welcome thee to our numbers, a flower of costliest bloom:
Let a hundred maids live widowed to furnish thy bridal bed;
But pause where the flag doth question, and bend thy triumphant head.

Take down now your flaunting banner, for a scout comes breathless and
pale,
With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale:
"They have fled while the flag waved o'er them! they've turned to the
foe their back!
They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout
and wrack!"

Pass hence, then, the friends I gathered, a goodly company!
All ye that have manhood in you, go, perish for Liberty!
But I and the babes God gave me will wait with uplifted hearts,
With the firm smile ready to kindle, and the will to perform our parts.

When the last true heart lies bloodless, when the fierce and the false
have won,
I'll press in turn to my bosom each daughter and either son;
Bid them loose the flag from its bearings, and we'll lay us down to rest
With the glory of home about us, and its freedom locked in our breast.

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

I.

It is raining; and being in-doors, I look out from my library-window,
across a quiet country-road, so near that I could toss my pen into the
middle of it.

A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling hedge of
Osage-orange; and from the stile the ground falls away in green and
gradual slope to a great plateau of measured and fenced fields,
checkered, a month since, with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged
purple of mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots. There are
umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy,
luxurious verdure of new-springing rye; gray stubble; the ragged brown
of discolored, frost-bitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops,
thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the
river-basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and
maples; then roofs, cupolas; ambitious lookouts of suburban houses,
spires, belfries, turrets: all these commingling in a long line of
white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple
hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other
by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and
so blend with the northern sky.

Is the picture clear? A road; a farm-flat of party-colored checkers; a
near wood, that conceals t