and equipage and millions! And with all the devotedness of these village females to domestic duties, and the love of order and of neatness, no lack appears among them of mental acquirement. A young girl, capable of adorning the best society, has been seen there scrubbing her floor with one hand and pushing forward one of Miss Edgeworth's volumes, which she was reading, to keep it in the dry spot, with the other: and I have perused, from the pen of another native female, yet resident there, scraps of sentimental, and of satiri cal, and of patriotic poetry, which sweet L. E. L., in her happiest inspirations, might have been proud of producing. The entertainments of the men at East-Hampton are, of course, of a severer character. The greatest among them is that of drawing the seine on the Atlantic. A horn is sounded at day-break, whenever the sea gives promise of abundance, and all the men, of all orders and conditions, hurry to the beach in their boat toggery; from head to foot all "suffer a sea-change," so thorough that the well-dressed yeoman of the preceding night is not to be recognized. The boats put off, and ere long all hands are pulling at the net-ropes, waist-deep in the water, and the sands are swarming with heaps of fish of every description, the greater part of which are used for the purpose of being left to decay upon the fields for manure. The hideous and poisonous sting-ray is usually among the captives; and I have seen from fifteen to twenty sharks strewn upon the shore from a single haul. Even the whale will occasionally appear in the distance, completing the majesty of the ocean prospect. These scenes are ever sources of no ordinary excitement on this part of the coast; and such is the inspiration of the sound of the horn-call to the sea, that all the male creation of the village rush forth on the instant. A Connecticut notion-monger who announced the arrival of his peddling cart there one morning by the sound of his own horn, was astonished to find every house suddenly depopulated of all the holders of the purse strings. The signal had been mistaken for a call to the seine-drawing. It may be, that a taste for the adventures of the ocean is awakened in the younger villagers by these sights of grandeur and the stir of these minor dangers; for their first thoughts are generally turned to a ship-board life, and they early wander far, most frequently upon whaling voyages. "There lives a man," said a young East-Hamptoner to me, as we rode by a cottage a few miles from the village, "who has made a competency by whaling, and retired from public life!" I have listened upon the sands, as the surf was dashing and sparkling at our feet, to harrowing narratives of bright hopes broken by this irrepressible thirst to tempt fortune on the deep. I have heard a warm-hearted and intelligent sister disclose, in faltering accents, the sad story of her young brother, who would not be dissuaded from the peril, even by a lovely relation, who, when yet a mere child, remonstrated with him in a letter, of which the ready memory of the sister retained the following sweet burst of artless eloquence: "Recollect, a mariner's life is one of hardship, toil, and danger. Think of the many anxious hearts you will leave among your friends. Even I, in some cold, stormy, night, when the wind whistles so mournfully about the house, and seems to bid defiance to the other elements,even I shall then think of my poor little cousin, exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather, rocked by Boreas in his hammock, and, perhaps, thinking or dreaming of his dear native village and the cheerful fireside he has left, to learn his lesson of life and mayhap to find his grave in its bosom, with nought but the billow to sing his death song." And the apprehension was prophetic. The poor lad, when his ship was sweeping before a gale, through the Indian ocean, ran aloft to furl a sail, as the mast broke, and he was heard to exclaim, "God save me!" when the ship, uncontrollably, dashed onward, and he was seen no more! Volumes might be filled with the romances of real life, which sometimes beguile the evenings on this wild ocean border; and often have I desired the graphic power to detain on paper a scene of the sort, in which I was once a sharer. The gentle monitor of her lost cousin sat with his sisters and some others on the beach. Anecdotes of the sea had made the time glide away unperceived, and the conversation was wound up by an unaffected song from the innocent girl, in which devotion so beautifully mingled with touchingly appropriate allusion, that no taste, no science, no execution of the finest melodists in the world, could have rivalled the pathetic influence of the untaught music. To imagine its spell, it must be associated with the impressive recollections; with the soft breeze rippling over the calm ocean; with the waves mildly breaking, then falling back in diamond sparkles, as they met the moonbeam; and with the vast wilderness of outstretched waters beyond, gradually more and more confused by distance, till at length undistinguishably blended with the black mist over the horizon, which seemed the only veil between the beholder and eternity. It may be readily inferred that, in such a village as I have described, the aged must naturally feel extremely sensitive about any omen of innovation. The old families are devoutly attached to their old homes, and though I have known but fifteen dollars a year to be asked for the only house to be hired at one time in the place, the same cost and trouble which would secure a lot in EastHampton, might obtain one of ten times the marketable value elsewhere,--so much beyond lucre do the inhabitants prize their modest independence. With such feelings, we cannot wonder at the distaste for all intruders. Hence it happened that when a steamboat from New York to Sag Harbor made the seclusion readily accessible to city rovers in quest of sea air and rurality, the irruption of the bar barians of aristocracy and fashion gave the old settlers evident concern; and when an accident abruptly stopped the new-fangled facility of approach, it was a source of exultation among some, that East-Hampton need no longer tremble for her purity, because the madness was over; the good old ways were returning; the old stage coach had gone out, as formerly, with a passenger and a portmanteau; and there were no more arrivals of the unknown from vicious large cities, to stir up extravagant ideas in the well disposed, and unsettle the husbandman from his dependence on his plough, by dreams of speculation. It is true, there might have been grounds for uneasiness. Some alarming cases of genius had actually broken out among them. Many a head is even to this day shaken at the sad delusion under which an old inhabitant, who invented a combined flour mill and threshing machine-and another, who fashioned an orrery, imitating by mechanism the movements of our planetary system, in their exact proportions-have both not only wasted time, but actually expended money! For such prejudices, however, the generation in which they prevail are scarcely to be held accountable; these good people have communicated but little with the wider world, so little, that an aged one among them, after having been inveigled in a mischievous young friend's wagon, for the first time, to the neighbouring town of Southhold, is said to have exclaimed in amazement, "who could have thought that Amerikey had been so big!" This wonderer may have been of the same tribe with the maiden of three-score-and-ten, who, after a hurricane which succeeded a grand scholars' exhibition of dialogues in the Clinton Hall Academy, cried out, with sanctimonious consternation,-"This is that plaguy 'cademy work, I know! A judgment is fell upon the town!" But I apprehend that it would be impracticable, for even much more potent jealousies permanently to shut out the dreaded changes. The sweet solitude of East-Hampton is inevitably destined to interruption from the city; and many an eye, wearied with the glare of foreign and domestic grandeur, will, ere long, lull itself to repose in the quiet beauty of this village. It will revel in its daybreak ocean sports. It will delight in its summer sunset, which, as the gazer from the rising ground at the western extremity, looks down the long and ample street, flings giant shadows upon the grass, and gilds the tree-tops and the nearer windmill, and the chimneys, and the academy cupola, and the little meeting-house spire opposite, and the distant tavern-sign, swinging between two posts in the centre of the road, and the far off windmill;-while the geese strut with slow and measured stateliness to their repose, and the cottagers upon the benches, projecting from before each side of many of the cottage doors, talk news or scandal, or pertinaciously bicker away about politics and religion, though they are said never to have voted but on one side, and never to have listened to a sermon out of their own sect. Such, then, was East-Hampton, when the hapless "neglected poet" of this narrative became naturalized, by one of the accidents of his random kind of life, as a member of this quiet, simple and primitive little community. Such at least it was a few years ago; and, with the exception of the slight changes I have specifically recorded above, I may safely guarantee that such it was at the date referred to. Another number will be necessary to complete the narrative, of which it is the object to rescue from entire oblivion a name well entitled to the tribute, by the double right of genius and misfortune. BRUCE'S TEARS. ["The kind, yet fiery character of Edward Bruce is well painted by Barbour, in the account of his behaviour after the battle of Bannockburn. Sir Walter Ross, one of the very few Scottish nobles who fell in that battle, was so dearly loved by Edward that he wished the victory had been lost, so that Ross had lived."Lord of the Isles. Note to Stanza XI. Canto iv. Red light was in the western sky, Upon the green and peaceful plain, Dark signs of life-where life had fled. Aye! the soft breeze but poured its breath O'er the dim starlit field of death, And cooled the burning lip and brow, In shame and agony laid low, The groan-the deep, half-stifled groanOf manly sorrow, struggling, lone, Came from that tent,-there sat the Bruce! The fiery Edward! Tigers loose There sat the Bruce! dark, dark, alone! His face, and quenched its lightning proud. Mixed with his triumph misery! He mourned the dead-the one brave youth His spirit loved with such deep,truth 66 'My Walter!". -rose the low, deep tones, |