The wannut logs shot sparkles out Toward the pootiest, bless her! An' leetle fires danced all about The chiny on the dresser. The very room, coz she wuz in, Looked warm from floor to ceilin', An' she looked full ez rosy agin She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu, All ways to once her feelin's flew He kin' o' l'itered on the mat, THE PIOUS EDITOR'S CREED. [From Biglow Papers.] I DU believe in Freedom's cause. I love to see her stick her claws To dror resolves an' triggers But libbaty's a kind o' thing Thet don't agree with niggers. I du believe the people want Fer I hev loved my country sence My eye-teeth filled their sockets, An' Uncle Sam I reverencePartic❜larly his pockets. I du believe in any plan O' levyin' the taxes, Ez long ez, like a lumberman, I go free-trade thru thick an' thin, I du believe with all my soul At my fat contracts squintin', I du believe thet I should give Fer it's by him I move an' live, Frum him my bread and cheese air; I du believe thet all o' me Doth bear his souperscription,- I du believe in prayer an' praise This lays all thought o' sin to rest,— I du believe in bein' this Or thet, ez it may happen One way or t'other hendiest is To ketch the people nappin'; It aint by princerples nor men My preudent course is steadied,— I scent wich pays the best, an' then Go into it baldheaded. I du believe thet holdin' slaves I couldn't ax with no face, I du believe wutever trash 'll keep the people in blindness,- Right inter brotherly kindness; Thet peace, to make it stick at all, Must be druv in with bagnets. In short, I firmly du believe In Humbug generally, Fer it's a thing that I perceive To hev a solid vally; This heth my faithful shepherd ben, In pasturs sweet heth led me, To feed ez they hev fed me. EDWARD EVERETT HALE. [From The Man Without a Country.'] THE rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man without a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of war-cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at sea. But it was always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. He was not permitted to talk with the men unless an officer was by. With officers he had 1 See page 195. Then the captain always asked him succession took up the invitation in unrestrained intercourse, as far as he and they chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites; I was one. to dinuer on Monday. Every mess in its turn. According to the size of the ship, you had him at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his own state-room-he always had a state-room-which was where a sentinel or somebody on the watch could see the door. And whatever else he ate or drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had any special jollification, they were permitted to invite "Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home while he was there. I believe the theory was that the sight of his punishment did them good. They called him "Plain-Buttons" because, while he always chose to wear a regulation army uniform, he was not permitted to wear the army button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned. I remember soon after I joined the navy I was on shore with some of the older officers from our ship and from the Brandywine, which we had met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of the gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the phrase was long since changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the system which was adopted from the first about his books and other reading. As he was almost never permitted to go on shore, even though the vessel lay in port for months, his time at the best hung heavy; and every body was permitted to lend him books, if they were not published in America, and made no allusion to it. These were common enough in the old days, when people in the other hemisphere talked of the United States as little as we do of Paraguay. He had almost all the foreign papers that came into the ship, sooner or later; only somebody must go over them first, and cut out any advertisement or stray paragraph that alluded to America. This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back of what was cut might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of one of Napoleon's battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the President's message. I say this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, which afterward I had enough and more than enough to do with. I remember it, because poor Phillips, who was of the party, as soon as the allusion to reading was made, told a story of something which happened at the Cape of Good Hope on Nolan's first voyage; and it is the only thing I ever knew of that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and had done the civil thing with the English admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a windfall. Among them, as the devil would order, was the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which they had all of them heard of, but which most of them had never seen. I think it could not have been published long. Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of any thing national in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the "Tempest" from Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said "the Bermudas qught to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day." So Nolan was permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often now; but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well, so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a line of the poem, only it was all magic and border chivalry, and was ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then began without a thought of what was coming: "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said " It seemed impossible to us that any body ever heard this for the first time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, still unconsciously or mechanically: "This is my own, my native land!" Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through, I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on: "Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand?→ If such there breathe, go, mark him well." By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, ard staggered on: "For him no minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, |