wise old friend to me,-he was a boor.-Better too few words, from the woman we love, than too many: while she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is working for herself.-Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men; therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.

Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress, or not,-whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,-whether I cribbed them from Balzac,-whether I dipped them from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom,-or whether I have just found them in my head, laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things, -and foolish men, I don't doubt, have said as wise things. Anyhow, the schoolmistress and I had pleas ant walks and long talks, all of which I do not feel bound to report.

You are a stranger to me, Ma'am.-I don't doubt you would like to know all I said to the schoolmistress.-I sha'n't do it; I had rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested in this. Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it. I shall tell only what I like of what I remember.

My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque spots which the city affords a sight

of, to those who have eyes. I know a good mary, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company with my young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them. Then there are certain small seraglio-gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high fences,-one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it, -here and there one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head, (as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!"-and the rest of that benediction. Nay, there are certain patches of ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has covered with hungry plebcian growths, which fight for life with each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of voung tatterdemalions playing pitch-and-toss beats a

row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way about everything. I hold any man cheap,-he said,-—of whom nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans. How is that, Professor ?-said I;-I should have set you down for one of that sort.Sir, said he,-I am proud to say, that Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck without seeing in it as pretty a swan de swam the basin in the garden of the Luxem And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.

I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, -"What are these people about?" And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper back,will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to them at night and whispers, -“Come with me." Then they go softly with it into the great city,-one to a cleft in the pavement

"We

one to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried, and there they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other," Wait awhile!" The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach the slope of the hills, and the rees repeat in low murmurs to each other," Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the streets bbs, and the old leafy inhabitants-the smaller tribes always in front-saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped in the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House. Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

-Let us cry!-

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and

talks with the schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I ought to probably. We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.

Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her reading and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a library. The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman goes to work softly with a cloth. She does not raise half the dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it,—but she goes into all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers.-Books are the negative pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced. A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most nearly together. I thought I knew something about that, that I could speak or write about it somewhat to the purpose..

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up water,-to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills its pores lying seven