vens croaked of storm,
They have sat them at my hearth,
Telling me my house was warm.

As the lute and cup went round,
They have rhymed me well in lay;--
When the hunt was on at morn,
Each, departing, went his way.
On the walls, in compliment,
Some would scrawl a verse or two,
Some have hung a willow branch,
Or a wreath of corn flowers blue.

Ah! my friend, when thou dost go,
Leave no wreath of flowers for me;
Not pale daffodils nor rue,
Violets nor rosemary.
Spill the wine upon the lamps,
Tread the fire, and bar the door;
So defile the wretched place
None will come, forevermore.

_From "April Twilights."_

A STORY OF HATE

BY GERTRUDE HALL

I

At one end of the village stood a century-old house, infinitely seemly
in line and proportion, in color unblemished white. A hint of the
manorial, if not the temple-like, it owed to a front of broad stairs
and fluted columns, upholding a pediment which over-hung the
ground-floor window-doors and shadowed the windows of the upper story.
An equal dignity and rather serious beauty belonged to the arrangement
of the surrounding garden. Year after year, the same plants bloomed
there, the sort, mostly, we call old-fashioned. A reverence for
ancestral predilections determined the colors and fragrances to be
enjoyed to-day; but as these fairly accorded with the present owners',
the garden remained a true expression of the house's inhabitants.

At the other end of the village, overlooking the main street, stood a
new house, fruit of what seemed now and then to some one the most
singularly successful research in vulgar ugliness. But to a large
proportion of the villagers it embodied the last word of splendor: it
had, on the face of it, cost enormously, and necessarily met the
tastes of many, from the fact that it offered some specimen of every
style the one who planned it had admired in any dwelling ever seen by
her: turrets, balconies, projecting windows, a Renaissance roof, acres
of verandah, and, ornamenting all, as lace might a lady's garment,
numberless yards of intricate wooden openwork. It had originally been
painted in three colors, but one day, no one divined at what
prompting, a gang of workmen was seen overlaying the rich buff,
russet, and green, with white, and the house stood forth among its
trees no longer utterly condemnable to the more fastidious, but
clothed in such redeeming