s, and far beyond,
Silken and green or velvety gray,
Tufted grasses with shifting colors
In the wholesome north wind toss and play.

Lonely and sad, on the sea of green
The cardinal-flower a lighthouse stands,
A scarlet blaze in the morning sun
To guide the honey-bees' toiling bands.

What was it for, this flower's beauty,
Its royal color's marvellous glow,
Not, like a good deed, still rejoicing
The soul that grew it, though no one know?

All unconscious, only a flower,
Life without zest, and death without thought,
Lost as a stone to the sweet deep pleasure
Its scarlet wonder to me has brought.

Has it, I ponder, no sense of pleasing,
No least estate in the world of joy?
Have the leaf and the grasses no conscious sense
Of what they give us--no want or cloy?

Not so unlike us. The words that weight us
With keenest sorrow and longest pain
Fall oft from lips that rest unconscious
If that they give us be loss or gain.

Do I only have power to fill me
From sun and flower with joy intense?
Has yon cold frog on his lonely leaf
No lower share through a duller sense?

Think you the ladies he woos are sought
For form or color or beauty's sake?--
That, touched with sorrow, he mourns to-day
Some mottled Helen beneath the lake?

Why should fret us this constant riddle,
To know if Nature be kind or harsh
To the pensive frog on his green-ribbed raft,
The scarlet queen of the lonely marsh?

Haply, in thought-spheres far above us
Some may watch us with doubts like ours,
Asking if we have wit or reason,
Asking if pain or joy be ours.

But _does_ it vex me, this endless riddle
I toss about in my helpless brain,
To know if life be worth the having,
If just mere being be any gain?

Scarce can I answer. Something surely
The thought has brought me this summer morn--
Something for me in life were missing
If frog and flower had ne'er been born.

S. WEIR MITCHELL.

IN A RUSSIAN "TRAKTEER."

We have it on the authority of no less a personage than Charles the Bold
of Burgundy (the Charles of _Quentin Durward_, at least) that "never was
Englishman who loved a dry-lipped bargain;" and the same thing may safely
be said of the modern Russian. But although the _trakteer_ (or
cof