cause he cannot see them, nor the application of the laws of life which he can see in sensible existences to them; nor would any such man deny the same application at the other end of the scale to spiritual, especially, since he has higher order of proof, independent of revelation, that they are!

Though each of these two natures in man is a unit capable of separate existence, yet the imagination is only apparent through the material, as electricity through the atmosphere, which conveys to us the flash and sound. We do not argue that electricity is a property of atmosphere, because we only hear and see it through this medium; nor do we argue that electricity is not, because it is not always apparent. We know it to be above us and around us, nevertheless, and gentle and familiar as the airs of home; but if we should forget! then, shaken with grandeur through the last quivering fibre, we are reminded that it is.

Though it sleeps now with silence, in its "old couch of space," yet its articulations are all of the sublime, and the awed earth, and the reverberating heavens rock beneath its stunning shout, when it answers the far-spaces in laughter at man's vain presumptuous doubts.

As electricity to nature, so imagination is to man's material or reasoning part. It is not always apparent to his drowsy consciousness; yet it always is subtle and silent, refining his coarse passions or making them more terrible; and its articulations, too, are all of the sublime; and when the gathering nations, with rapture on their multitudinous tongues, swell the huzza to glorious deeds, you may know that it has leaped from its "dumb cradle!"

All that is grand, magnificent, sublime, the Past has to tell-the Future has no hope: Imagination wrought or must create. The Chieftain, the Architect, the Sculptor, the Painter, the Poet, are her slaves-and at her bidding, the world is showered with splendors. In a word, Imagination is the Soul.

The cause of that gradual physical deterioration we notice from the times before the flood to the present, evidently may

song of yon more favored twain! Can he be glad with all his misery, his piteous unrecking shame upon him?

Here we reluctantly pause. A voice from the printer"No more space! all closed!" falls like a sudden shower upon the thin wings of our "Reverie," and damps them back to earth. They will soon dry and grow glossy again, and be rollicking madly on the fitful winds as if the envious clouds had never wept.

CHAPTER II.

BOYHOOD AND BIRDS.

THE Hunter Naturalist is formed in childhood. "The little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump," commenceth its strange ferment in that unconscious time when the sun is yet the golden wonder, and all of earth's apparelings glitter in the splendor of the dew.

Why is it that with our scathed brows relaxed we watch the gambols of the "little ones" with such pleasure? Is it not that the sweet simplicity and natural grace of every impulse and movement of the healthy child recalls our earliest associations of the lovable, the piquant and the pleasing, as exhibited in the life of the Natural World?

We may grow to be paste-board, and painted men and women, to be sure, and learn to admire the antics of bedizened monkeys, which would be even miscalled "Human Brats!" -but such terrific perversions, thanks to the illimitable blue that is universed in the deep eye of one true child of God and Nature can do little harm. We pity while we despiseyet, in the other, the chubby insolence of exuberant fun provokes the laughter of deep joy. Ha! ha! we laugh, and let our sides go quaking with the tranquil stir of bliss that God has left us something natural even in the children of our loins as well as in his "unhoused wilds !"

If I feel now that the sanctifying pleasure of renewing the reminiscences of my earlier life in connection with Birds, and Flowers, and wild scenes, can afford to others a proxi

mate gratification to that which they have afforded me in the act of recalling them, I may perhaps be pardoned for making as nearly as is possible "a free breast of it!"

I must therefore be permitted to confess, after my own fashion, one of the first, of the many droll troubles, in which the Hunter-Naturalist in the earlier stages of his experiences and development is liable to be involved.

While yet a boy, I had one, out of a number of sisters, who, being nearest my own age, became naturally my espe cial playmate. She had dark lustrous eyes, delicate features, and a form lithe, supple and elastic as that of a she wild-cat; and like that creature also, possessed a marvellous facility of ascension—that is, she had a faculty of ascending, by that indefinite process called "climbing," the uttermost boughs of plumb trees, apple trees, cherry trees, pears trees, &c., &c.,-as also the tops of fences, barns, houses and such like!

She was, hence and therefore, quite generally christened "Tom-boy"—but, if ever any vulgar sense of that phase was misapplied, it was in this instance, as characterizing a severe audacity that, as it was above fear or thought of evil, never dreamed in its pride of the possibility of misconstruction.

She was fearless, because God had gifted her thus in her innocence that she dreaded not his Justice!

She was my dainty compeer and companion in many an enthusiastic forage into the wild domains of Nature.

I shall proceed to relate one of the most memorable of these in which she assisted me, as only her sex could have done, in relation to some young "MOCKING BIRDS IN A

STRANGE NEST":

It must be premised that, at the settlement of Kentucky, the mocking bird (Turdus polyglottus) was not known in the land as a resident; but that, when the war-whoop had ceased to affright the silence, and the ring of the deadly rifle given way to the peaceful clang of scythes, whetted by mowers in the broad, green, smiling meadows, then the king of song

birds made his appearance, and took possession of the fair land, as of a rightful heritage.

To be sure, it had been seen before this, and the hunters knew its white-barred wings from afar off, but not its name; nor had they heard its song. It had always shown itself wild and shy in the extreme as if it were a mere passenger through an evil country, and feared to rest the soles of its feet upon a soil that was accursed. But, with the blooming orchards, waving grain, and all the pleasant sights and mellow sounds of peace, the scared way-farers tarried for awhile to rest, and then to find a new kingdom and a home.

There is something very curious in the manner in which this creature took possession, first of Northern Kentucky; and then, some twenty years after, of the Southern part, or Green River country, as it is known. The North, beyond doubt, from its physical confomation, suited the habits and tastes of the fastidious monarch best; and besides, it was nearly fifty years after the settlement of the North, and not until the world had commenced to style it the Paradise of the West, that the Green River valley began to emerge from the semi-barbarous condition of a frontier, and to be considered by him as worthy of notice. Then he came more frequently, a fleeting scout "to spy out the land and the richness thereof." I remember well, a very eccentric, good-natured, and garrulous old gentleman of my native town, a Mr. B.who was a good naturalist by the way, and loved birds dearly-telling me about a chase after the first mocking bird he ever saw in the Green River country. He was one of the earliest settlers of our town, and had known the bird well in Virginia, and had frequently seen it in the north of Kentucky. He often, during a residence of twelve or fifteen years, wondered why he had never seen it in the "Barrens"—which was the old name the hunters had given to the Green River Valley.

Mr. B. was one day riding through these black oak Bar