sweeter than the home-note of the little creatures, when nestled at night beneath the Mother's brooding wing. Were it translated into the language of "Par

adise Lost -that subdued " yeep, eep, eep "—it would be, beyond a doubt, the word defined by some Webster yet unborn, "perfect happiness at home, and home once more !" re!"

Chicken Pie.

THE transition from chickens on the perch to chickens in the pie, seems more natural and easy according to Whateley and Newman than it is according to Poultry. I abominate Chicken-pies as edibles, but, be assured, from no "fellow feeling." I love to see them, to think of them, but not to eat them. I would as soon make a meal of reminiscences, or call for a Metaphor, "rare done," at dinner. They are suggestive; they are melancholy-Chicken-pies are; they bring to mind days that went down long ago at home; the capacious and burnished tin pan, wherein "mother "mother"-your mother and mine-used to bake them aforetime; the old family table, round

which we five, and no more, used to gather, Christmas Days and Thanksgivings; when to hold the lantern at night, while some body robbed the hen-roost, was an era; when we used to run away before they were beheaded, because we couldn't bear to see it ;' when we just wanted to hold one a minute, to see how it would seem;' when a wing was a treasure, and we played' it was a bird, and ‘poored' it, and offered it crumbs of bread every day, and wrapped it up in an apron, and hid it in the trundle-bed; when we-you and I-grasped the 'wish-bone' and wished, and both pulled, and both held a fragment; but yours was the larger, so you had your wish, as they all told us. Don't you remember? Can't you see it all? Ah! there's more beneath that swelling crust than every body dreams of, and the chickens are a small item indeed..

That mnemonic pie "minds " me, too, of the days when to find a Hen's nest was to have an ecstacy; the more eggs, the more ecstacy. Many a man-perhaps you have-has found name and fame since then, and it never quickened a pulse! How the chip hat was doffed, preparatory to “the removal of the deposites," and the eggs transferred thereto; and no Roman, returning from flushed fields

of conquest, felt half so grand as you and I, when we counted the treasures, one by one, into Mother's checked apron, and had a vision of a little pie a-piece, baked upon our scalloped tins.'

Sometimes, after a driving rain, you remember, we used to find a downy chick, drenched with water, in articulo mortis. The little handled basket, stained with strawberries summers before, was nicely lined with cotton-wool, and the gasping helplessness nestled therein, and the basket, with its precious contents, covered with a cloth, was set in a corner near the kitchen fire, to keep it warm. And what times we had, wetting up meal, and feeding, and watching, and 'tending! How many times we peeped under the cloth, just to see, as we said, 'how it is now. Fierce altercation--sorry to say it--about the ownership of the tenant in the basket, would arise, and the titles tried by the usual test of who saw it first, who got to it first, who put it in the basket, whose hen laid the egg, or whose hen hatched it; and maybe, the while, the chicken would be dying. The right of possession occurs simultaneously to both; a plunge is made for the basket; the cloth falls off in the mêlee, and the chicken lies there, among the white wooldead! War is turned to weeping. I made a shingle

coffin; you dug a grave. The chicken was borne out beneath the apple-tree, and we buried it there, and sang, as well as we could,

"Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound."

That done, you remember one of us wrote upon the fragment of a slate, 'SACRED to the memory of'. and there was a difficulty; it had no name. But this was disposed of, and we wrote on a little Biddy, drowned to death, July 10th, 18-'-I've forgotten the year; and then drew over the top, a distant resemblance of a weeping willow, very drooping and sad, and set it up at the head of the grave. That afternoon there was a shower, and at night, when we went out to see the little grave again, the inscription was gone; the drops of rain had washed it all away! Strange, we never thought of it then, but we have since slate, marble, or brass; pencil, graver, or gilding, it is all the same. The world weeps away its griefs, and with those griefs, the memory of the wept.

Since then, we have both stood by other graves, times too many, doubtless with deeper, but never with truer sorrowing, than when, beneath the old appletree, we paid our childish tribute to the dead NEST

LING.

Happiness "at Cost."

THIS morning, a wagon, laden with wheat, went by, going to town; nothing strange in that, certainly. And a man driving the team, and a woman perched on the load beside him, and a child throned in the woman's lap; nothing strange in that, either. And it required no particular shrewdness to determine that the woman was the property—“ personal,” of course of the man, and that the black-eyed, roundfaced child was the property of both of them.

So much I saw; so much, I suppose, every body saw, who looked. It is a fair inference that the wife was going in to help her husband 'trade out' a portion of the proceeds of the wheat, the product of so much labor and so many sunshines and rains.

The pair were somewhere this side-a fine point of observation, isn't it?—this side of forty, and it is presumptive, if blessed like their neighbors, they left two or three children at home, 'to keep house' while they came to town-perhaps two girls and a boy, or, as it is immaterial to us, two boys and a girl.

Well, I followed the pair, in thought, until the