ticoats, and in such a mood I can plod for hours and hours through the dusky, tattered leaves of old, parchment-bound volumes in the library, devouring every musty line with the greedy eagerness of a prying antiquary. Once I happened, at such a time, to get hold of a folio book of travels in America, in the early time of the colony. The writer was a Frenchman, and first went to Canada, travelling through the Lakes down the Mississippi, and back the same way. He made a curious prophecy, when he arrived at about the present site of St. Louis, where he says, that in time that spot would be the seat of a mighty empire, that would stretch its arms to the East and West, the North and South. His map is dolefully deficient, making a distance of but two or three hundred miles from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and covering the finest part of Georgia and the Carolinas with an immense inland sea. Another traveller, of the same date, makes a shrewd conjecture in regard to the lakes, which he connects with the Pacific by an immense arm of the sea running up from the Gulf of California, and supposes them to be inhabited by very enlightened nations of Indians. It has struck me as very singular that in the many and various suppositions advanced about the origin of the Aborigines of America, no one should have thought of the real locality. It must appear fully demonstrated that they came from the interior of the earth, through the cavity at the pole, which was made mention of by that renowned and enlightened philosopher Capt. Symmes, whose recent death has put an end to an expedition which would have immortalized him, and bestowed a

blessing on mankind. Each sympathetic mind reverts, with

melancholy reflections on the mention of the demise of this great man, upon the late sad tragedy acted at Rochester, where one of the stars of the age lost his life in trying a philosophical experiment; Cæsar's name may be forgotten, but Samuel Patch's still will flourish, untarnished by the corroding rust of time. Few geniuses have lived with greater depth of understanding than this philosopher. By the bye, I must remark that I do not make it a regular practice to joke, esteeming a pun that hurts another's feelings a most vile and scandalous piece of mischief. This has been my opinion ever since I made a severe joke upon one of my friends, who cut me in return, and harassed me for a month by his coldness and indifference. Confusion to wily, witless

wits, and puny, Punic pugilists! By the bye, Mr. Editor, can you give any reason for the word pun coming from Punic? I have often thought of this strange derivation, which I suppose to have taken place from the Carthaginians being double-tongued. (See Livy). I wrote, as you desired me, a piece of poetry ycleped, " Marius lamenting over the Ruins of Carthage," but I find, upon looking over it, that he has bolted off suddenly from Carthage, and digressed to a horrible extent; discovering him after a chain of links sharpening his whittling knife in a corn-field. And here I must remark that of all disagreeable things in this world, not even excepting a woman's rattle, a genius for digression is the worst, as I have stated before. After having explained, in the above pages, as concisely, clearly, and briefly as possible my distressing case, I hope that you and the Club, in their infinite goodness, may give their opinions and advice.

DELORAINE DIGRESS.

THE MEETING OF THE DRYADS.

It was not many centuries since,
When, gathered on the moonlit green
Beneath the Tree of Liberty,

A ring of weeping sprites was seen.

The freshman's lamp had long been dim,
The voice of busy day was mute,
And tortured melody had ceased

Her sufferings on the evening flute.

They met not, as they once had met,

To laugh o'er many a jocund tale,

But every pulse was beating low,

And every cheek was cold and pale.

Then rose a fair, but faded one,

Who oft had cheered them with her song;
She waved a mutilated arm,

And silence held the listening throng.

"Sweet friends," the gentle nymph began,
"From opening bud to withering leaf

One common lot has bound us all

In every change of joy and grief.

"While all around has felt decay,

We rose in ever-living prime,
With broader shade and fresher green,
Beneath the crumbling step of time.

"When often by our feet has past
Some human freak of nature's whim,
Say, have we trimmed one awkward shape,
Or lopped away one crooked limb ?

"Go on, fair Science, soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast, Her vulgar fingers formed a tree,

But thou hast trained it to a post.

"Go paint the birch's silver rind,

And quilt the peach with softer down, Up with the willow's drooping threads, Off with the sunflower's radiant crown.

"Go plant the lily on the shore,

And set the rose among the waves,
And bid the southern bud unbind
Its silken zone in arctic caves.

"Bring bellows for the panting winds,
Hang up a lantern by the moon,
And give the nightingale a fife,
And lend the eagle a balloon.

"I cannot smile-the tide of scorn

That rolled through every frozen vein,

Comes kindling fiercer as it flows

Back to its burning source again.

"Again in every quivering leaf

That moment's agony I feel,

When limbs that spurned the northern blast Shrunk from the sacrilegious steel.

"A curse upon the wretch who dared
To crop us with his felon saw—
May every fruit his lip shall taste,
Lie like a bullet in his maw.

"In every julep that he drinks,
May gout and bile and headach be,
And when he strives to calm his brain
May colic mingle with his tea.

"May nightshade cluster round his path,
And thistles prick, and brambles cling,
May blistering ivy scorch his veins,

And dogwood burn, and nettles sting.

"On him may never shadow fall
When fever racks his throbbing brow,
And his last shilling buy a rope

To hang him on my highest bough."

She spoke the morning's herald beam
Sprang from the bosom of the sea,
And every mangled sprite returned
In sadness to her wounded tree.

A SATURDAY-NIGHT.*

MR. EDITOR, Do you wish to hear a very piteous tale? I will tell you one.

I have enjoyed my Saturday even more than usual. Before coming to college, I loved home, as every truly civilized being does, above every other place. But since taking up my abode here, and being at home but one day in seven, it has seemed to me that I enjoy it seven-fold. To-day has been what all the world,-that is, Boston students and their friends-know that three Saturdays out of four are-wet. So I spent the day (videlicet, since 12 o'clock, that being the hour of the morning at which we get into town now, on our weekly holyday,) inter parietes. Skimmed the seven days' quota of news-papers-chatted with "the folks "-heard, according to custom, all the family incidents of the week-read two letters which had been received-looked at the "Rewards of Merit" of all the little ones, pared all their finger-nails, and told them three cock-and-bull stories apiece-played sundry games of chess and twice as many of back-gammon with my cousin (I might have been more distinct in French, by saying

This piece was communicated for our March number. It was unfortunately mislaid, found its way into the wicker basket, and has not been recovered till within a fortnight. We sincerely beg Mr. Domal's pardon, and hope that our temporary and unintentional neglect will not prevent his favoring us once more with some of his effusions. EDITOR.

cousine)--and ate two meals (we are all human), which were rendered doubly grateful to my palate by their direct antithesis to thy abominations, O Commons-hall! Tea is over. Seven o'clock. Conversation grows more and more interesting. We talk about nearly every thing worth talking about under the sun-gayeties and gravities, novelties and antiquities, the last including college jokes. Every thing and every body seems more and more domestic and dear; home seems more my home than ever. Twenty minutes past seven. "My dear friends, I must go." "Go!" exclaimed my cousin; "what, you are surely to spend the evening, with us?" "Surely not, fair coz; we are required to enter our names, and be at our rooms by eight o'clock." "Is that the law?" she murmured, with little short of Shylock's astonishment. "But what is the reason of it, Charles? why does your government require you to jump up and run away from us in the midst of the evening? Do they grudge you a whole evening with your family? When you reach Cambridge, you surely will not feel like making a fire and sitting down to study." What should I have answered, ye departed founders of our laws? I knew not; so merely trying to stammer out something about inscrutable wisdom, and referring my cousin to Paley's theory of general and particular consequences, I commenced a determined retreat. "Interque mærentes amicos

Egregius properaret exul."

"Give my love, coz, to Helen, when you write. Don't let Tom Clarke get above you in geography, Dick, before I come home again. Good bye all, till next Saturday." And I closed the parlor door-and then the front door.

"Oh night,

And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong!"

I exclaimed with the poet; but I could not continue with him, "Yet lovely in your strength." Little was there lovely to me in the cold, driving sleet, against which I spread my huge umbrella; or in the keen northeaster which impelled it at an angle of 15 degrees with the horizon. Something very lovely, however, the slosh* I ploughed through in every

* This we acknowledge to be a Yankeeism, but it is an expressive one.