where the silver lies in the deep shafts-that is to say, outside the town, 'in a flat, and not very pleasant district."

"I knew no one in the town; I had no one to be my guide, so I accompanied the cows, and came to the churchyard. The cows went past, but I stepped over the stile, and stood amongst the graves, where the grass grew high, and almost all the tombstones lay with worn-out inscriptions. On a few only the date of the year was legible. 'Anno,'-yes, what then? And who rested there? Everything on the stone was erased, blotted out like the earthly life of those mortals that here were earth in earth. What life's dream have ye dead played here in silent Sala?

"The setting sun shone over the graves; not a leaf moved on the trees, all was still -still as death, in the city of the silvermines, of which this traveller's reminiscence is but a frame around the shop-boy who leaned over the counter."

One passage more, to show how Anderson paints scenery, and then we must terminate our pickings. It is a forest scene in midsummer, and, to our thinking, it is charmingly described.

"Midsummer raises its leafy arbor everywhere, yet it is most flush in the forest, it extends for miles around. Our road goes for miles through that forest without seeing a house, or the possibility of meeting travellers, driving, riding, or walking. Come! the hostler puts fresh horses to the carriage; come with us into the large woody desert: we have a regular trodden way to travel, the air is clear, here is summer's warmth and the fragrance of birch and lime. It is an up and down hill road, always bending, and so, ever changing, but yet always forest scenery -the close thick forest. We pass small lakes, which lie so still and deep, as if they concealed night and sleep under their dark, glassy surfaces.

"We are now on a forest plain, where only charred stumps of trees are to be seen; this long tract is black, burnt, and deserted, not a bird flies over it. Tall, hanging birches now greet us again; a squirrel springs playfully across the road, and up into a tree; we cast our eye searchingly over the wood-grown mountain-side, which slopes so far, far forward; but not a trace of a house is to be seen; nowhere does that bluish smoke-cloud rise, that shows us here are fellow-men.

"The sun shines warm, the flies dance around the horses, settle on them, fly off again, and dance, as though it were to qualify

themselves for resting and being still. They, perhaps, think nothing is going on without us; there is no life while we are doing nothing.' They think as many persons think, and do not remember that Time's horses always fly onward with us!

"How solitary it is here! so delightfully solitary! one is so entirely alone with God and one's self. As the sunlight streams over the earth and over the extensive solitary forests, so does God's spirit stream over and into mankind; ideas and thoughts unfold themselves, endless, inexhaustible as he is, as the magnet which apportions its powers to the steel, and itself loses nothing thereby. As our journey through the forest scenery here, along the extended solitary road, so, travelling on the great high-road of thought, ideas pass through our head. Strange, rich caravans pass by from the works of poets, from the home of memory, strange and novel, for capricious fancy gives birth to them at the moment. There comes a procession of pious children with waving flags and joyous songs; there come dancing Monades, the blood's wild Bacchantes. The sun pours down hot in the open forest; it is as if the southern summer had laid itself up here to rest in Scandinavian forest-solitude, and sought itself out a glade where it might lie in the sun's hot beams and sleep hence this stillness as if it were night. Not a bird is heard to twitter, not a pine-tree moves; of what does the southern summer dream here in the north, amongst pines and fragrant birches?

In the writings of the olden time, from the classic soil of the South, are sagas of mighty fairies who, in the skins of swans, flew towards the North, to the Hyperborean's land, to the east of the north wind; up there, in the deep, still lakes, they bathed themselves, and acquired a renewed form. We are in the forest by these deep lakes; we see swans in flocks fly over us, and swim upon the rapid elv and on the still waters. The forests, we perceive, continue to extend further towards the west and the north, and are more dense as we proceed the carriageroads cease, and one can only pursue one's way along the outskirts by the solitary path, and on horseback.

"Woodland solitude! what images dost thou not present to one's thoughts! Woodland solitude! through thy vaulted halls people now pass in the summer-time with cattle and domestic utensils; children and old men go to the solitary pasture where echo dwells, where the national song springs forth with the wild mountain flowers! Dost

thou see the procession? paint it if thou | canst! The broad wooden cart laden high with chests and barrels, with jars and with crockery. The bright copper kettle and the tin dish shine in the sun. The old grandmother sits at the top of the load and holds her spinning-wheel, which completes the pyramid. The father drives the horse, the mother carries the youngest child on her back, sewed up in a skin, and the procession moves on step by step. The cattle are driven by the half-grown children: they have stuck a birch branch between one of the cow's horns, but she does not appear to be proud of her finery; she goes the same quiet pace as the others, and lashes the saucy flies with her tail. If the night becomes cold on this solitary pasture, there is fuel enough here, the tree falls of itself from old age, and lies and rots.

"But take especial care of the fire, fear the fire-spirit in the forest desert! He comes from the unextinguishable pile, he comes from the thunder-cloud, riding on the blue lightning's flame, which kindles the thick, dry moss of the earth; trees and bushes are kindled, the flames run from tree to tree, it is like a snow-storm of fire; the flame leaps to the tops of the trees; what a crackling and roaring, as if it were the ocean in its courses! The birds fly upwards in flocks, and fall down suffocated by the smoke; the animals flee, or, encircled by the fire, are consumed in it! Hear their cries and roars of agony! The howling of the wolf and the bear, dost thou know it? A calm, rainy day, and the forest-plains themselves, alone are able to confine the fiery sea, and the burnt forest stands charred, with black trunks and black stumps of trees, as we saw them here in the forest by the broad high-road. On this road we continue to travel, but it becomes worse and worse; it is, properly speaking, no road at all, but it is about to become one. Large stones lie half dug up, and we drive past them; large trees are cast down, and obstruct our way, and therefore we must descend from the carriage. The horses are taken out, and the peasants help to lift and push the carriage forward over ditches and opened paths.

"The sun now ceases to shine; some few rain-drops fall, and now it is a steady rain. But how it causes the birch to shed its fragrance! At a distance there are huts erected of loose trunks of trees and fresh green

boughs, and in each there is a large fire burning. See where the blue smoke curls through the green leafy roof; peasants are within at work, hammering and forging; here they have their meals. They are now laying a mine in order to blast a rock, and the rain falls faster and faster, and the pine and birch emit a finer fragrance. It is delightful in the forest."

From the extracts we have given, it will be seen what kind of book this is. We have nothing to offer in the way of criticism, further than to say, that the whole of it is written in the same picturesque and pleasant strain; that a cheerful and grateful feeling of enjoyment in the delights of nature and of existence is manifest in every sketch; and that the tone of the author's thoughts is eminently joyous, free, and humanizing. It is apparently his habit to make the best of everything; to look upon the world and its goings-on with calm eyes and a contented heart; and to use his poetic gifts for the purpose of illustrating and revealing the beauty and the goodness which are more or less in all things. A wise and genial philosophy pervades all his observations and reflections on human life and man's relations and destiny in the world; and we think it next to impossible for any one to read the book without deriving from it a measure of the mild and thankful spirit with which the author is inspired. If there is one defect in the work, it is perhaps a too continuous prettiness of phraseology, which has a somewhat palling effect upon the reader when the book is read connectedly, an effect somewhat analogous to that of sweet confectionery on the palate when too liberally indulged in; but even this seems natural and not inappropriate to the author's style of treatment; and it is evident you are liable to just the same effect from running hastily over a gallery of paintings; whereas, if you steadily contemplate a single picture till you have taken in its entire beauty and intention, you get exactly what the artist desired to impart; and hence, perhaps, the way to use and enjoy such a book as this, is to read it at intervals, one or two sketches at a time, so that you may quietly and effectually realize the charm of each. Were it not that reading, like everything else, is now commonly gone through at railway speed, we should recommend to readers having leisure, a trial of the plan thus indicated.

WHEN a new comet is described, we set ourselves to trace the path on which it is moving; so that, if it seems likely to trespass on our own orbit, prudent men may have warning to make all snug aloft, and ready for action; authors, in particular, seeking to correct the proofs of any book they may be publishing, before the comet has had time with its tail to sweep all the types into "pi." It is now becoming a duty to treat California as a comet; for she is going ahead at a rate that beats Sinbad and Gulliver, threatening (if we believe the star-gazers of our day) to throw universal commerce into "pi;" and other Californias are looming in her wake, such as Australia and the South Sea islands, now called Hawaii:* they are crowding all sail towards the same object of private gain and public confusion; anxieties are arising in various quarters; and it is daily becoming more a matter of public interest to assign the course upon which they are really advancing, and to measure the dangers (if any at all) with which they are practically charged.

In the case of California, the most painful feature at the outset of the termashaw was the torpor manifested by all the governments of Christendom as to a phenomenon that was leading their countrymen by wholesale into ruin. Helpless and ignorant as that army of children, which, in an early stage of the Crusades, set forward by land for Palestine; knowing as little as those children, of the horrors that besieged the road, or of the disappointments that would seal its terminus, supposing it ever to be reached; from every quarter of Europe rushed the excited ploughman and artisan, as vultures on a day of battle to the supper of carrion: and not a word of warning or advice from their government.

* i. c. by Missionaries in their dictionaries of the Sandwich language: but formerly better known to sailors as that Owhyhee, where Captain Cook was massacred.

On the continent this neglect had its palliation. Most governments were then too occupied by anxieties and agitations derived from the approaching future, or even by desperate convulsions derived from the present. But whither shall we look for the excuse of our own government? Some years ago, it was, by inconsiderate Radicals, made the duty of government to find work for the people. That was no part of their duty; nor could be; for it can be no duty to attempt impossibilities. But it was a part of their duty, officially, to publish remonstrances and cautions against general misapprehension of apparent openings, that too often were no real openings, for labor, and against a national delusion that for ninety-nine out of a hundred was sure to end in ruin. Two things government were bound to have done, viz., 1st., to have circulated a circumstantial account of the different routes to San Francisco, each with its separate distances assigned, and its separate varieties of inconceivable hardship; 2dly, to have sent out a party of surveyors and mineralogists, with instructions to report from time to time, at short intervals, upon the real condition of the prospects before the golddiggers, upon the comparative advantages of the several districts in California, as yet explored, with these mineral views, and upon the kind of labor, and the kind of tools or other apparatus, that had any reasonable chance of success. Had this been done, some myriads of energetic and enterprising men, that have long since perished miserably, would have been still available for the public service. California, be its real wealth what it may, was a "job;" a colossal job; and was worked as a job by a regular conspiracy of jobbers. The root of this conspiracy lay and lies (in all senses lies) up and down the United States. It is no affront, nor intended as such, to the American Union nor to Mr. Barnum, if I say that this