"No," responded he, "but I can build quite a handsome monument for five thousand dollars. Shall I make

a design of one for that figure?"

66

Yes, I wish you would, please, and I will come to your office and examine it in a week or two."

"I can make some alterations in these plans and have it ready very soon," he urged. "Indeed, I could bring it around to-morrow just as well as not."

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Oh, no, I won't trouble you to do so.

There is no particular hurry about it, and I will call upon you; it's my turn, you know," and she smiled graciously upon him as she bowed him out.

Well, what was a poor monument man to do? He could only wait, and he did wait, busying himself meanwhile in getting up beautiful and elaborate designs. One day he met the lady on the street, dressed in the merest apology for half-mourning. He bowed obsequiously and informed her that the design was finished, and he thought would not fail to be perfectly satisfactory.

"Oh," she said, "I have been so busy, don't you know, with one thing and another, and I had forgotten all about it. Let me see, how much was that to cost?"

"Five thousand dollars."

"Oh dear, I can't really afford to pay that much. Now, couldn't you," this very bewitchingly, "make a real nice monument for five hundred dollars? I know you can, and I will come and see you about it real soon; good-bye!"

Then the monument man went to his office and told his grief to a three-legged lamb and a stone angel.

Some time after this the charming widow, with a male friend whom she called "Charley," dropped in again.

"Do you know," she said, "I feel so ashamed to think that I never came around to look at your pretty designs. Charley and I have concluded that those great costly ornaments are so foolish, after one's dead, you know. We think it's wicked don't we, Charley?" Charley al

lowed that it was. "But," she continued, "those little boards, such as they put at the soldiers' graves, Charley and I think they are very nice. So neat and unpretentious. Couldn't you make one of them for me and put George's monogram on it? His initials make such a pretty monogram?"

Then the monument man's cup was full, and spilled over. He told her that Charley could get an old shingle and tack one of George's business cards on it.

Then she called him a "horrid beast" and Charley spoke whipping him "for half a cent," and they sallied off.

THE DEAD SOLDIER-BOY.-WM. MASON TURNER. A TALE OF THE CHRISTMAS-Tide.

The cold gray moon of a winter's sky

Gleamed down from an old-time German town,

And the low night breezes whispered by,

As the stage coach paused by the "Kaiser's Crown ;”* For I was a wanderer, far from home:

And the eve of the Christmas-tide had come.

But I paused as the old coach rolled away,

For there by the door I had seen a form,—
An old dame bent, with her long locks gray;
An old dame bent as by many a storm!
And as she swayed her to and fro,
She bent her head, and she murmured low:
"Ah! the night is cold, and the searching winds
Blow over the hills and upon the plains:
But no light gleams from the bannered blinds,
And the dark night wanes! it wanes! it wanes!"
And then as she sadly shook her head,

I drew to her side, and softly said:

"Ay! ay! good dame the night is cold;

But what doth burden you on this eve?" "Ha! stranger, and would you have it told?" "Ay, friend, to me your sorrows unweave." And then as the winds moaned o'er the wold, I list to the tale the old dame told.

hotel on the Rhine.

"In the fair Rhine land, where the red rose blooms, And the violet scents the breeze,

Where the dark fir's bending, swaying plumes

Rise o'er the nodding trees,

A cottage clad in the gray woodbine,

In jasmine buds and the arbute vine,

Gleamed bright in the Rhine land's summer shine.

"The Blue Rhine's water's fled swift along,

A glittering, sheeny thread,

And rippled aloud a woodland song,
Over their pebbly bed,

And the cottage was nestled by its side,

Where the fallow deer and the hare could hide,

By the blue Rhine's sheeny, lapping tide.

"The rumble of war swelled over the land,
The roll of the stirring drum,

And the shrill fife pealed from cliff to strand,
And died in a solemn hum!

The din of the battle-jar in the air,

And the torch of Mars, with its crimson flare,
Were heard and seen in the cottage there.

"A stripling boy, his mother's lone pride,
Hearkened to the war-note's jar;

And he belted a saber by his side,
Steel stained in an ancient war.
He heard the thrilling battle-call,
He felt the shrouding, funeral pall,

And he strode away from his home-from all!

"On Gravelotte's hill at sunset's glow,

Where the war-shouts rang so loud,

Breasting the battle tide's sanguine flow,

His youthful form was bowed!

And far from home, from the blue Rhine's prattle, From his vine-clad cot there mid the rattle

Of guns, he died on the field of battle!

"And the sonless mother in the fair Rhine land, Weeps silent day by day.

Where the blue stream with its silvery sand

Glints by the cottage way.

Ah! that mother doth wait, and pray for the hour,
In her cot at the foot of the moss-grown tower,
To meet with her boy in the Aidenn bower!

"Then stranger, pause, should you see that mound,
So grim in the fir tree's shade,

For your feet would tread upon sacred ground
There in that Gallic glade,

For there, far from the blue Rhine's prattle,
Where once rang loud the rifle's rattle,
My darling lies dead on the field of battle."

Yes, this was the tale the old dame told

To me that night in the quaint old town,
There mid the blasts and the winter's cold,

There 'neath the gray moon's gibbous frown--
But she reeled away. And with heart bowed down,
At last I entered the "Kaiser's Crown."

THE SHOEMAKER'S DAUGHTER.

THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.

Yesternight, as I sat with an old friend of mine,
In his library, cozily over our wine,

Looking out on the guests in the parlor, I said,
Of a lady whose shoe showed some ripping of thread:
"Frank, she looks like a shoemaker's daughter."

"Yes," said Frank, "yes; her shoe has a rip to the side,The mishap of the moment-the lady's a bride.

That reminds me of something; and here as we sit,
If you'll listen with patience, I'll spin you a bit

Of a yarn of a shoemaker's daughter.

"When I was a boy, half a century since

How one's frame as one numbers the years, seems to wince' A dear little girl went to school with me then

As I sit in my arm-chair I see her again,

Kitty Mallet, the shoemaker's daughter.

"Whence the wonderful ease in her manner she had,
Not from termagant mother, nor hard-working dad.
Yet, no doubt that, besides a most beautiful face,
The child had decɔrum, refinement and grace,
Not at all like a shoemaker's daughter.

"Her dress was of six-penny print, but 'twas clean;
Her shoes, like all shoemakers' childrens' were mean;

Her bonnet, a wreck, but, whatever she wore,
The air of a damsel of breeding she bore-

Not that of a shoemaker's daughter.

"The girls of the school, when she entered the place, Pinched each other, then tittered and stared in her face. She heeded no insult, no notice she took;

But quietly settled herself to her book—

She meant business, that shoemaker's daughter.
"Still jeered at by idler, and dullhead, and fool,
A hermitess she in the crowd of the school:

There was wonder indeed when it soon came to pass
That 'Calico Kitty' was head of the class.

'What! Kitty! That shoemaker's daughter!'
Still wearing the same faded calico dress,
And calm, as before, in the pride of success;
Her manner the same, easy, soft and refined,

'Twas she seemed an heiress, while each left behind
In the race was a shoemaker's daughter.

"Bit by bit all her schoolmates she won to her side,
To rejoice in her triumph, be proud in her pride,
And I with the rest. I felt elderly then,

For I was sixteen, while the lass was but ten;
So I petted the shoemaker's daughter.

"Do you see that old lady with calm placid face:
Time touches her beauty, but leaves all her grace:
Do you notice the murmurs that hush when she stirs,
And the honor and homage so pointedly hers?
That's my wife, sir, the shoemaker's daughter."

AN UNACCOUNTABLE MYSTERY.
PAUL DENTON.

Intemperance is the strangest and most unaccountable mystery with which we have to deal. Why, as a rule, the human soul is passionately jealous of its own happiness, and tirelessly selfish as to its own interest. It delights to seek the sunshine and the flowers this side the grave: ardently hopes for heaven in the life to come. It flashes its penetrating thought through the dark chambers. of the earth; or lighted by the lurid flames of smoulder