me and said that his grand-daughter would like to be presented to the Emperor, as she had previously met him in Egypt. So we turned to his majesty, and I had hardly named the young lady, when he exclaimed, "Oh, I met you at the Pyramids, and gave you my photograph, did I not?"

We were fourteen hours on that journey, returning to Philadelphia at eight P.M. I was quite worn out, and went to bed. Rising early, I picked up the Ledger, and about the first thing that caught my eye was an account of the Emperor's attendance the night before at a meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences, where, it appeared, he had taken part in the discussions of the evening. I mention all this to show that one monarch in the world, at least, is a man of energy and broadest intelligence and kindest sympathy. He seemed to know all about Professor Henry of the Smithsonian Institute when I made them acquainted; speaking of his original and practical application of the telegraph. The professor invited him to visit Washington and the Smithsonian Institute, and he went. Again, when I introduced him to Joaquin Miller he instantly spoke in praise of the Sierra Nevada poems. Indeed, there was apparently nothing notable in literature, art, or science that had not engaged his attention. In women's medical colleges he was much interested. I broached the subject during our trip to the coalregions, and he amazed me with the breadth of his information, dwelling, as he did, upon the labors of those women who were sent out as missionaries.

I cannot help but hold Dom Pedro in the kindest remembrance; and it is gratifying to know that I have him as a loyal as well as a royal friend. He presented me with a large photograph likeness bearing an autograph inscription, and with a copy of his book of travels in which he wrote some kindly words. It is one of the pleasing methods he employs to show me I am not forgotten, that I have been honored with an early and welcome visit from each new Brazilian minister to the United States. And perhaps I may be pardoned for quoting at this appropriate place the following extract from a letter which the Hon. Thomas A. Osborn, American Minister to Brazil, recently wrote to a friend, describing his presentation to the Emperor: "I have thought," he says, "that you might not be uninterested in learning that the Emperor, in an informal conversation which followed the presentation of my letter of credence, inquired quite feelingly after Mr. George W. Childs, and manifested a deep concern in his welfare. The Emperor spoke of the hospitalities extended to him in Philadelphia, and was especially warm in his expressions touching Mr. Childs."

But the creature of greed and of death,
Who shall sleep in the hollows low down,
He has tarnished the sun with his breath
And ruined the meads with the town.
He shall lie in the barrow beneath
The green waving grass of the heath,
While leaves of the years shall grow brown.

Ah me! for the singers of old!

How they sung, the delicious and sweet! How they lingered and lived on the wold, In the day of a manhood more meet, When womanhood wandered unsold, When not everything smacked of the mould, Of the mine, or the bitterer street!

Ah, June, thou art blowing in vain!

You shall find them no more in the mead:

The delight of the mellower strain,
The loves of the lovers indeed!

(Only madmen run wild o'er the plain.)
We buried deep under the rain

The shapes of the faithful at need!

Ah, sad are the rhymes of to-day.
Though June is a June as of old,
And we know that the best is the clay
That lies over iron and gold!
Ah, would I could say, "Let us pray
For a hope on the desolate way,

As the flowers spring out of the mould !"

Daniel L. Dawson.

A LITERARY BOARDER.

RS. COPP was a fearful example of that dread of modern patriots, —an oligarchical office-holder knowing nothing of the beauties of the great republican principle of rotation in office. For so many years had she signed her name "Dorothy Copp, Postmistress," with an appropriate official flourish below the line, that it would have been utterly impossible for her, at her time of life, to cultivate another style of signature; and as for the inhabitants of Sheard's Corners, all their ideas of the United States mail were so connected with her that the whole post-office system would have seemed to them to have gone to wreck if any one but Mrs. Copp were to hand them out their chance letters and their local oracles the county papers. Administrations might rise and fall, Congressmen might come and go, but she held on her official course undisturbed. The appointment to office had come to her, in the first instance, as the deserving widow of a Union soldier, and time had but strengthened her claims to grateful remembrance and recognition on the score of her husband's service of his country. He had, as a matter of fact, been the terror of her life before his enlistment, but now her memory had so mellowed towards him that she could not point out his head-stone to a stranger without a tender tribute to the "beloved remains,"-the phrase in which she always alluded to her deceased partner.

Either a prolonged lease of power or a naturally even temper had induced in Mrs. Copp an equanimity from which it was not easy to startle her, so that her exclamation of surprise when Henry Evans asked her to take him to board for the summer implied an unusual strangeness in the request. He had jumped from the stage to the platform of the store-of course Mrs. Copp kept the village store-at the same time with the thud of the mail-bag, and, after the official duties of the postmistress were attended to, had asked her if there was any place to get board in Sheard's Corners.

Mrs. Copp looked up doubtfully at the weather-beaten sign creaking over her head, bearing a faint legend to the effect that accommodation for man and beast might be obtained within, and said, "Well, I've sometimes done it myself. We don't have many calls, nowadays, and our accommodations ain't exactly first-class; but if it's only a question of staying over-night, or a day or two

"I may want to be here for six months,-possibly longer." It was this remark that brought from Mrs. Copp a cry of astonish

ment.

"Six months! Why, what on earth!-it can't be the fishing, then. I thought perhaps you wanted to try the trout over in the run; though them as do mostly puts up down at the Centre. But for the hull summer, that's a different thing. There ain't much here to make it interesting for summer boarders. How come you to think of trying it?"

"I simply want quiet and retirement. I should think there would be no doubt about my finding them here. The question is if you can accommodate me."

It is not necessary to pursue the steps of the negotiation. Suffice it to say that Henry Evans succeeded finally in convincing Mrs. Copp that all he wanted was a room to himself, where he could be free from noise or interruption, and that she at last made an arrangement with him which he said was perfectly satisfactory to him, and which certainly ought to have been so to her, as her terms were about twice anything ever known in the Corners. One thing, however, she insisted upon securing a little light about.

"But what are you going to do?" she asked. "You are from the city, you say, and of course might like the country for a while; but six months is a good while, with nothing to do."

I

Henry Evans hesitated a moment. Then he said, "I may as well tell you my plan. You would find it out anyhow, sooner or later. The fact is, I am engaged in certain literary work which I can best do in a quiet place like this. That is the reason I have come here. shall be in my room every morning, and shall walk about for recreation in the afternoon. Evenings I shall devote to reading. So you see I can get on very well without the ordinary summer attractions. I will write for my trunk and box of books to be sent me at once, and I have no doubt we shall get on together. By the way, I want some stamps: you may as well give me a dollar's worth.”

This order just about exhausted Mrs. Copp's stock, and at the same time tended to strengthen her conviction that her boarder was a man of lavish wealth.

The village store was, like most of its kind, the scene of that dissipation which, in the absence of a saloon in Sheard's Corners, had to display itself somewhere, and so took the form of smoking and lounging and gossiping on the hard chairs and benches which Mrs. Copp was in duty bound to provide. The fullest conclaves were gathered on Saturday nights, when the return of some of the freeholders of the Corners who were away at work during the week, and the necessity of laying in groceries for the day of rest, making trade unusually brisk, had the effect of filling every seat. It was here, of course, that the important and somewhat mysterious advent of Henry Evans had to be thoroughly discussed.

"Well," said Mrs. Copp, in answer to repeated inquiries, "I have told you all I know about it. He's taken my front room for six months, and says he's a-doing some literary work. And I guess it's

so, too; for he's done nothing all this week but set there at his table a-writing away for dear life."

"This is a very remarkable occurrence," said John Boyd. He was a Scotch master-mason, away through the week at a job he had in the Centre. He was the unquestioned literary oracle of Sheard's Corners, a position to which he was not unfairly entitled, as he had had more than the usual contact of a Scotch boy with the "humanities," to use a favorite word of his own, and was accustomed even to speak incidentally of the days he had passed in the University. In spite, too, of his trade, he managed to keep up the literary traditions of his youth by a regular reading of the Edinburgh Review, whose blue cover and foreign post-stamps were objects of respectful awe to all who saw him take it from the post-office.

Naturally, therefore, his opinion of the stranger was looked for eagerly and was received as of great weight.

"I should very much like to know this gentleman," he went on. "He is not, of course, a distinguished writer as yet, else I should have heard of him. But it speaks well for him that he has withdrawn from the distractions of the city. Doubtless he is engaged on a work which requires quiet meditation. It speaks well for him, I say, that he has drawn aside to a place like this."

"Evans? Evans?" said Mr. Medby; "'pears to me I've heard that name as a writer. Of course Mr. Boyd knows, but I do seem to remember my daughter Jane speakin' of one of her favorites by that name. 'Pears like 'twas a female, though, after all."

"Your daughter Jane, Mr. Medby, probably refers to that meretricious writer, the authoress of 'St. Elmo' and other writings of a like low grade," said Mr. Boyd, with some severity.

"That's it! that's the very book! Yes, she's the one I was a-thinkin' of. My daughter thinks just as you do, Mr. Boyd; a very meritorious writer she calls this female Evans, and soulful, too, I've heard her say she was."

Mr. Medby was a forehanded farmer, the proud father of a poetically-inclined young lady who had borne back to her father's house the garnered culture to be had at two Young Ladies' Seminaries. Mr. Boyd regarded her as a lamentable example of superficial American methods of education, and as knowing nothing of a truly correct and classical taste. He paid the tribute of a scornful sniff to the specimen of her literary judgment cited by her father, and, returning to the subject of Mrs. Copp's boarder, remarked, "I know nothing of this young man, as I was saying, but I take it well of him that he has sought out our retired village as the scene of his literary labors. Perhaps it will turn out to be his Craigenputtock."

Pleased rather than otherwise at the blank looks with which his allusion was received, he hastened to add, "That was the rural spot where Mester Carlyle 'nourished his mighty heart,' as your own Emerson said. That is the thing most to the literary credit of America, that it so soon learned to appreciate the greatest genius of the age. He was alone there, in the remote country, but he did work that carried his name across the sea. It would be presumptuous, of course, to