on the morning grass: could they, like these, be woven in a single
summer night? The sequel will show. I appeared upon the scene. A single,
slender iron pole was driven into the ground: one end of a piece of rope
was fastened to it; the other end encircled the neck of our little,
black, woolly calf, Topsy, who was describing great circles around the
pole, in her frenzy to escape.

"Sir," said I, after a somewhat prolonged silence, "it is the old
crowbar."

"No," said he, confidently, "it is an Iron Fence,--such as they have in
Natick. Only," he added, after a short pause, and as if the thought had
just occurred to him, "perhaps theirs is the old-fashioned centripetal
kind. This is the New Centrifugal Iron Fence!"(?)

* * * * *

Kindness to animals is, like every other good thing, its own reward. It
is homage to Nature, and Nature takes you into the circle of her
sympathies and refreshes you with balsam and opiate. We, too, delight in
green meadows and blue sky. Resting with our pets on the southern slope,
the heavens lean tenderly over us, and star-flowers whisper to us the
brown earth's secrets. Ever wonderful and beautiful is it to see the
frozen, dingy sod springing into slender grass-blades, purple violets,
and snow-white daisies. The lover deemed it a token of extraordinary
devotion, that, when his mistress came by, his

"dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red."

But no foot so humble, so little loved, so seldom listened for, that the
earth will not feel its tread and blossom up a hundred-fold to meet her
child. And every dainty blossom shall be so distinctly wrought, so
gracefully poised, so generously endowed, that you might suppose Nature
had lavished all her love on that one fair flower.

As you lie on the grass, watching the ever-shifting billows of the
sheeny sea, that dash with soundless surge against the rough old
tree-trunks, marking how the tall grasses bend to every breeze and
darken to every cloud, only to arise and shine again when breeze and
cloud are passed by, there comes through your charmed silence--which is
but the perfect blending of a thousand happy voices--one cold and bitter
voice,--

"Golden to-day, to-morrow gray:
So fades young love from life away!"

O cold, false voice, die back again into your outer darkness! I know the