Plucked walking by thy sunlit streams;

For all of Nature's pictured calm,
The children's hour, the fireside scene,
For our frail lives' undying psalm,
And wandering sweet Evangeline;

Praises for all; yet first for thee,
O lover with the kindling eye!
Quick to discern the minstrelsy
Where planets sway and star-fires die.

O prophet of a nobler world!
Thy song shall cheer the hill and plain,
Till sunset's glowing wings are furled
On faded joys and vanished pain.

NEEDLE AND GARDEN.

THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
STRAWBERRY-GIRL.

WRITTEN BY HERSELF.

CHAPTER III.

My experience as a seamstress thus far subjected me to mere trials of
temper, or mortifications of personal pride, but never to the calamities
which sometimes fall so heavily on others in a like position. Hence,
while spared the latter, I was too much disposed to magnify the former:
for, let our trials be few and light as they may, we are generally prone
to consider them the greatest that could befall. The griefs of others,
their losses, their calamities, as has often been well said, we can all
bear with surprising fortitude: it is only our own that we are disposed
to regard as unendurable. But in this time of discouragement there were
cases brought to my notice, the severity of which fairly humbled me in
the dust, filling my heart with thankfulness at the exemption extended
to us, and showing me that afflictions are really great or insignificant
only by comparison.

One sleety wintry night the low wail of a new-born infant was heard
issuing from a bundle of ragged clothing which some poor creature had
laid down on the doorstep of a house in a small by-street not many
squares from our own. The house was occupied in part by a man named
Varick, who had a wife and several children. This man had been an
industrious mechanic, but had for two years been pursuing the downward
path to ruin, a confirmed victim of the bottle. He had been forced by
the destitution thus brought upon himself to abandon a snug abode in a
decent street for the squalor of a rickety shell in a mean locality, and
was now prostrate on his bed, dying of rapid consumption. By what
mysterious providence a new-born babe should thus be sent to such a
man's door is beyond my comprehension. But the wife of Varick, softer of
heart than its mother, took in the shivering waif, adopted it