great swamp in Poplin, New Hampshire;
whereupon an immediate search was made for the precious metal. Under
the bleak sky of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twenty
or more grown men, graduates of our common schools, and liable, every
mother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general court
members, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the march
of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozen
earth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and
crowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore only
answered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl. The snows
of December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation still
remains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary upon the age of
progress.

Still later, in one of our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made,
partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose of
digging for money in one of the desolate sand-keys of the West Indies.
It appears that some mesmerized "subject," in the course of one of those
somnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, like Satan in
chaos,--

"O'er bog, o'er steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies,"--

while peering curiously into the earth's mysteries, chanced to have his
eyes gladdened by the sight of a huge chest packed with Spanish coins,
the spoil, doubtless, of some rich-freighted argosy, or Carthagena
galleon, in the rare days of Queen Elizabeth's Christian buccaneers.

During the last quarter of a century, a colored woman in one of the
villages on the southern border of New Hampshire has been consulted by
hundreds of anxious inquirers into the future. Long experience in her
profession has given her something of that ready estimate of character,
that quick and keen appreciation of the capacity, habits, and wishes of
her visitors, which so remarkably distinguished the late famous Madame
Le Normand, of Paris; and if that old squalid sorceress, in her cramped
Parisian attic, redolent of garlic and bestrewn with the greasy
implements of sorry housewifery, was, as has been affirmed, consulted by
such personages as the fair Josephine Beauharnois, and the "man of
destiny," Napoleon himself, is it strange that the desire to lift the
veil of the great mystery before us should