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 plunges 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.

appiness "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

wheat was sold, the money paid, and then for the trade. The baby was shifted from shoulder to shoulder, or set down upon the floor, to run off into mischief like a sparkling globule of quicksilver on a marble table, while calicoes were priced, sugar and tea tasted, and plates "rung." The good wife looks askance at a large mirror that would be just 'the thing for the best room, and the roll of carpeting of most becoming pattern; but it won't do; they must wait till next year. Ah! there is music in those next years that Orchestras cannot make!

And so they look, and price, and purchase the winter supplies, the husband the while eying the little roll of bank-notes, "growing small by degrees and beautifully less." Then comes an aside' conference, particularly confidential. She takes him affectionately by the button, and looks up in his face-she has fine eyes by the by-with an expression eloquent of "do, now; it will please them so." And what do you suppose they talk of? Toys for the children; John wanted a drum, and Jane a doll, and Jenny a little book all pictures, "just like Susan so-and-so's." The father looks" nonsense;" but he feels in his pocket for the required silver, and the mother, having gained the point, hastens away, baby and all, for the