her dead!
You think her gone to her eternal rest,
Like some strange bird forever left her nest!
Her sweet voice hush'd within the silent grave,
While o'er her dust the weeping willows wave.

Dead! dead! You call her dead!
And yet she lives, and loves! Oh, wondrous truth!
In golden skies she breathes immortal youth!
Look upward! where the roseate sunset beams,
Her airy form amid the brightness gleams!

Dead! dead! You call her dead!
Oh, speak not thus! her tender heart you grieve,
And 'twixt her love and yours a barrier weave!
Call her by sweetest name, your voice she'll hear,
And through the darkness like a star appear.

Dead! dead! You call her dead!
Lift up your eyes! she is no longer dead!
In your lone path the unseen angels tread!
And when your weary night of earth shall close,
She'll lead you where eternal summer blows.

ARTEMUS WARD.

_AND OUT OF PURGATORY._

ARTEMUS WARD'S LECTURES TO POOR, PERISHING HUMANITY.

LECTER I.

You'll remember, relatives and nabors, how I crost the Atlantic Ocean and
never agin set foot on my native soil. I naterally thought my
opportunities there, in the British Mooseum and with those Egyptian
Carcusses dun up in rags, and remaining for the space of six days and six
nights with a skeleton grinning at me and pointing its long skinless
fingers in my face and looking in an awful licentious manner, showing its
pivoted legs--I say I naterally thought such an unheard-of experience
would have prepared me for "the awful change" that follered. But it
didn't.

One nite, cummin' hum from the Mooseum, where I had been instructin' and
elevatin' several thousand pussons, male and female, I innocently
swallered a fog--swallered it hull. I'd bin swallerin on 'em ever since
I'd bin in England, but that night I took in a bigger one than ever, and
it made me _sick_.

I sent for the physicians that received the patronage of the noble lords
and dooks and they made me _sicker_; and finally for the physicain "to
her most gracious majisty the Queen of Great Britain,"--but their
aristocratic attention to me was of no use. As I lie tossing on what is
known as "the bed of pain," I seed a big light coming through the dark
towards me. Behind that light appeared a grim skeleton, just like the
pictur of Death in the Alminack, walkin' on tiptoe toward me; and quicker
than a wink he put out his long bony hand and touched me--firstly, in the
pit of the stomach, so I couldn