en per cent.; and every one
knows that there is no metre of public sentiment so infallible as the
stock-market. Now that the country is becoming safe, we must again turn
our attention to the health of our girls. Unless they are healthy,
the country is not safe. No where can their physical condition be so
important as in a republic. The utmost attention was paid to the bodily
training of Victoria, because she was to be a queen and the mother of
kings. By the theory of our government, however imperfectly applied as
yet, this is the precise position of every American girl. Voltaire
said that the fate of nations had often depended on the gout of a
prime-minister; and the fate of our institutions may hang on the precise
temperament which our next President shall have inherited from his
mother.

* * * * *

SONNET.

The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade
And brighten with the daylight and the dark,
The bluet in the green I faintly mark,
And glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,
Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade,
Shine one to me,--the least still glorious made
As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch.
And, so, dim grassy flower and night-lit spark
Still move me on and upward for the True;
Seeking, through change, growth, death, in new and old,
The full in few, the statelier in the less,
With patient pain; always remembering this,--
His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold,
Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.

THE HORRORS OF SAN DOMINGO.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Among the stock fallacies which belong to public writers and thinkers,
and which exercise a kind of conventional influence as often as they are
paraded, there is none greater than this,--that History always repeats
herself, because Human Nature never changes. The Tories of all ages and
countries content themselves and alarm their neighbors by an adroit
interpolation of this formula in their speech. They create the alarm
because they are contented and intend to remain so. Successive audiences
yield, as to the circus-jokes of the clown, who hits his traditional
laugh in the same place so often that it is a wonder the place is not
worn through. But people of a finer wit are not so easily surprised. If
they bore a fair numerical proportion to the listeners of _doctrinaires_
and alarmists, the repetition would be eventually resisted, with an
indignati