to the fury of an incensed female. The gale and the storm are natural, as much so as the sunshine and the shower; but an angry woman is an unnatural spectacle monstrum horrendum; a Vesuvius in Eden; the spirit of a devil in the bosom of an angel. But I had better leave prosing, and tell my story.

I instituted an action, for a large amount, in the county of The suit was brought upon a plain promissory note, which I was assured was founded upon good consideration, and I was curious to know what defence could be set up. I was aware that I had to deal with a wily adversary; and when I offered my note in evidence, and closed my case, I was more terrified than surprised, when I heard him direct the sheriff to call Mrs. Mary Jackson. The witness appeared. Tomy horror, she was a perfect beauty; possessing a sweet countenance, with an exquisite form. I saw at once that my antagonist had formed the same judgment of human nature that I had, and that he was about to make the experiment of washing away the obligation of a note of hand, by the tears of a female witness. I knew that nothing but a desperate effort could save my client, and that her testimony must be excluded, before she had time to cry.

I rose at once. I perceive,' said I, addressing the court,' that this lady bears the same name with the defendant; I therefore respectfully request that she be placed on the voir dire.' This was done. Will you be kind enough to say, madam, what relation you are to the defendant?'

Sir,' answered she, applying a beautifully-embroidered handkerchief to her eyes, I am his injured wife!'

Then, of course, your honor, the lady's testimony is inadmissible.' 'Oh, very well,' interposed my adversary; 'you wish to keep the truth from the jury, do you? Gentlemen of the jury, you see what technicalities are resorted to, to procure a verdict against my client. I hope you will appreciate it, gentlemen.'

By this time, the lady was a beautiful representation of Rachel of old; and one glance at the jury was sufficient to convince me that my case was ruined. I turned to my client: 'You are gone, my friend,' said I. Gone!' said he; gone! my dear Sir; don't give up my suit so coolly. I shall be made a beggar, if I lose this case; and then what will become of my wife, and my poor daughters!' 'Oh, you have daughters, have you? Run and bring them, my dear friend! If they mine, we must countermine. Bring them,

one and all!'

My client rushed out, and as he lived but next door, he almost instantly returned, with a half dozen of as pretty girls as could be found any where. My antagonist's face fell to zero.

་

May it please your honor,' I began, I desire to offer some rebutting testimony.'

Rebutting testimony, Mr. C? why your adversary has not been permitted to examine his witness. What have you to rebut?'

'A great deal, your honor. The witness has given some testimony. She called herself the injured wife of the defendant. Injured by whom? By my client. Injured how? By procuring this note, the subject matter of this suit, from him. Now, Sir, I wish to swear the afflicted daughters of the plaintiff, against the injured wife of the defendant.'

Here my fair witnesses commenced to weep bitterly, while several of the jury looked on, with evident commiseration. My triumph was complete; but I determined to pay off my legal friend in his own coin.

'I do not seek, Sir,' continued I, 'to take up the time of this court and jury, by administering the oath to all these witnesses. I am afraid their heart-rending description of this nefarious transaction, (of which, be it remembered, they did not know a syllable,) would unman us all; and your honor and this intelligent jury would be tempted to inflict summary justice upon the base wretch, who, with a heart like Caligula, and a spirit like Nero, could attempt to doom to a life of beggary, of shame, and perhaps of infamy, the beautiful offspring of my unhappy, my too credulous, too confiding client. Sir, in the spirit of a liberal compromise, I will swear but three of them.'

Here there ensued a new burst of anguish from the daughters, and a corresponding and prolonged excitement of the jury. My legal friend saw that I had out-generalled him, and so he said: 'Cstop your nonsense, and take your verdict!' Of course, I did so; but to show my knowledge of jury nature, I add, that as the foreman passed me, he said: 'I am rejoiced that you have gained your suit, but before you offered to swear those witnesses, your case was a very black one!

THE BALD EAGLE.

THY place is in the heavens! The fiery sun
Is as a brother to thee! Thou alone
Of all earth's things, can gaze upon his face,
Unblinded by his glory!

SAIL on, proud bird, sail on!
On the pinions of the wind;
Nor from thy height look down

On the world thou leav'st behind.
Thou hast left the waving wood,
Where thy cry spread fear around;
Thou hast left the solitude,

That ne'er heard another sound:

And the fresh and flowery plains,

And the gently rippling spring,
And the dear though wild domains,
Where first thou tried'st thy wing.
Yet on, proud bird, sail on!

Unheeding rock or nest;
Though from them all thou 'rt gone,
Mourn not; thy place is best!

By the stream where thou hast quaffed,
In the plains where thou lov'dst to be,
The hunter's deadly shaft

Might have found its way to thee:
But now thou art rising high,

Thou hast left, thou hast left them all; And thou fear'st not, in the sky,

An earthly shaft or thrall.

Yet wherefore dost thou turn
Again, and gaze thus back?
On, where the sun-beams burn!
On, in their glorious track!
And wherefore dost thou rest
Thus on thy mighty wing?
Why look back to thy nest,
With such fond lingering?

It hath precious ties for thee,
That can tempt thee back again;
Though thou know'st the earth must be
But a scene of fear and pain.
Sail on, proud bird, from earth!
Wilt thou not 'scape the snare?
Ah! freedom were little worth,
That thy loved ones could not share!

"T is thus with the parting soul,
When it looks with hope above;
When it breaks the earth's control,
And every bond, save love.
Though it knows it shall be free,
In heaven, from deeds unkind,
Still looks it lingeringly

To the world it leaves behind!

OLLAPODIAN A.

NUMBER XXVII.

How do you bear yourself, my friend and reader, on the subject of winter generally? What are your views?' If you are young and sanguine, with no revulsions or tempests of the heart to remember, I will warrant that you like old Hyem, and patronize that most windy individual, Boreas, of that ilk. Well, you have a free right to your opinion, and if you held it two years or less ago, you had the honor to agree with me. But I confess on that point a kind of a warped idiosyncracy; an unaccountable change of opinion. The truth is, reader, between you and me, there is not much dignity in winter, in a city. When, in the country, you can look out upon the far-off landscapes, the cold blue hills rising afar, and where a snow-bank is really what it is cracked up to be; where the blast comes sounding to your dwelling over a sweep of woods, and lakes, and snowy fields, for miles of dim extension, there is some grandeur in the thing. But what is it to hear a blast, half choked with the smoke and soot of the city, wheezing down a contemptible chimney-pot, or round a corner, where the wind, that glorious emblem of freedom, has no charter at all to 'blow out' as he pleases, but is confined by the statute of brick-andmortar restrictions?

I BEGIN to affect the softer seasons; and I look with more than usual earnestness for the coming-on of Spring. I am not universal chronologist enough to know whether the creation began in the spring, but I should suppose it did. If, when the morning stars sang together,' there was one out of tune; one whose rôle was imperfect; that belonged rather to the stock company of stars; that took no part in the concert; I apprehend it must have been one of those cold winter stars, that glister, and go through you, with their cold and unimpassioned blinking. I do not affect the dog star;' but I must admit that the stars of spring, summer, and of autumn, are my favorites. Those of spring seem to throb with love, and light, and joy, that multitudes of flowers are springing, and that unnumbered sighs are breathing, in the world beneath; as if indeed they knew and relished the fact, that the roses and violets had again appeared on the earth; that the time of the singing of the birds had come, and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land.' True, the summer stars have rather too fervent a glitter; they look down with a tropical kind of aspect, and induce one to go on the shady side of a street, even at evening, in order to avoid the intense heat of the moonshine. At such hours, one seems to have reached that point, mentioned in nautical phrase, which I translate for ears polite, where the first settlement beyond purgatory is to be remunerated, and there is no tar to cancel the obligation. As for the autumn stars, they are to be praised in numbers; not in a series, but in verse, as dazzling and pure as the light they dispense, and the thoughts they awaken. Whoever gazed at them, in their homes of blue infinity, without rapture and gratitude?

TALKING of gratitude, reminds me of one of the most extraordinary developments of that quality, which I ever remember to have heard of any where. It occurred in a southern city; where there did live a person, otherwise called an individual, who was considered one of the most parsimonious of all the tribe of Adam. He had gone for nearly fifteen years without the imbuing of his personal top, or apex, with a new hat. He was singularly irrascible, owing to the fact that he peculiarly answered to the comprehensive definition of man in general; he was an irregularly-digestive tube, with the principle of immortality at his top, and pedal grain upon his understanding. Having worn his eternal ram-beaver into greasy desuetude, he came to the conclusion to get a new one; which he did-price twelve dollars. It was placed, in glossy youth, upon his hall table; the 'old hat,' as he called it only after he had got its successor, was removed, and he sat down to his dinner with all the certainty that the next day he would strike the town with a fresh sensation. He was not often on the street;' for be it known,

He was a man retired in wealth,
An ancient man, of feeble health.

But the fatal sisters, with their intolerable shears, clipt his hope in the bud. A varlet who had watched him all the way from the hatter's to his home a sort of crazy lounger of the place, more knave than fool, though enough of either determined to regain his felt, and feel what he regained.' And as the citizen sat at meat, and thinking of the novelty of hat which he should sport on the morrow, it came to pass that the varlet entered, and stole the unhackneyed chapeau from the hall. He left in the place of it, his own miserable headgear, open at top, and smothered in grease, with the following words on a slip of whitey-brown paper, in pencil :

'MY SUFFERING SIR:

I have taken your new hat, but I leave you my eternal gratitude.
'Your anonymous friend,

'B. BARLOW. 'P. S. I leave you an open apology for what I have taken, which I wish you to show to a candid world.'

'B. B.'

Great was the proprietor of that hat's consternation, (this is rather an obscure, but a very common, mode of transposition,) when he came out after dinner to seek what was lost. 'Confound him! curse him!" was his vehement ejaculation. Curse his 'gratitude!' What good does that do me? Where is my new hat?'

I HAVE read, with a great deal of interest, the extraordinary and quite original proposition, by the favorite writer and pulpit orator of the Messiah' congregation, concerning the progress of music. There are few who do not love the concord of sweet sounds; if there are, we have assurance, on the highest literary authority, that they are fit for stratagems, and the 'spoils of victory' won thereby. But I launch forth at once upon a strong expression, which I seldom use, when I

say, that I rather think that the subsequent theory of my favorite aforesaid, is likely to make an immense revolution in the progress of musical science; namely, music by steam. When we look back to what was done in the musical days of 'Salmagundi,' when a fall of snow, parliamentary deliberations, and other soft and sleepy transactions, were expressed by appropriate music, we find that the science, like the witness in his box, 'stared into the face of the public with rapid strides.' There was no evading the current melody.

But this was in the infancy of the science, in our happy land. And I have been thinking it most surprising that this matter has not before been discovered. I have supposed that it must have been owing to the alarming want of taste which has been ascertained to exist, by those who are only enabled to remark on this most abstruse and interesting subject, that there are two beats in a bar; two down, and two up.' Indeed, it is a curious thing, this same music. My old friend, Sir Thomas Browne, with all the inquiry of his mind, tells us that he considers the question, 'what song the syrens sang,' as a decided enigma; and I believe it has never been accurately ascertained what tune was 'pitched upon,' when the morning stars sang together. But we may venture to indulge the idea, that they were all perfect in their parts, from the glittering basso, to the effulgent tenore; the Bear, the Pleiades, and all. Under the circumstances, and with no opportunity for rehearsal, I am persuaded that the whole concert was as well got up' as could have been expected in the case, and at so short a notice.

I HAVE turned this subject of steam-music extensively over in my mind, of late; and I have married myself to the idea, after a very short courtship, that it is a kind of thing that must go on. At the first blush, indeed, it might appear chimerical; but I ask the sceptic why the steam-whistle of a locomotive should not discourse in tones more soft and winning? Why cannot a locomotive ask a cow to leave a rail-road track in a politer manner than in that discordant shriek, which excites the animal's indignation, and awakens her every sentiment of quadrupedal independence? I protest against such conduct. We presume a locomotive to buzz, and vapor, and deport itself pragmatically; but its conversation by the way ought to be chastened into something like propriety; and please Apollo, I think it will. I once saw an animal of this stamp killed instantly by the crushing transit of a train; and I thought I saw in the singular turn of her upper lip, as her torn-out heart lay yet palpitating on the rails, a peculiar curl of disdain, in her dying moments, at the treatment she had won. I put this down, because I hope 't will be remembered as a warning to whistlers in especial, and the great generation of calves unborn.

ON one of those warm April-like afternoons, with which, in our Philadelphia meridian, the fierce February chose to delight us, as if by contrast, I sat by my open window, which commands, through and over pleasant trees, fine glimpses of the country: and

'As the red round sun descended,

Mid clouds of crimson light,'