h as speech with the lady's father.

And now, could I pardon--
Nay, did I think I could love him? I sobbingly answered, I thought
so.
And we are all of us going to Lago di Como to-morrow,
With an ulterior view at the first convenient Legation.

Patientest darling, good-by! Poor Fred, whose sense of what's
proper
Never was touched till now, is shocked at my glad self-betrayals,
And I am pointed out as an awful example to Annie,
Figuring all she must never be. But, oh, if _he_ loves me!--

POSTSCRIPT.

Since, he has shown me a letter in which he absolves and forgives
her
(Philip, of course, not Fred; and the _other_, of course, and not
Annie).
Don't you think him generous, noble, unselfish, heroic?

L'ENVOY.--_Clara's Comment_.

Well, I'm glad, I am sure, if Fanny supposes she's happy.
I've no doubt her lover is good and noble--as men go.
But, as regards his release of a woman who'd wholly forgot him,
And whom he loved no longer, for one whom he loves, and who loves
him,
_I_ don't exactly see where the _heroism_ commences.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

There is a bird that comes and sings
In the Professor's garden-trees;
Upon the English oak he swings,
And tilts and tosses in the breeze.

I know his name, I know his note,
That so with rapture takes my soul;
Like flame the gold beneath his throat,
His glossy cope is black as coal.

O oriole, it is the song
You sang me from the cottonwood,
Too young to feel that I was young,
Too glad to guess if life were good.

And while I hark, before my door,
Adown the dusty Concord Road,
The blue Miami flows once more
As by the cottonwood it flowed.

And on the bank that rises steep,
And pours a thousand tiny rills,
From death and absence laugh and leap
My school-mates to their flutter-mills.

The blackbirds jangle in the tops
Of hoary-antlered sycamores;
The timorous killdee starts and stops
Among the drift-wood on the shores.

Below, the bridge--a noonday fear
Of dust and shadow shot with sun--
Stretches its gloom from pier to pier,
Far unto alien coasts unknown.

And on those alien coasts, above,
Where silver ripples break the stream's
Long blue, from some roof-sheltering grove
A hidden parrot scolds and screams.

Ah, nothing, nothing! Commonest things: