'Well, sur, it's just this; MARGARET O'DONAHUE gets ten dollars a month at TRACY'S, and I'm worth every bit as much as she is; and if I can't get it here, I know where I can.'

'But, BRIDGET, we've company here now. would you?'

'Well sur, they're your company, not mine they get any dinner or not. Any how, give me sponded BRIDGET, in a decidedly dictatorial tone.

You would n't leave us now,

and it's little I care whether

my price, or let me go,' re

'BRIDGET,' said Mr. Davis, in a mild, subdued, and quietly appealing manner, 'BRIDGET, after Mrs. DAVIS's kindness to you, could you have the heart to leave her without any dinner for our guests?'

'Yis, sur,' said BRIDGET Shortly.

'Then you want a dollar more a month?'

'Yis, sur.'

'Let me see,' said Tom, in a musing tone, and taking out his pocket-book, your month is up on Thursday fortnight

'I want the dollar from to-day,' interrupted BRIDGET, triumphant in the success of her coup.

'But you insist upon the increase from to-day that will cancel the engagement. BRIDGET, here's your money up to to-day. If you an't out of the house in half-an-hour, I'll have you taken out by the police!'

And Mr. DAVIS, lighting a cigar, sate him down upon the kitchen-table, and took out his watch.

Poor BRIDGET! an engineer hoist by her own petard, she had dug up the war-hatchet, and been cut down by it herself.

Vows of vengeance, schemes of resistance founded on 'her month's not being up,' entered her mind — but the passive figure with the time-piece in his hand, appalled her. She sat herself down, and made up her mind to stay her month out- - she looked toward the kitchen-table, and arose, and fidgeted about

'Only ten minutes more,' said an inexorable voice, and BRIDGET put on her bonnet and fled.

Mr. DAVIS stopped on his way to his office to order a dinner from a restaurant, and was all day in that frame of mind which the performance of a good action induces in a conscientious person.

The next day, an Exile of Erin standing six feet two in his boots, entered Mr. DAVIS's office.

'Is Mr. DAVIS in?' said he.

Mr. DAVIS blandly acknowledged his identity.

'I'm BRIDGET PENOYER'S cousin,' was the next observation of the gentleman from Ireland.

เ

'Ah!' said Mr. Davis, politely, 'you do n't look very much alike for such near relatives.'

'You're a purty man,' roared BRIDGET's cousin, breaking out all upon a sudden, 'to frighten a poor, lone woman like BRIDGET, out of your house. It's mighty bould you are wid a faymale; and I've just come to give yes the most complate bating that iver

'That's right, WILLIAM, come in; I want you,' interrupted THOMAS Davis, looking toward the door.

BRIDGET'S cousin stopped and looked around to reconnoitre this addition to the enemy's forces. Seeing nobody, he turned with the conviction that he'd been humbugged — and saw Mr. DAVIS standing with a revolver in his hand. 'If you're not out of my office by the time I count three,' observed he urbanely, 'what's inside of this will be inside of you.'

Now an Irishman dreads cold lead; a tap on his head does him good - it rather quickens and enlivens him than otherwise; but a bullet in the digestive organs can not be cured by a sticking plaster — and therefore, by the time that Mr. DAVIS had got as far as 'I've given you fair warning! One! Two!' he was alone in his office.

The hall being dark, and the stairs being inconveniently near the door for a person making a hurried exit, a bumping sound, as of a heavy body proceeding with considerable velocity down a staircase, immediately arose.

Out of the office opposite popped a gentleman.

stairs, and then one at the pistol.

'Ah!' said he, 'frightening a client.'

He was a lawyer, and used to such things.
JONES, just see if this pistol is loaded.'

JONES tried it carefully.

He took a look down the

'As empty as Judge BLANK's head,' was his verdict. 'Just recollect that.'

'All right,' said JONES, and retired into his den.

In about an hour, a gentleman in metal buttons and a blue cap requested Mr. DAVIS's attendance at Court, whither he proceeded, accompanied by his witness.

BRIDGET's cousin had made a charge against him of an attempt to kill; but the innocent state of the shooting-iron having been proven, BRIDGET's cousin was non-suited and laughed at.

Thereupon Mr. DAVIS took his innings, and made a counter-charge of threat to assault and batter; and BRIDGET's cousin was ordered to find a surety in the sum of fifty dollars, that he would keep the peace toward Mr. Davis.

So, under the convoy of an officer, he travelled about for several hours, before he could find a fellow-countryman, who would consent to risk such an amount on his peacefulness; and when, at length, he was set free from legal toils, he departed, bruised both in body and in mind, a sadder and a sorer man. About a week after BRIDGET's cousin's hegira down the staircase, Mr. DAVIS was returning home late one night, when a tall gentleman in a slouched hat, stepped from behind a tree and observed:

'I've got you now, you murdering villyan

What the rest of this complimentary address might have been is unknown; for Mr. DAVIS happened to be carrying in his hand an apoplectic walking-cane; and recollecting the Irishman's advice to his son, 'When you see a head hit it,' smash came his stick upon the orator's cranium, who immediately assumed a recumbent position with great swiftness and in profound silence.

When Mr. DAVIS reached his house, which I must say he did considerably out of breath, he lighted a cigar, and gave himself up to reflection — the result VOL. LIX.

14

of which was the entrance of a gentleman wearing a star, into the sleepingapartment of BRIDGET's cousin.

Miss PENOYER's relative was summarily haled to judgment - his prepossessing countenance exhibiting the adventitious adornment of various strips of black sticking-plaster.

Being unable satisfactorily to account for these additions to his ordinary toilette, it was adjudged that they were caused by Mr. DAVIS's stick, and BRIDGET'S Cousin was condemned to penal-servitude for the sum of six calendar months.

His reflections on being conveyed away, were not peculiarly satisfactory, if one may judge from his observations to the officer having charge of him. 'Faith!' said he, 'it's little I've made out of that. First and foremost, me back's not well yet from bumping down thim stairs. Thin I lost a day's wages in getting TERRY MALONE to go bail for me. Thin I got me head shplit open, and now, I'm sent up for six months, wid the plisant prospect, after I get out, of having TERRY MALONE take the fifty dollars he's ped for me, out of me hide. He says he will, and he's the boy that will do what he says. Musha! but it's more profitable business I've been in, in the coorse of me life.'. And that's the way, BRIDGET's cousin came to grief.

Woman's Laugh.

'A WOMAN has no natural grace more bewitching than a sweet laugh. It is like the sound of flutes on the water. It leaps from the heart in a clear, sparkling rill; and the heart that hears it feels as if bathed in the cool, exhilarating spring. Have you ever pursued an unseen fugitive through the trees, led on by her fairy laugh; now here, now there now lost, now found?'

Have you? Well, if so, you have run after sweet music, the silveriest of all silvern sounds; the moltenest of all music, for surely none flows so lightly. 'A woman's laugh,' saith Meister KARL in his unwritten book of 'Tones by Mountains and Rivers,' 'is to her voice what honey is to a flower — the delicate beauty of beauty, the sweeter kernel of a dainty fruit.'

'You can tell souls,' says he, 'by voices, and the key to the voice is the laugh. A flirt, a coquette may hide her heartless folly in every way, but the initiated in tones who once hears her laugh knows her well. When such belles ring there is always a flaw perceptible. Of all sounds, the soulless laugh of a flirt at heart is the most intolerable.

'When a man is a fool, it always sounds in his laugh. Fools are more guarded in their laughter, more afraid of letting it out than wise men. Especially the shrewd fools, the wary ones the fools who think themselves bravely wise, and who are often thought so by others, yet, who are, after all, often the most arrant fools in existence. Oh! the cackling, sniggering laughter of these

men!

''T is a great gift, HUBERT mon amy, this of laughing honestly and cheerily, and one just as rare as a real good fellow. As for a good lady laugher, her price is above rubies and Etruscan vases, above golden dressing-cases placed on

malachite slabs; yea, above all earthly gimcrackeries. I would go far, very far, to hear MALIBRAN sing, could she be raised from the dead; but further still, to hear the perfection of a soprano lady laugher, a lovely soul, falling at times from trilling sweetness down to the deepest abyss of contralto chiaroscuro! Such a voice I heard once in dreams, sleeping or waking was it? I know not. Or if it were the pealing laughter of a GLYCERA, a DIONÉ, a LAIS or LALAGE—some fair Greek shadow-girl — vanished from Corinth in the olden time!'

And having written this of old, he speaks once more unto us of that shadow-music of ancient days.

'Truly I have often thought, that could we sink deep into the very idea of that bright Greek-land; drown all life in its flashing golden gleam, shadowed by emerald vine-leaves and the glossy darkness of the eternal olive — floating amid nymphs and lilies, HYLAS darting downward in the foam.

'Lo! you there, reader, I have tasted the Amreet cup with those memories, and am drunk with the classic wine. I speak no longer-the Nymph speaks within me- the lovely MŒNAD of the burning eyes the soul of inextinguishable laughter-mad with the beauty of the mountain-streams

-

evoe Bacche!

'Did I speak of LAIS? At her name I am lost in loveliness. A mass of green and purple and sun-beams, vine-leaves and grapes clustering around, with young fauns laughing among them—their mirthful eyes gleaming from dark distances, and the warm rustling of the branches moved by their stirring the air. Sturdy oaks, weaving arches with their brown arms, bound with pointed savages of leaves that seem to strive to prick the golden-bellied grapes and suck their living wine. And patches and veins of blue sky gazing down upon LAIDION, lying in a trance of indolent rapture, with young grape-leaves shading her brown hair, and the lithe green stalks bound about her arms the striped snake-grass coiling about her ankles and brushing her snow-white limbs; with a white dove, with a billet from ANACREON, nestled upon her bosom, 'pecking with pink bill the pinker breasts.'

'Ah! the dream-where was I? Think you not, reader, that in those days, in that land, the human voice did not speak in deeper, stranger, sweeter winninger tones than man now hears? Where such loveliness blossomed and bloomed in limb and eyes, and wondrous harmony with nature; where the acanthus leaf and the eternal grace of woman's perfected form in sacred unveiled beauty, foaming fountain and violet eyes were reflected in all things human, think you not that the Voice was then and there also a marvel? You who can raise shadows from the past by deep reverie in all art — raise again the voices, and ye shall hear that their sweetness and power are divine.

'It is all coming again—it is not dead, but sleepeth. PAN is not dead among the mountains, the nymphs have not vanished, the dream of beauty shall revive, and the days of laughter amid the vine-leaves live again. Evoe! Through long centuries of toil; through an age of science, the time, the sacred time of joy is coming when man and woman shall turn again to the shaded paths trodden of old, but now a thousand-fold more beautiful, when it will be worshipped once more - the Spirit of Primeval Beauty, the sacred mother Nature.'

'And the Dryad shall brush the dew from the thicket upon the mountainside, the oak shall whisper again of love, the nymph be seen again in the fountain, 'loveliest nakedness in sparkling foam;' Love shall laugh over the blue but the Dryad and Nymph and the Aphrodite will be fair humanity made perfect and strong a prophecy fulfilled, of which the gentle dreams of old mythology were but a dim foretelling and far-off shadow. Through roving centuries of toil it is coming again.'

sea;

GOSSIP WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.-As we write, 'late into the night,' our mind recurs, 'ever and anon,' to the narrative of a dream to which we listened 'yestreen,' from one whom to doubt were to doubt purity and truth itself. But what a dream! What abysses of mystery, of strange involutions of life's deepest, secret springs, shooting skywards from earth's depths into rainbowed mists, phantom shadows, tender, fading hues, accompanied the while with eolian music. Such a dream, narrated by one who plays skilfully with language, as a sweet player on a harp, is something to strangely move the inner chambers of the soul with unwonted vibrations. Dreams! - what are dreams? What are these wonderful spirit-keys which unlock the most forgotten secrets of the past? Do you remember, O reader! those words of CARLYLE: The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but tomorrow, thou findest it swept away. Already, on the wings of the north wind, it is nearing the tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught that God hath made, that is motionless, without force, and utterly dead?' Even so, reader, we may ask if aught in the whole unbounded range of thought, ever dies. Dies—nothing dies. The smile of the mother to the child, one day lang syne, rises again in the dream of the child grown old; it will be carried back again to her, some day after the 'parting of the ways' of life and death-far into the courts of heaven.

'We are such stuff as DREAMS are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'

Even as we write, we recall a poem on Dreams passed away, which chimes well with these our musings.

Lost Dreams.

BY HATTIE TYNG.

'WHEN first the glowing wine of life

on those which have 'Place aux dames!'

Flushed my young heart with rosy gleams,
I reared within the future's sky

A fairy frost-work of bright dreams.

'The dreamy Palace all was built

Of silver white and fretted gold,

And net-works of bright pearls were seen
When back the jasper doors were rolled.

'Four stately pillars had the dome,
And to each pillar it was given

To hold the arch where hung my dreams,
Of Fame, of Friendship, Love and Heaven.