night the harvesters heard the sound
Of a woman sobbing underground,
And the voice of the Hill-Troll loud with blame
Of the careless singer who told his name.

Of the Troll of the Church they sing the rune
By the Northern Sea in the harvest moon;
And the fishers of Zealand hear him still
Scolding his wife in Ulshoi hill.

And seaward over its groves of birch
Still looks the tower of Kallundborg church,
Where, first at its altar, a wedded pair,
Stood Helva of Nesvek and Esbern Snare!

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK IN MEXICO.

And first, let it be on record that his name is GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, and
not CRUICKSHANK. The good old man is seventy years of age, if not more,
(the earliest drawing I have seen of his bears the date of 1799, and he
could scarcely have begun to limn in his long-clothes,) yet, with a
persistence of perversity wellnigh astonishing,--although his name has
been before the public for considerably more than half a
century,--although he has published nothing anonymously, but has
appended his familiar signature in full to the minutest scratchings of
his etching-needle,--although he has been the conductor of two
magazines, and of late years has been one of the foremost agitators and
platform-orators in the English temperance movement,--the vast majority
of his countrymen have always spelt his surname "Cruickshank," and will
continue so to spell it, I suppose, even should he live as long as
Cornaro. I hope he may, I am sure, with or without the additional _c_
for his age and his country can ill spare him.

But George Cruikshank in Mexico! What on earth can the most stay-at-home
of British artists have to do with that out-of-the-way old
curiosity-shop of the American continent? One might fancy him now--but
that it is growing late--in the United States. He might be invited to
attend a Total Abstinence Convention. He might run Mr. J.B. Gough hard
on his favorite stump. He might be tempted, perchance, to cross the
ocean in the evening of his days, to note down, with his inimitable and
still unfaltering pencil, some of the humors of Yankee-land. I am
certain, that, were George Cruikshank or Dicky Doyle to come this way
and give a pictorial history of a tour through the States, somewhat
after the immortal Brown, Jones, and Robinson pattern, the Americans
would be in a better temper with their brothers in Old England than
after reading some long spun-out book of travels