RECTION AND THE LIFE." We know not, it is true, the conditions of our future life; we know not what it is to pass from this state of being to another; but before us in that dark passage has gone the Man of Nazareth, and the light of his footsteps lingers in the path. Where he, our Brother in his humanity, our Redeemer in his divine nature, has gone, let us not fear to follow. He who ordereth all aright will uphold with his own great arm the frail spirit when its incarnation is ended; and it may be, that, in language which I have elsewhere used,

when Time's veil shall fall asunder,

The soul may know

No fearful change nor sudden wonder,
Nor sink the weight of mystery under,

But with the upward rise and with the vastness grow.

And all we shrink from now may seem

No new revealing;

Familiar as our childhood's stream,

Or pleasant memory of a dream,

The loved and cherished past upon the new life stealing.

Serene and mild the untried light

May have its dawning;

As meet in summer's northern night

The evening gray and dawning white,

The sunset hues of Time blend with the soul's new morning

I

YANKEE GYPSIES.

"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets;

Here's to all the wandering train."

BURNS.

CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences." I profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasoned feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her yashmack; schoolboys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow or blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof. There is nothing in all this to complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities, its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with

fire, shattered by exploding thunders.

Even the

wild gales of the equinox have their varieties, sounds of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz administers his hydropathic torment,

"A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench, —
The land it soaks is putrid";

or rather, as everything, animate and inanimate, is seething in warm mist, suggesting the idea that Na-. ture, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thompsonian steam-box on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous melancholy drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters ; a dim, leaden-colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot. He who can extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted. Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just

now. One gains nothing by attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at the keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes ; they insinuate themselves through the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of the rain-drops.

I rise and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loose-jointed figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-brown and wind-dried; small, quick-winking black eyes. There he stands, the water dripping from his pulpy hat and ragged elbows.

I speak to him; but he returns no answer. With a dumb show of misery, quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in consequence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitable Christian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this veracious document, duly certified and indorsed by an Italian consul in one of our Atlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to Yankee organs unpronounceable, name.

Here commences a struggle. Every man, the Mahometans tell us, has two attendant angels, the good one on his right shoulder, the bad on his left. "Give," says Benevolence, as with some difficulty I fish up a small coin from the depths of my pocket. "Not a cent," says selfish Prudence; and I drop it from my fingers. "Think," says the good angel, "of the poor stranger in a strange land, just

escaped from the terrors of the sea-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrown half-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our language, and unable to find employment suited to his capacity."—"A vile impostor!" replies the lefthand sentinel. "His paper, purchased from one of those ready-writers in New York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the low price of one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, to suit customers."

Amidst this confusion of tongues I take another survey of my visitant. Ha! a light dawns upon me. That shrewd, old face, with its sharp, winking eyes, is no stranger to me. Pietro Frugoni, I have seen thee before. Si, signor, that face of thine has looked at me over a dirty white neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and those small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast offering to a crowd of halfgrown boys an extemporaneous exhortation in the capacity of a travelling preacher. Have I not seen it peering out from under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lost the use of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska? Is it not the face of the forlorn father of six small children, whom the "marcury doctors" had "pisened" and crippled? Did it not belong to that down-East unfortunate who had been out to the 66 Genesee country" and got the "fevern-nager," and whose hand shook so pitifully when held out to receive my poor gift? The same, under all disguises,—