de and old;
Upon the wall did darkness fall,
The evening air was cold.

"A dream!" the sleeper, waking, said,
Then paced along the floor,
And, whistling slow and soft and low,
He locked the schoolhouse door.

And, walking home, his heart was full
Of peace and trust and praise;
And singing slow and soft and low,
Said, "After many days."

_W.H. Venable._

A Legend of Bregenz

Girt round with rugged mountains, the fair Lake Constance lies;
In her blue heart reflected shine back the starry skies;
And watching each white cloudlet float silently and slow,
You think a piece of heaven lies on our earth below!

Midnight is there: and silence, enthroned in heaven, looks down
Upon her own calm mirror, upon a sleeping town:
For Bregenz, that quaint city upon the Tyrol shore,
Has stood above Lake Constance a thousand years and more.

Her battlement and towers, from off their rocky steep,
Have cast their trembling shadow for ages on the deep;
Mountain, and lake, and valley, a sacred legend know,
Of how the town was saved, one night three hundred years ago.

Far from her home and kindred, a Tyrol maid had fled,
To serve in the Swiss valleys, and toil for daily bread;
And every year that fleeted so silently and fast,
Seemed to bear farther from her the memory of the past.

She served kind, gentle masters, nor asked for rest or change;
Her friends seemed no more new ones, their speech seemed no more strange;
And when she led her cattle to pasture every day,
She ceased to look and wonder on which side Bregenz lay.

She spoke no more of Bregenz, with longing and with tears;
Her Tyrol home seemed faded in a deep mist of years;
She heeded not the rumors of Austrian war and strife;
Each day she rose, contented, to the calm toils of life.

Yet when her master's children would clustering round her stand,
She sang them ancient ballads of her own native land;
And when at morn and evening she knelt before God's throne,
The accents of her childhood rose to her lips alone.

And so she dwelt: the valley more peaceful year by year;
When suddenly strange portents of some great deed seemed near.
The golden corn was bending upon its fragile stock,
While farmers, heedless of their fields, paced up and down in talk.

The men seemed stern and altered, with looks cast on the ground;
With anxious faces, one by one, the women gathered round;
All talk of flax, or spinning, or work, was put away;
The very children s