to-night, our auditor is simply whistling with diabolical industry. The unwilling listener is prone to cry to Heaven for mercy with all the fervor of the funeral chords breathed within the chapel-walls.

So, too, the child, grappling with the art of drawing pictures, lays a sheet of tracing-paper over the finely-executed representation of a lion, and places the two sheets against a window-pane. He proceeds with zeal and enthusiasm, tracing, as he believes, upon his white sheet of transparent paper, an elegant imitation of the lord of the forest. So long as the pictures are upon the window-pane, that pleasant satisfaction endures. The moment that the tracing-paper is lifted, so that the effort of the boy stands by itself, the lean and impoverished character of his drawing stares blankly at him, and then, to borrow a conceit from Gray's Elegy, Melancholy catches him and puts her painful ear-mark on him.

The writer of the following work has traveled with his tracing-paper over the noble thoughts of many men, and has gazed on his chapters with delight so long as a plenitude of elaborate details shone through them. Yet, alas! after the ecstasies of the possession of shadows have passed, he has invariably lifted his tracing-paper to find only a disjointed production, and has often whistled but one unmeaning part where he supposed he was carrying off a whole opera-house.