but sceptered sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.'

* * * * *

HEMMING COTTON.

'Hem them in!' is the country's cry;
See how the bayonet needles fly!
Nothing neglect and nothing leave,
Hem them in from the skirt to sleeve.
Little they reek of scratch or hurt
Who toil at hemming the Southern shirt;
Little they'll care, as they shout aloud,
If the Southern shirt prove a Southern shroud.
Hurrah for the needles sharp and thin!
Cotton is saved by hemming it in.'

* * * * *

ONE OF MY PREDECESSORS.

No books have quite the same fascination for me as the narratives of old
travelers. Give me a rainy day, a state of affairs which renders the
performance of a more serious task impossible, and a volume of Hakluyt
or Purchas, or even of Pinkerton's agreeable collection, and I
experience a condition of felicity which leaves Gray and his new novel
far in the background. For I thus not only behold again the familiar
scenery of the earth,--never forgetting a landscape that I have once
seen,--but I am also a living participant in the adventures of those who
have wandered the same paths, hundreds of years before. I visit
Constantinople while the Porphyrogenite emperors still sit upon the
throne of the East; I look upon the barbaric court of Muscovy before the
name of Russia is known in the world; I make acquaintance with Genghis
Khan at Karakorum, and with Aurungzebe at Delhi; I invade Japan with
Kampfer, penetrate the Arctic Seas with Barentz, or view the gardens of
Ispahan in the company of the gallant Sir John Chardin.

This taste was not the cause, but is the result, of my own experience.
My far-off, unknown Arab progenitor says, in one of his poems: 'Fly thy
home, and journey, if thou strivest for great deeds. Five advantages
thou wilt at least procure by traveling. Thou wilt have pleasure and
profit; thou wilt enlarge thy prospects, cultivate thyself, and acquire
friends. It is better to be dead, than, like an insect, to remain always
chained to the same spot of earth.' In the Middle Ages, and especially
among the members of the enlightened Saracenic race, the instinct of
travel was mainly an instinctive desire for education. There was no
other school of knowledge so complete and practical, in the dearth of
books and the absence of other than commercial intercourse between the
ends of the earth, I fancy that this