assailants.

The Iroquois were the terror of every tribe east of the Mississippi. If
Champlain could but conquer them, he would make the power of France felt
to the Gulf of Mexico.

All night long the Hurons worked, building a tower of timber upon which
the Frenchmen could stand, and pick off with their guns those inside the
walls.

Two hundred warriors, with shouts and yells, amid a volley of arrows,
drag the tower into position. The Iroquois swarm upon the walls, and the
fight begins--the Frenchmen firing from the top of the tower, the
Iroquois sending back arrows.

The Hurons light torches, and run up to the palisade with armfuls of dry
sticks, and set them on fire; but the Iroquois run with calabashes of
water, mount the gallery, and extinguish the flames. Each warrior yells
at the top of his voice. They are crazed with excitement. For every
whoop of the Hurons, the Iroquois give an angry yell of defiance. Arrows
and stones fly. The Iroquois drop one by one before the unseen
thunder-bolts from the men in the tower, but seventeen warriors go down
before the arrows of the Iroquois. An arrow wounds Champlain in one
knee, another pierces his leg. For three hours the fight goes on, when
the Hurons, crest-fallen and disheartened, retreat to their camp. They
linger five days, and then retire to their canoes, carrying Champlain on
a litter all the way to Lake Ontario. The Iroquois steal upon them in
their retreat, letting fly volleys of arrows, and yelling like hyenas
over the defeat of the Hurons. They have discovered that the white men
with their guns, after all, are not invincible.

HUMPTY DUMPTY AND THE MAGIC FIRE-CRACKERS.

BY AGNES CARR.

Humpty Dumpty looked very sober one July morning, as he sat on his
mother's door-step, his usually good-natured face screwed into a dozen
wrinkles, and his button-hole of a mouth drawn down at the corners in
the most dismal manner imaginable.

What could be the matter with the merry lad? For he was known far and
wide for his fun and jollity.

So thought Mother Goose as she came up the village street.

"Why, Humpty Dumpty, what has happened to you? have you had another
fall?" asked Mother Goose.

"No, Mother Goose, it is not a fall this time, but something worse, for
I haven't a penny in the world, nor likely to have, and to-morrow is the
Fourth of July, when all the boys and girls will have pistols,
gunpowder, and fire-works, while I shall not even be able to g