Or lying 'mid the blooming heath where oft he made his bed;

Or could he drink of those sweet rills that

trickle to its vales,

Or breathe once more the balminess of Cheviot's mountain gales!

5. At length, upon his wearied eyes the mists of slumber come,

And he is in his home again-till wakened by the drum!

"Take arms! take arms!" his leader cries; "the hated foeman's nigh!"

Guns loudly roar, steel clanks on steel, and thousands fall to die.

The shepherd's blood makes red the sand: "Oh! water-give me some!

My voice might reach a friendly ear but for that little drum!"

6. 'Mid moaning men and dying men the drummer kept his way,

And many a one by "glory" lured did curse the drum that day.

"Rub-a-dub!" and "Rub-a-dub!" the drummer beat aloud

The shepherd died! and, ere the morn, the hot sand was his shroud.

And this is "Glory?"-Yes; and still will man the tempter follow,

Nor learn that Glory, like its drum, is but a sound, and hollow!

primeval man, mankind in the

PRIMEVAL MAN.

earliest ages. en-or-mous, very large indeed. des-cend-ing, going down. grad-u-al-ly, by degrees.

1. Once upon a time, so long ago that

no man can

tell when, the

SO

land was much higher, that between England and Ireland, and,

what is more, between England and Norway, was firm dry land. The country, then, must have

2. There were forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce too, which is not wild in England now, though you may see plenty in every plantation. There were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there are in our woods now. There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in Larmer's and Heath pond; and white and yellow water-lilies, horn-wort, and pondweeds, just as there are now in our ponds.

3. There were wild horses, wild deer, and wild oxen, those last of an enormous size. There were little yellow roedeer, which will not surprise you, for there are hundreds and thousands in Scotland to this day; and, as you know, they will thrive well enough in our woods now. There were beavers too : but that must not surprise you, for there were beavers in South Wales long after the Norman Conquest, and there are beavers still in the mountain glens of the south-east of France.

4. There were honest little water-rats too, who I daresay sat up on their hind-legs like monkeys, nibbling the water-lily pods, thousands of years ago, as they do in our pond now. Well, so far, we have come to nothing strange but now begins the fairy tale.

5. Mixed with all these animals, there wandered about great herds of elephants and rhinoceroses; not smooth-skinned, mind, but covered with hair and wool, like those which are still found sticking out of the ever

lasting ice-cliffs, at the mouth of the Lena and other Siberian rivers, with the flesh, and skin, and hair so fresh upon them, that the wild wolves tear it off, and snarl and growl over the carcases of monsters who were frozen

up thousands of years ago.

6. And with them, stranger still, were great hippopotamuses, who came perhaps northward in summer time, along the seashore and down the rivers, having spread hither all the way from Africa; for, in those days, you must understand, Sicily, and Italy, and Malta-look at your map-were joined to the coast of Africa and so it may be was the rock of Gibraltar itself.

7. Over the sea where the Straits of Gibraltar now flow was firm dry land, over which hyænas and leopards, elephants and rhinoceroses ranged into Spain, for their bones are found at this day in the Gibraltar caves, and this is the first chapter of my fairy tale.

8. Now while all this was going on, and perhaps before this began, the climate was getting colder and colder year by year-we do not know how; and what is more, the land was sinking; and it sank so deep that at last nothing was left out of the water but the tops of the mountains in Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales. It sank so deep that it left beds of shells belonging to the Arctic regions nearly two thousand feet high upon the mountain side.

9. And so

"It grew wondrous cold,
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerold."

But there were no masts then to measure the icebergs by, nor any ship nor human being there. All we know is that the icebergs brought with them vast quantities of mud, which sank to the bottom, and covered up that pleasant old forest-land in what is called boulder clay; clay full of bits of broken rock, and of blocks of stone so enormous, that nothing but an iceberg could have carried them.

10. So all the animals were drowned or driven away, and nothing was left alive, perhaps, except a few little hardy plants which clung about cracks and gullies in the mountain-tops; and whose descendants live there still. That was a dreadful time; the worst perhaps of all the age of Ice and so ends the second chapter of my fairy tale.

11. Now for my third chapter. "When things come to the worst," says the proverb, "they commonly mend; " and so did this poor frozen and drowned land of England and France and Germany, though it mended very slowly. The land began to rise out of the sea once more, and rose till it was perhaps as high as it had been at first, and hundreds of feet higher than it is now: but still it was very cold, covered, in Scotland at least, with