these regions was danger "I know nothing except that it was accomplished in time for me to take my place again among the spectators of the fight, and even to try another ascent. I had just confessed and received absolution. It was a singular opportunity for venturing my life without risking my soul; I took advantage of it, and was lucky, for this time I fell upon my legs when the bull tossed me, to the great delight of the public, who showered reals and demi-reals upon me. Then, finding myself-thanks to you, above all-with a well-filled purse, I gratified my taste for dress by purchas-ous; to follow him not less so. ing this suit at a broker's, and it gives me a very respectable appearance. You saw with what consideration the alcade treated me! There is nothing like being well-swer, upon which I repeated my question. dressed, sir!" "But where do you live?" I asked Perico. He scratched his head and made no an "To say the truth,” he replied at last, 66 And your wife, your children, and the concealment you offered me ?" I saw well enough that the fellow had" having no regular dwelling, I live a little cheated me once more; and that his pre- everywhere." tended suffering, like his confession, had been merely to obtain some piastres from me; but I must say, that my anger melted away before the comic dignity with which the lépero strutted about in his ragged cloak during this strange tale. My aim now was to get rid of a troublesome companion; and I said to him, with a smile "If I reckon rightly, the illness of your children, your wife's confinement, and your own shroud, have cost me nearly a hundred piastres; by excusing you all this, I think I amply repay the service you have just done me. I am now near my home, and I again return you my thanks." "Your home, sir! Are you thinking of that?" cried Perico. "At this moment your house is being searched by soldiers; they are seeking for you in your friends' houses; you do not know what alcade you have to do with." "I had forgotten," replied the zaragate, unmoved, “ that I sent my wife and children yesterday to to Queretaro; but, as to a hiding-place "Do you offer me that also at Queretaro?" I asked, recollecting, too late, that the wife and children of this honest man were as imaginary as his dwelling. "As to a hiding-place," answered Perico, still unmoved, "you shall partake of such as I know how to find, when I have not the means of hiring a home; for bullfights and large windfalls like this do not come every day. There," he added, pointing to a reflected light which flickered at a distance, " perhaps that will assist us." Advancing toward the light, I found it proceeded from a lamp; and near it the watchman, in a yellowish cloak, not much better than that of Perico, was crouched upon the pavement, gloomily watching the clouds; he did not move at our approach. "Halloo, friend," asked the zaragate, "do you know any velorio hereabouts?" "Yes, to be sure! not far from hence, near the bridge of Ejizamo, you will find one; and, if I were not afraid of the régidor taking his round, or could find some brave boy to take care of my cloak and lantern, I would go myself to the fête.” “Much obliged," said Perico, civilly. "We will take your hint;" while the watchman, looking surprised at my dress, which agreed ill with Perico's, said— "Gentlemen like this are not much in the habit of frequenting those meetings." "It is a case of necessity; this gentleman has made a debt which prevents his returning to his own house to-night." "That is a different thing; there are debts which one puts off paying as long as possible," replied the watchman; and, turning away from us, he cried in a doleful voice "Nine o'clock, and a stormy night!" then resumed his former attitude, while many distant watchmen repeated the words. I followed Perico dejectedly, leading my horse by his bridle, it being against the police rules of Mexico to ride on horseback in the city after vespers; and I was not inclined for further trouble with the alcades. My guide's words had excited my curiosity; and I wished to know what a velorio could be. In about ten minutes we reached a bridge, over a narrow canal, bordered by dilapidated houses, while a lamp, dimly burning before a picture of souls in purgatory, was gloomily reflected in the muddy and stagnant water, and watchdogs were loudly baying the moon, alternately hidden and revealed by a curtain of driving clouds, for it was the rainy season. All else was silent; and in these two lines of melancholy-looking houses the sole light was from the windows of the first floor opposite to the sacred picture, which showed a room well lighted up. Perico knocked at the door of this house, and after some time half of it was opened, the other half being fastened as usual by an iron chain; and a man's voice cried, "Who is there ?" "Some friends, who are come to pray for the dead and rejoice with the living," replied Perico, without hesitation. We entered, and, lighted by the porter, crossed the hall to an interior court; there, having tied my horse to a ring in the wall, which the man pointed out, we ascended about twenty steps, and I followed I was Perico into a well-lighted room. now to learn what a velorio was. (To be continued.) BEAUTIFUL PARABLES. "Hold every mortal joy With a loose hand!" WE clutch our joys as children clutch their flowers; We know them sweet, yet scarce believe them ours Till our hot palms have smirch'd their colours And press'd their dewy blood out, unaware. rare, But the wise Gardener, whose they were, comes by, And, while we are not looking, with mild eye, Mournful, yet sweet, and pitiful, though stern, Takes them. Then in a moment we discern By loss, what was possession, and half wild, Lift up rash empty hands like wrongèd child, Crying, "Why didst thou snatch my posies fine?" But he says tenderly, "Not thine, but mine;" And points to those stain'd fingers which do prove Our fatal cherishing, our cruel love : tears, More and more clean beneath his sight appears: At length the heavy eyelids trembling shine"I am content. Thou took'st but what was thine." And then he us his beauteous garden shows, Where, bountiful, the Rose of Sharon grows. TRUE JOY.-That is the true and chief joy which is not conceived from the creature, but received from the Creator; which none can take from thee; whereto all pleasure, being compared, is torment, all joy is grief, sweet things are bitter, all glory is baseness, and all delectable things are despicable.—Quarles. METAPHYSICAL SPECTACLES. E who walks in a city, pursuing his ing us out of the way. And all this, too Hroute through defiles of dingy bricks, in spite of the law o inclined to te ah, the has a fascinating study in the figures that pass him on his way. There is often a history in a face. One thing he will not fail to note the strange coincidence which gives a character, independent of neighborhood or weather, to each city ramble. There are days when every one he meets seems comely or interesting: patriarchal old men lead beautiful little girls; romantic foreigners, with their black hair artistically arranged, seem actually clean; nurse-maids, seized with sudden affection for their quiet little charges, kiss them with ardor; laughing children run after one another, shouting at the top of their voices. He sees young girls, all grace some looking at him not without interest; some glancing their eyes downward, conscious of interesting him-all pretty. There are other days when every one he comes upon is hideous: unhealthy children, born of shocking courts and back slums; importunate beggars, hideous and impudent; miserable faces, suggestive of vice and starvation: features, full of ugliness and woe. Wherever he goes, these haunt him. Funerals, with a wretched show of penurious upholstery, beadledom, and badly paid, badly executed sorrow, cross his path. He lights upon accidents, and runs the risk of being entangled in a row, in which a besotted, red-nosed thing, rag-covered and dirthidden, plays a conspicuous part. state of our digestion, much of this is due to our wearing spectacles. I refer to metaphysical spectacles, which magnify, diminish, color, or decolorize the objects that float before the mind's eye. Incredible as it may seem, none of us are entirely guiltless of spectacles of one kind or other, for these psychological instruments fall into two classes-the permanent or constitutional, and the dependent or subjective varieties. The permament are tinted with the shade of the character of the wearer, and are apt to magnify and discolor the acts of men of opposite dispositions, parties, or opinions. They invest things with attributes one-sided, strange, or false. The man of science, who views all things through the medium of his ology or ography; the man of art, by the light of his favorite authorities; the man of argumentative temperament, with a searching glance of his critic eye; the poet, with his dreamy, aërial gaze; the practical man with his cui bono-all these have permanent glasses, more or less optically wrong, and yet all the subject of implicit, unhesitating faith. The dependent vary with the state of mind of the owner: if he is happy, they make everything seem light and cheerful; if sad, they invest creation with a gray neutral tint; if exceedingly enraged, they seem, like Iceland spar, to have a double refraction, and to distort everything. And so arise misjudgments, false calculations, and inaccuracies of all kinds. The permanent glass is notoriously common; indeed, it may be said to be universal. It tends to establish that exquisite diversity of character and opinion so conducive to our wellbeing. It becomes a bore, however, at times. Professor Dingo is apt to chip the stones of buildings with his geological hammer. Talk rapturously of the sea to a friend great in On some days there is an extraordinary demonstration in our favor: people make room as we pass; every one is strangely polite; we are evidently popular; strangers point the way, as if our inquiries were a personal compliment; and if our toes are trodden on, or we ourselves thrown on the toes of others, the offending parties seem full of contrition, and respectfully beg our pardon. And there are other days when there seems a general conspiracy against us: we are insulted, snub-chemistry, and he gives a look worthy of bed, and snapped at; dogs run between our legs, or yelp as we go by; no one moves out of our way; people run against us, and then growl, or swear at us for being so hard. We are looked down upon contemptuously. Fat old women run bump upon us in the midst of crossings, at self detected recently sulphate of copper the moment when angry cabmen are shout--blue vitriol, you know." Fadladeen, as he says: "Chloride of sodium; chloride of magnesium; yes, sir, and chloride of ammonium: a vast repository of all the soluble matters of our globe. It is beautiful to think how the great ocean lixiviates our earth. I have my Here our friend raises his eyes with the look dog- stance, from the symbol to the verity, the matic. There now comes up a mechanical genius, full of hydraulics, pneumatics, and dynamics. He is talking something about the specific gravity of the vessel yonder; but his conversation will certainly not rank among the imponderables. The argumentative gentleman interposes: "Blue, sir; it is not blue; do you call that blue?-it is green. Rough, sir; excuse me, but it is n't-calm as a lake: what you took for breakers was very likely a flock of wild geese. Ships, my good sir; surely you are joking: they are only fishing-boats and barges." And now the poet is appealed to. "See, ah, beautiful thing!— O, how sweet it is to wander Has wooed the stars, those eyes of angels; Eyes brighter than earth's fairest daughters." And now comes the practical man. "Wonderfully cheap and convenient this carriage by water. All very well your poetry, but give me the useful. See how cheap salt is; we get it for a mere nothing out of the sea. Look at our fisheriesour potash and soda manufactories—our iodine. I like to see the sea turned to account. Poetry is all very well for weak minds and sentimental young ladies. I like the practical, the useful- that's all I care about." The poet, it may be, ponders to himself on the line of demarcation between the useful and the useless. He also wonders whether that which elevates the soul and feelings of the people, is not as important as that which only raises their material condition. He is perplexed, for he, too, has his spectacles, and entertains an indefinite idea of sacrilege when he hears of the transmutation of nature's beautiful works into pounds, shillings, and pence. He views practical men as a set of hedge-clipping, valleyfilling, mountain-leveling, forest-clearing factory-mongers, and forgets that these art-Goths and nature-Vandals fabricate his comfortable clothes, produce his pleasant dinners, and waft him at his command hundreds of leagues away to spots of loveliness and romance. To turn from the shadow to the sub mention of the spectacles critical will at once bring before our mental vision the optical instrument itself, with a pair of cynical orbs peering behind it; eyes never intended, it would seem, for the purpose of seeing, but preeminently adapted for quizzing. Men have long known that a white cravat gives an aspect of benevolence, and, of course, a popular reception among masses, fanatical in their admiration of wealthy liberality-they have long been aware that the optic instrument which gives its name to this paper, imparts an air of professional dignity to him who wears it encircles his brow with an intellectual halo. Their use is not confined to the reviewer, nor indeed to the satirist himself. Long ago, Diogenes, the first of cynics, walked this earth, with a lantern to guide him, in the search for an honest man. It was an endless task to such a soul, for his critical spectacles were so awfully powerful, that the world seemed like a demonland, and its inhabitants monsters. It is not strange that he became in fact what he saw others in imagination; that while he quizzed mankind with spectacles critical, himself became the butt of eternal sarcasm, the classic specimen of the wildest extreme of folly. There are spectacles of another kind common to every age of life. The babe that smiles in its dear mechanical way when it is pleased, has huge glasses before its pretty laughing blue eyes. It sees them not; we see them not; but could we paint the images that lie upon its budding mind, that float before its tiny imagination, they would be strange unrealities to us beings of stern, veritable life. The old forgotten times, that have a dreamy record in the musty chronicles of history, when giants warred with goblins, or piled mountains to the skies; when every marshy valley was the home of some human reptile or zoophytish monsterthose old forgotten times are the pen-andink sketches of the world as painted in an infant's eye. Every green leaf is strange and wonderful; every sunny bank, a fairy's home. Undoubted Jacks kill real giants; historic Cinderellas sport slippers of genuine gold-not gilded, nor electroplated, but massy, gleaming gold; stars are angels' eyes; the moon, a playthingonly far away. Pupilage succeeds to infancy. The school-boy sports another kind of eyeglass. The world is a huge playground; study, a species of torture; happiness and half-holidays are synonyms. The great optical property of these spectacles is their near-sightedness. I believe a wearer was never known to look beyond the vacation. He is seldom able to see the consequences of neglecting a lesson. Should he be so acute, so far-sighted, as to foresee punishment, he strives to exhibit counterfeit proficiency, or, it may be, endeavors to administer an excuse with sufficient adroitness. But as to anything beyond-ignorance and its inconveniences -he has not the slightest idea in the world. A don at cricket; a proficient in marble-playing; a graduate in horse-management and dogdom-these are his heroes. He has thoughts of going to sea, and pines for the life of a Crusoe. He is rarely fond of books. His literary acquirements consist principally in the copying of holiday letters, and the perusal of storybooks, reflections and moral passages carefully omitted. Above all, he has not the slightest sympathy with the optic incongruities of his next stage; I refer to the romantic era of human life. Now, the romantic spectacles are really, in some respects, very enviable. The bright tinting they cast over nature, unreal though it be, is full of poetry and beauty. I speak of the milder forms, for the imperfections of vision at such a time frequently amount to absolute blind ness. The technical term for such cases is, being in love; and really the assumption of romantic spectacles often produces nothing more or less than acute monomania. The wearer is constantly haunted by some form which he denominates "thee." Poetry of the very acme of sentimentality is quoted, or often, it may be, misquoted spontaneously. If constant allusions to the moon, and fondness for moonlight under various circumstances, be criteria, these spectacles impart somewhat of lunacy. The figure I mentioned as haunting the wearer, often bears a strong but flattering likeness to some lady of his acquaintance, whose personal charms, however, are strangely distorted, if his descriptions are to be relied upon. Her teeth become pearls, and her eyes are gems; light hair is transmuted into gold; while red hair is said to be auburn. No wonder the poor youth becomes dejected: so strange a metamorphosis of a friend, and that friend a lady, must be very distressing. Fortunately, however, the glasses which cause the mischief are very fragile the slightest shock will break them; and this is a merciful provision, for their long continuance is said to end in the breaking of a much more important organ—I refer to the heart, which is reported to have become fractured under such circumstances. To these succeed, often more suddenly, the spectacles of prose-life. The world, which before was one chaos of alpine peaks and alpine chasms, now takes the form of a vast flat, bounded by bills-tailors' bills, butchers' bills, doctors' bills. The most singular effect of these prose-life spectacles, is their power of instantly squaring certain numbers: a family of four, for example, will seem to be one of sixteen ; a delay of five minutes in the serving of dinner will appear at least five-and-twenty; while the extravagant accounts incurred at the milliner's and silversmith's by the lady referred to-who, by the by, has now regained her wonted looks, and turned out no angel whatever-seem not only to square, but to cube spontaneously. He looks upon his romantic era as a very silly delusion, and seems heartily ashamed of it. He revels in his morning paper, and has been known to read through the supplementary advertisements with evident relish. He is in a sea of business: to his eyes, it seems hemming him in on all sides. Respectability is his motto, and that species of employment which the young call pleasure, his exceeding bane. Last of all come senile spectacles-the spectacles of old men. As the romantic peer with telescopic gaze into the future, so the aged look back into the past; things were very different when they were young; the world has strangely altered-it is a great deal worse than it used to be; their school-boy lessons, their early labors, their rectitude of conduct, were colossal. They live in a world of to-day, but it seems like a fresh picture in dissolving views, which mars and is marred by the world of yesterday. AVOID STRIFE. Easily and from the smallest chink the bitter waters of strife are let forth, but their course cannot be foreseen; and he seldom fails of suffering most from their poisonous effect who first allowed them to flow. |