bout the size of a calf, very
good-natured, and quite tame. Its acquirements, as yet, are few, being
limited to climbing a pole. Its education has not been conducted with
that care and attention which so intelligent a beast merits, but it is
soon, I hear, to be removed to the valley and placed under teachers
capable of developing its wonderful talents to the utmost.

We also stopped at a shanty to get a large gray squirrel which had been
promised to me some days before; but I certainly am the most
unfortunate wretch in the world with pets. This spiteful thing, on
purpose to annoy me I do believe, went and got itself drowned the very
night before I was to take it home. It is always so.

I never had two humming-birds,
With plumage like a sunset sky,
But one was sure to fly away,
And the other one was sure to die.

I never nursed a flying-squirrel,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But it always ran into somebody's tent,
Got mistaken for a rat and killed!

There, M.; there is poetry for you. "Oh, the second verse doesn't
rhyme."--"Doesn't?"--"And it ain't original, is it?" Well, _I_ never
heard that rhyme was necessary to make a poet, any more than colors to
make a painter. And what if Moore _did_ say the same thing twenty years
ago? I am sure any writer would consider himself lucky to have an idea
which has been anticipated but _once_. I am tired of being a "mute
inglorious Milton," and, like that grand old master of English song,
would gladly write something which the world would not willingly let
die; and having made that first step, as witness the above verses, who
knows what will follow?

Last night one of our neighbors had a dinner-party. He came in to
borrow a teaspoon. "Had you not better take them all?" I said. "Oh,
no," was the answer; "that would be too much luxury. My guests are not
used to it, and they would think that I was getting aristocratic, and
putting on airs. One is enough; they can pass it round from one to the
other."

A blacksmith--not the learned one--has just entered, inquiring for the
Doctor, who is not in, and he is obliged to wait. Shall I write down
the conversation with which he is at this moment entertaining me? "Who
writ this 'ere?" is his first remark, taking up one of my most precious
books, and leaving the marks of his irreverent fingers upon the clean
pages. "Shakespeare," I answer, as politely as possible. "Did
Spokeshave write it? He