So crooned one day, close by Limoux, We left next morning his abode, But (Heaven forgive him!) halfway on, The old man died upon the road: He never gazed on Carcassonne. Each mortal has his Carcassonne ! -Lippincott's Magazine. A NIGHT OF TERROR. PAUL LOUIS COURIER. PAUL LOUIS COURIER, one of the most noted of French pamphleteers, born 1772, died 1825, was a Liberal in politics, and had great repute as an eloquent and satirical writer. I was one day traveling in Calabria; a country of people who, I believe, have no great liking to anybody, and are particularly ill-disposed towards the French. To tell you why would be a long affair. It is enough that they hate us to death, and that the unhappy being who should chance to fall into their hands would not pass his time in the most agreeable manner. I had for my companion a worthy young fellow; I do not say this to interest you, but because it is the truth. In these mountains the roads are precipices, and our horses advanced with the greatest difficulty. My comrade going first, a track which appeared to him more practicable and shorter than the regular path, led us astray. It was my fault. Ought I to have trusted to a head of twenty years? We sought our way out of the wood while it was yet light; but the more we looked for the path, the further we were off it. It was a very black night, when we came close upon a very black house. We went in, and not without suspicion. But what was to be done? There we found a whole family of charcoal-burners at table. At the first word they invited us to join them. My young man did not stop for much ceremony. In a minute or two we were eating and drinking in right earnest he at least; for my own part I could not help glancing about at the place and the people. Our hosts, indeed, looked like charcoal-burners; but the house! you would have taken it for an arsenal. There was nothing to be seen but muskets, pistols, sabres, knives, cutlasses. Everything displeased me, and I saw that I was in no favor myself. My comrade, on the contrary, was soon one of the family. He laughed, he chatted with them; and with an imprudence which I ought to have prevented, he at once said where we came from, where we were going, and that we were Frenchmen. Think of our situation. Here we were among our mortal enemies-alone, benighted, and far from all human aid. That nothing might be omitted that could tend to our destruction, he must, forsooth, play the rich man, promising these folks to pay them well for their hospitality; and then he must prate about his portmanteau, earnestly beseeching them to take care of it, and put it at the head of his bed, for he wanted no other pillow. Ah, youth, youth! how art thou to be pitied! Cousin, they might have thought that we carried the diamonds of the crown: and yet the treasure in his portmanteau, which gave him so much anxiety, consisted only of some private letters. Supper ended, they left us. Our hosts slept below; we on the story where we had been eating. In a sort of platform raised seven or eight feet, where we were to mount by a ladder, was the bed that awaited us-a nest into which we had to introduce ourselves by jumping over barrels filled with provisions for all the year. My comrade seized upon the bed above, and was soon fast asleep, with his head upon the precious portmanteau. I was determined to keep awake, so I made a good fire, and sat myself down. The night was almost passed over tranquilly enough, and I was beginning to be comfortable, when just at the time it appeared to me that day was about to break, I heard our host and his wife talking and disputing below me; and, putting my ear into the chimney, which communicated with the lower room, I perfectly distinguished these exact words of the husband: Well, well, let us see-must we kill them both?" To which the wife replied, "Yes!" and I heard no more. How should I tell you the rest? I could scarcely breathe; my whole body was cold as marble; had you seen me you could not have told whether I was dead or alive. Even now the thought of my condition is enough. We two were almost without arms; against us, were twelve or fifteen persons who had plenty of weapons. And then my comrade was overwhelmed with sleep. To call him up, to make a noise, was more than I dared; to escape alone was an impossibility. The window was not very high; but under it were two great dogs, howling like wolves. Imagine, if you can, the distress I was in. At the end of a quarter of an hour, which seemed to be an age, I heard some one on the staircase, and through the chink of the door, I saw the PARALLEL BETWEEN WILLIAM PENN AND JOHN LOCKE. 63 old man with a lamp in one hand, and one of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong his great knives in the other. The crisis was now come. his wife followed him; I was behind the door. He opened it; but before he entered he put down the lamp, which his wife took up, and coming in, with his feet naked, she being behind him, said in a smothered voice, hiding the light partially with her fingers-" Gently, go gently." On reaching the ladder he mounted, with his knife between his teeth, and going to the head of the bed where that poor young man lay with his throat uncovered, with one hand he took the knife, and with the other-ah, my cousin!-he SEIZED-a ham which hung from the roof,-cut a slice, and retired as he had come in! When the day appeared, all the family, with a great noise, came to arouse us as we had desired. They brought us plenty to eat; they served us up, I assure you, a capital breakfast. Two chickens formed a part of it, the hostess saying, "You must eat one, and carry away the other." When I saw them, I at once comprehended the meaning of those terrible words, "Must we kill them both?" PARALLEL BETWEEN WILLIAM PENN in his bosom; as with John Eliot and Roger He mounted-Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever overflowing heart; and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and "surpassing in speculative endowments; conversant with men, and books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations, as they existed in England and France, in Holland and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and by suffering; familiar with the royal family; intimate with Sunderland and Sydney; acquainted with Russell, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham; as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton and the great scholars of his age,-he valued the promptings of a free mind above the awards of the learned, and reverenced the singleminded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke when, twelve years before, he had framed the constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was World to lay the foundations of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher? Locke, like William Penn, was truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the tolerant; both loved freedom; both cherished torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn, at the living light in the soul. Locke sought world; Penn looked inward to the divine truth through the senses and the outward revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as time and chance scrawled their experience; Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which to Penn, the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed that, when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, "Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions; to Penn, it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed "the duty of parents to preserve their children not to be understood without reward and punishment;" Penn loved his children without a thought for the consequences. Locke, who GEORGE BANCROFT, born at Worcester, Mass., Oct. 3, 1800, liberally educated at Harvard and Göttingen. He early devoted himself to historical writing, publishing the first volume of his "History of the United States " in 1834. This great work is characterized (in the language of the historian Prescott,) "by a brilliant and daring style, picturesque sketches of character and incident, acute reasoning and compass of erudition." Ten volumes have appeared, bringing the work down to the close of the Revolution in 1782, and two concluding volumes, closing with the constitutional period, 1789, were issued in 1882 Mr Bancroft's public services, as Secretary of the Navy in 1845-6, minister to Great Britain 1846-49, and minister to Germany in 1867-74, have conferred additional distinction upon himself and upon his country. Removing to Washington upon his return from Europe in 1874, and surrounded with one of the richest collections of books and manuscripts ever gathered, Mr. Bancroft enjoyed a serene old age, addicted to those historical studies for which his wide converse with books and with men had eminently fitted him. He died in 1891. Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the energy of his mind to the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that "heavenly end" he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his character. The sentiment of come to the New was never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that there must be a people before a government," and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to "inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts;" Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in ;" Penn, like Plato and Fénelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for; Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "popish practices; Penn censured no sect, but | condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietaries; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefore he built such are his own words-" a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions, which had seen Hugh Peter and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philanthropy, when Russell stood for the liberties of his order, and not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington and Shaftesbury and Locke thought government should rest on property,-Penn did not despair of humanity, and though all history and experience denied the sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man's capacity for self-government. Conscious that there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute "THE HOLY EXPERIMENT." THE YOUTH OF WASHINGTON. At the very time of the congress of Aix-laChapelle, the woods of Virginia sheltered the youthful George Washington, who had been born by the side of the Potomac, beneath the roof of a Westmoreland planter, and whose lot almost from infancy had been that of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shades, no college crowned him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his degrees in knowledge. And now, at sixteen years of age, in quest of an honest maintenance encountering the severest toil; cheered onward by being able to write to a schoolboy friend, Dear Richard, a doubloon is my constant gain every day, and sometimes six pistoles;' himself his own cook, "having no spit but a forked stick, no plate but a large chip;" roaming over spurs of the Alleghanies, and along the banks of the Shenandoah; alive to nature, and sometimes "spending the best of the day in admiring the trees and richness of the land;" among skin-clad savages with their scalps and rattles, or uncouth emigrants "that would never speak English;" rarely sleeping in a bed; holding a bearskin a splendid couch; glad of a resting-place for the night upon a little hay, straw, or fodder, and often camping in the forests, where the place nearest the fire was a happy luxury,-this stripling surveyor in the woods, with no companion but his unlettered associates, and no implements of science but his compass and chain, contrasted strangely with the imperial magnificence of the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. And yet God had selected, not Kaunitz nor Newcastle, not a monarch of the house of Hapsburg nor of Hanover, but the Virginia stripling, to give an impulse to human affairs; and, as far as events can depend on an individual, had placed the rights and the destinies of countless millions in the keeping of the widow's son. CHILDE HAROLD. CANTO THE SECOND. Come, blue-eyed maid of heaven!-but thou, alas! But worse than steel, and flame, and ages slow, Is the dread sceptre and dominion dire Of men who never felt the sacred glow That thoughts of thee and thine on polish'd breasts bestow. II. Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone-glimmering through the dream of things that were: First in the race that led to Glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away-is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon, and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power. III. Son of the morning, rise! approach you here! Come-but molest not yon defenceless urn: Look on this spot-a nation's sepulchre ! Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn. Even gods must yield-religions take their turn. "Twas Jove's-'tis Mahomet's-and other creeds Will rise with other years, till man shall learn Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds; Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds. IV. Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven- X. Here let me sit upon this mossy stone, MARK TWAIN ON THE WEATHER. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, American humorist, widely known by the pseudonym of "Mark Twain," was born at Florida, Mo., November 30, 1835. With a common school education, he became apprentice in a printing office at thirteen. Shipping to New Orleans at twenty, he became a pilot on the Mississippi; removed to Nevada in 1861, where he tried silver mining and editorship; then to California where he wrote for the newspapers and lectured with success. In 1868 Mark Twain made a pilgrimage to Europe and the Holy Land, with a party of excursionists, and chronicled his travels and observations in "The Innocents Abroad," his most successful work of humor, of which 125,000 copies were sold in three years. “ Roughing It,” (1872) is a graphic account of Pacific coast life in a rude frontier society, and "The Gilded Age," (1873) written jointly by Mr. Clemens and Mr. Charles D. Warner, is a social and political satire. "Sketches Old and New," by Mark Twain, and "A Tramp Abroad," (1880) are among the latest works of our author, whose peculiar and original humor make his books eagerly sought, both in England and America. At a New England dinner in New York, Mark Twain delivered the following speech, amidst frequent interruptions-of langhter and applause. I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all, makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the Weather Clerk's factory, who experiment and learn how in New England, for board and clothes, and, then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration-and regret. The weather is always doing something there, always attending strictly to business, always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in the spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours. It was I that made the fame and fortune of that man that had that marvellous collection of weather on exhibition at the Centennial that so astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all over the world and get specimens from all climes. I said, "Don't you do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day." I told him what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he came, and he made his collection in four days. As to variety; why, he confessed he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never heard of before. And as to quantity; well, after he had picked out and discarded all that were blemished in any way, he not only had weather enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; weather to deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor. The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing; but there are some things that they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets for writing about "Beautiful Spring." These are generally casual visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring. And so, the first thing they know, the opportunity to inquire how they feel has permanently gone by. Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the papers and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what to-day's weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States, in the Wisconsin region, see him sail along in the joy and pride of his power till he gets to New England, and then see his tail drop. He doesn't know what the weather is to be in New England. He can't any more tell than he can tell how many Presidents of the United States there are going to be. Well, he mulls over it, and by and by he gets out something about like this: "Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.' Then he jots down this postscript from his wandering mind to cover accidents: "But it is possible that the programme may be wholly changed in the meantime." Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it, you are certain there is going to be plenty |