ave been some special
cause for the singular nervous state into which this reading threw the
young girl, our Scheherezade. She was doubtless tired with overwork and
troubled with the thought that she was not doing herself justice, and
that she was doomed to be the helpless prey of some of those corbies who
not only pick out corbies' eyes, but find no other diet so nutritious
and agreeable.

Whatever the cause may have been, her heart heaved tumultuously, her
color came and went, and though she managed to avoid a scene by the
exercise of all her self-control, I watched her very anxiously, for I
was afraid she would have had a hysteric turn, or in one of her pallid
moments that she would have fainted and fallen like one dead before us.

I was very glad, therefore, when evening came, to find that she was
going out for a lesson on the stars. I knew the open air was what she
needed, and I thought the walk would do her good, whether she made any
new astronomical acquisitions or not.

It was now late in the autumn, and the trees were pretty nearly stripped
of their leaves.--There was no place so favorable as the Common for the
study of the heavens. The skies were brilliant with stars, and the air
was just keen enough to remind our young friends that the cold season
was at hand. They wandered round for a while, and at last found
themselves under the Great Elm, drawn thither, no doubt, by the
magnetism it is so well known to exert over the natives of its own soil
and those who have often been under the shadow of its outstretched arms.
The venerable survivor of its contemporaries that flourished in the days
when Blackstone rode beneath it on his bull was now a good deal broken
by age, yet not without marks of lusty vitality. It had been wrenched
and twisted and battered by so many scores of winters that some of its
limbs were crippled and many of its joints were shaky, and but for the
support of the iron braces that lent their strong sinews to its more
infirm members it would have gone to pieces in the first strenuous
northeaster or the first sudden and violent gale from the southwest.
But there it stood, and there it stands as yet,--though its obituary
was long ago written after one of the terrible storms that tore its
branches,--leafing out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its
dumb language to lisp "Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of
foliage in October as softly as if it were whispering Amen!

Not far