, also in black, but with
gold spectacles, to the funeral of an aunt. As they pursued their
jog-trot journey along the Salt Hay Road, and came to Ephraim Morse's
cottage, they saw Susan sitting in a shady little porch, at the front
door, shelling peas, and looking down the bay.

"How is everything, Susan?" called out Captain Seth; "'bout time for Eph
to be gitt'n' in?"

"Yes," she answered, nodding and smiling, and pointing with a pea-pod;
"that's our boat, just coming up to the wharf, with her peak down."

THE DENVER EXPRESS.

BY A.A. HAYES.

I.

Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way and
heard the "shanty-songs" sung by the sailors as they toiled at capstan
and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but melodious
refrain--

"I'm bound to see its muddy waters
Yeo ho! that rolling river;
Bound to see its muddy waters
Yeo ho! the wild Missouri."

Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective
"wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river, which, tipsily
bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far North-west, totters,
reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and
which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at
Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some
drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian),
contaminates it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

At a certain point on the banks of this river, or rather--as it has the
habit of abandoning and destroying said banks--at a safe distance
therefrom, there is a town from which a railroad takes its departure for
its long climb up the natural incline of the Great Plains, to the base
of the mountains; hence the importance to this town of the large but
somewhat shabby building serving as terminal station. In its smoky
interior, late in the evening and not very long ago, a train was nearly
ready to start. It was a train possessing a certain consideration. For
the benefit of a public easily gulled and enamored of grandiloquent
terms, it was advertised as the "Denver Fast Express;" sometimes, with
strange unfitness, as the "Lightning Express"; "elegant" and "palatial"
cars were declared to be included therein; and its departure was one of
the great events of the twenty-four hours, in the country round about. A
local poet described it in the "live" paper of the town, cribbing from
an o