eye, and twist of his lower jaw, and roll of his thick tongue, as to make us laugh out even while we felt such true compassion.

Still another creature-character there was, who chanced to be gifted with just intelligence enough to feel sure that he was brighter than the idiotic subject; he was a clear "better-thanthou" individual, and so far as poor foolish Sam was concerned, delighted to betray it. He was a great talker, and had the eyes of a lobster, and a tongue that would crowd itself out of his mouth. If he saw that Sam was furnishing us with amusement, up he came to display his own superior parts upon so gloomy a foil. It would indeed be a pity if one could not shine, with a poor idiot to furnish the background. This voluble fellow took upon himself an immensely patronizing care of the other, as if, in some time past, he might have been appointed his guardian. He would come up and pull down the upraised hands of the pitiful fool, and offer him advice about what he ought to do and say before us. "Seems to me" he would break out, with a proud glance around on us "Sam don't know nothin' at all! He-he-he!" Then he would order him to ask for his cracker, or his cent; and suddenly turn his back upon him, and laugh, neither he nor we knew at what.

At length this very fellow came to amuse us most of all, though he little dreamed it was so. We used to nudge one another, and get ourselves all prepared to enjoy these displays of his fancied superiority over the weaker fool. The trick fails to provoke the same astonishment now, since the world has opened its wider view to me.

The remainder of that pauper regiment comes up before me in review, clad in their cheap and scant pauper uniform. Black and white men and women old and young, alas! alas! for the pledges and promises and false lights of our social system! A decayed, unhappy, aimless race; consumed of "dry rot; " thrust out and kept out of the social world by the hand of actual benevolence; shut up from the living sympathy of their fellow-creatures; faded, worn, and broken, waiting in a sort of sullen silence for the opening of the great door that swings on golden hinges, and is to let them into a light which no man can obstruct any more.

A Poor-house starts strange thoughts, out of time and tune, harsh and dissonant, — which cannot instantly be put down. You find there persons whose lives had as promising a beginning as your own, but who have

been able, out of the body of their combined exertions and aspirations, to reach but this inauspicious goal. There, too, you see, close beside such, other persons whose natures had foul stains on them from the beginning, which would not wash out; and whose very presence imparts to the place a lazaar-house character, as if it were actually peopled with moral infections. And pale and suffering women, too, who have vainly followed, in the blindness of love, faithless and forgetful husbands, till their wearied feet have finally brought them to this common refuge of sorrow and despair. Or, now and then, may be caught the glimpse of a child's face, little realizing how deeply the brand of Pauper is to be burned into its after life.

And always may be found there, gathered as into a mouldering corner, the relics of an once vigorous generation, mumbling the broken histories of their early life, crouching in dim and shadowy recesses, chatting of happy times such as this world will never bring them again, sitting on long benches in the sun and idly watching the flies, and, let us hope, now and then catching a glimpse of the far-off reality which they fondly believe will one day be theirs.

Heaven keep all of us clear of the Poorhouse! It is a place, the sight of which can check the current suddenly in young veins. Distinct and lonely it stands out in the plane of the thoughts, just as it does in the lap of the landscape. It has no other effect than to excite inward fears and bring on sudden creepings and shudderings. There is no token whatever, within it or about it, of the blessed life that lies concealed in the single word—HOME! a word that, next to Mother, lives and lingers longest in the human heart.

THE DISTRICT SCHOOL.

HAT noted polygamist and wife-murderer,

THAT

known as Henry the Eighth, did no more for the cause of learning in Old England when he invited Erasmus over to take a Greek Professorship at Oxford, than our puritan ancestry, when they built the first school-house in the New England woods. Through its humble door has passed the power that is to-day engaged in conquering and civilizing the continent.

At the time when I knew it, the little red school-house stood at the fork of the road; and though there were other school-houses in other districts of the town, this was accounted the only one of which special mention was thought worthy to be made.

Mr. John Porringer a man a man somewhere within the broad-growing shadows of fortyfive years" kept" this school, and was in the way of keeping it so long as he lived and liked. The notion seemed to have taken root