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UNCLE TOM.

[The following is an extract from a book that old and young read with delight. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the title of this universal favourite, and the hero of the story was a slave commonly called "Uncle Tom," but whose real name is Josiah Henson. Its gifted authoress is an American lady, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who wrote the tale, founded on fact, in the interest of the emancipation of slaves in America, which has since been happily effected.]

HE Mississippi! How, as by an enchanted wand,

have its scenes been changed, since Chateaubriand wrote his prose-poetic description of it, as a river of mighty unbroken solitudes, rolling amid undreamed wonders of vegetable and animal existence.

But, as in an hour, this river of dreams and wild romances has emerged to a reality scarcely less visionary and splendid. What other river of the world bears on its bosom to the ocean wealth and enterprise of such another country? a country whose products embrace all between the tropics and the poles! Those turbid waters, hurrying, foaming, tearing along, an apt resemblance of that headlong tide of business which is poured along its wave by a race more vehement and energetic than any the old world ever saw. Ah! would that they did not bear along a more fearful freight1-the tears of the oppressed, the sighs of the helpless, the bitter prayers of poor ignorant hearts to an unknown God-unknown, unseen, and silent, but who will yet "come out of his place to save all the poor of the earth!"

The slanting light of the setting sun quivers on the sea-like expanse of the river; the shivering canes, and the tall dark cypresses, hung with wreaths of dark funereal moss, glow in the golden ray, as the heavily-laden steamboat marches onward.

Piled with cotton bales from many a plantation, up

over deck and sides, till she seems in the distance a square massive block of grey, she moves heavily onward to the nearest mart. We must look some time among its crowded decks before we shall find our humble friend Tom. High on the upper deck, in a little nook among the everywhere predominant cotton bales, at last we may find him.

Haley (a slave - dealer) had at first watched him narrowly through the day, and never allowed him to sleep at night unfettered; but the uncomplaining patience and apparent contentment of Tom's manner led him gradually to discontinue these restraints, and for some time Tom had enjoyed a sort of parole of honour, being permitted to come and go freely where he pleased on the boat.

Ever quiet and obliging, and more than ready to lend a hand in every emergencys which occurred among the workmen below, he had won the good opinion of all the hands, and spent many hours in helping them with as hearty a good-will as ever he worked on a Kentucky farm.

When there seemed to be nothing for him to do, he would climb to a nook among the cotton bales of the upper deck, and busy himself in studying over his Bible, and it is there we see him now.

For a hundred or more miles above New Orleans the river is higher than the surrounding country, and rolls its tremendous volume between massive "levees' twenty feet in height. The traveller from the deck of the steamer, as from some floating castle top, overlooks the whole country for miles and miles around. therefore had spread out before him, in plantation after plantation, a map of the sort of life in which he expected soon to take part.

Tom

He saw the distant slaves at their toil; he saw afar their villages of huts gleaming out in long rows on many a plantation, distant from the stately mansions and pleasure-grounds of the master; and as the moving pictures passed on, his poor foolish heart would be turning backward to his old home-to the Kentucky farm, with its old shadowy beeches-to his old master's house, with its wide cool halls, and near by his little cabin, overgrown with the multiflora and bignonia. There he seemed to see familiar faces of comrades, who had grown up with him from infancy; he saw his busy wife, bustling in her preparation for the evening meals; he heard the merry laugh of his boys at their play, and the chirrup of the baby at his knee; and then with a start that brought him back to the present reality, he saw again the cane-brakes and cypresses and gliding plantations, and heard again the creaking and groaning of the machinery, all telling him too plainly that all that phase of life had gone by for ever.

In such a case as his, a free man will write to his wife, and send messages to his children, and live in hope of soon seeing them again; but Tom could not write. The mail for him had no existence, he had no hope of ever again seeing wife or child, from whom he had been separated by the slave-dealer: the gulf of separation was unbridged by a gleam of hope or by even a friendly word or signal.

No wonder the poor slave looked forward to a brighter world, where he hoped to see his beloved ones again and to be with them for ever, where the voice of the oppressor is no more heard, and the weary are at rest. Nor is it strange that some tears fall on the pages of his Bible, as he lays it on the cotton bale, and with patient finger, threading his slow way from word to

word, traces out its promises. Having learned late in life, Tom was but a slow reader, and passed on labouringly from verse to verse. Fortunate for him was it that the book he was intent on was one which slow reading cannot impair-nay, one whose words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to be weighed separately, that the mind may take in their priceless value.

1 Fearful freight. At the time this was written slavery existed in the United States.

2 Parole of honour, word of honour; promise not to escape.

3 Emergency, occasion of great or sudden need.

4 New Orleans, a large city at the mouth of the Mississippi.

5 Phase of life, a particular aspect

of life.

6 Ingot, a bar, or wedge of metal; generally said of silver or gold.

THE BOBOLINK.

THE happiest bird of our spring (in America), and

tion, is the bob-o-lincoln, or bobolink as he is commonly called. He arrives when nature is in all her freshness and fragrance," the rains are over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land."

The trees are now in their fullest foliage and brightest verdure; the woods are gay with the clustered flowers of the laurel; the air is perfumed by the sweetbrier and wild-rose; the meadow is enamelled with the clover-blossoms; while the young apple, the peach, and the plum begin to swell, and the cherry to glow, among the green leaves.

This is the chosen season of revelry of the bobolink. He comes amidst the pomp and fragrance of the season; his life seems all sensibility and enjoyment, all song

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and sunshine.

He is to be found in the soft bosoms of the freshest and sweetest meadows, and is most in song when the clover is in blossom.

He perches on the topmost twig of a tree or on some long flaunting weed, and as he rises and sinks with the breeze, pours forth a succession of rich tinkling notes, crowding one upon another like the outpouring melody of the skylark, and possessing the same rapturous 3 character.

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Sometimes he pitches from the summit of a tree, begins his song as he gets upon the wing, and flutters tremulously down to the earth, as if overcome with ecstasy at his own music. Sometimes he is in pursuit of his mate, always in full song, as if he would win her by his melody, and always with the same appearance of intoxication and delight.

Of all the birds of our groves and meadows, the bobolink was the envy of my boyhood. He crossed my path in the sweetest weather and the sweetest season of the year, when all nature called to the fields, and the rural feelings throbbed in every bosom.

Had I been then more versed in poetry, I might have addressed him in the words of Logan to the cuckoo :

Sweet bird thy bower is ever green, thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy note, no winter in thy year.
Oh, could I fly, I'd fly with thee; we'd make, on joyful wing,
Our annual visit round the globe, companions of the spring!

Further observation and experience have given me a different idea of this little feathered voluptuary, which I will venture to impart for the benefit of schoolboy readers who may regard him with the same unqualified envy and admiration which I once indulged.

I have shown him only as I saw him at first, in what

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