ed your ears,
And wished that you couldn't hear them.
'Twas a brilliant effort, upon my word,
And nearly killed the canary-bird.

The Pussy-cat and the Black-and-Tan
With the music were so delighted,
They will give a concert as soon as they can,
And perhaps we may be invited.
"Bow-wow!" "Miaow!" I'm sorry, you know,
I've another engagement--and cannot go!

A LETTER TO AMERICAN BOYS.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD.

My dear Cousins: Shall I really be talking to you as I sit here in my
study with the river Thames now flowing, now ebbing, past my window? I
am uttering no word, I am only writing; and you are not listening, not
reading, for it will be a long time ere what I am now thinking shall
reach you over the millions of waves that swell and sink between us. And
yet I shall in very truth be talking to you.

In like manner, with divine differences, God began to talk to us ages
before we were born: I will not say before we began to be, for, in a
sense, that very moment God thought of us we began to exist, for what
God thinks of, _is_. We have been lying for ages in his heart without
knowing it. But now we have begun to know it. We are here, with a great
beginning, and before us an end so great that there is no end to it. But
we must take heed, for, else, the very greatness will turn to confusion
and terror.

Shall I explain what made me begin my letter to you just this way?--I
was sitting in my room, as I am now, thinking what I should say to you.
And as I sat thinking after something worth saying and fit to say, my
room spoke to me,--that is, out of its condition and appearance came a
thought into my mind. And that you may understand how it came, and how
it was what it was, I will first show you what my room at this moment is
like. For the thought had nothing to do with the sun outside, or the
shining river, or the white-sailed boats, neither with the high wind
that is tossing the rosy hawthorn-bloom before my windows, or with the
magnolia trained up the wall and looking in at one of them: it had to do
only with the inside of the room.

It is a rather long room. The greater part has its walls filled with
books, and I am sitting at one end quite surrounded by them. But when I
lift my eyes, I look to the other end, and into the heart of a stage for
acting upon, filling all the width and a third part of the length of the
room. It is surrounded with curtains, but those in fr