his still form, watching with sinew-strung bow amidst pathless solitudes. When it had donned the blanched insignia of Eagle-hood, and on steadier wings with swifter rushing flight, spread its white tail and threw its white head far back to utter resounding war-cries, then, with a shock, upsprung in answer, the sharp ring of the rifle, and the hissing bullet told that a more fearful foe had come! And now it became more wary and learned to fear for its wild empire; for from afar the gradual hum of an approaching civilization swelled upon the ancient silence, until the belching roar of a Steamboat roused the startled echoes to reverberate on distant hills as it passed up the quiet-gliding river! Then in fire, in thunder, and in smoke, the mysterious and terrible Advent was announced to all the creatures of a wilderness which was henceforth to own a new dominion, and with sullen. flappings the Eagle passed away towards the West, above falling forests and uprising cities, to find the unviolated solitudes.

There again the same sights and sounds would follow it apace, until at last the Steam Horse, snorting flames, came tearing through the bowels of the old solemn hills, to fill the wide valleys beyond with the iron clangor of its hurtling speed, and then the astounded guardian of Earth's Primeval sleep whirled away on hurried wings, deeper yet deeper towards the West! Still the inexorable pursuers came upon its track, and still it passed on before, in shortening flights, until at last its earliest foe no longer answered with the warwhoop to its scream, and the forests seemed oppressed with the silence of a pause, as if it but awaited, breathlessly, the terrible coming!

And here the swift-winged bird first felt that it was weary! The steel-hinged pinions that had "sheared the subtile ayre" so long, seemed to have lost their free, triumphing spring, and it went heavily upon its way. Now its savage pride becomes reconciled in a degree to the tumults and strange sounds from which it fled at first in fiercest wrath, because

it finds the lambs, pigs, geese and turkeys of the farm-yard to be easier prey to its decaying powers than the wild creatures it had proudly conquered in the earlier lustrums of the century it is living to a close.

Now the Royal Eagle sinks into a petty plunderer, and the final decadence of its grandeur is, when, from the last patch of its forest-home it launches out on stiffened wings above the villages on some "Independence morning," and hears, as it wheels slowly over the gathered crowds, wild shouts of patriotic recognition as the youthful Orator points aloft to the omen of Liberty!-Shouts that but frighten the superannuated Cloud-King, which rushes on to the nearest covert to hide, until the warty barnacles of age overtake it, and its rusty plumes no longer lift it to the clouds!

18

CHAPTER XII.

MY WIFE'S STORY OF HER PET CAT-BIRD, "GENERAL BEM."

Two years ago we were residing in C. We had very few friends near us, and sometimes the days seemed very dreary and long to us, for our pet Brownie had been dead many months, and we had said we could never have another such pet; to lose him had grieved us too much, and we would not have our hearts so nearly broken again.

Still we could not but admire the taste of our new acquaintance, W, who kept his bachelor establishment solely for the accommodation of pet song-birds, and that his own love and genius for music might be nourished by this association of all our most charming songsters. We spent many an hour in his "bird rooms," listening to the gay mimiery of mocking birds, the clear, musical piping of his English black birds, and the loud, enchanting whistle of the cardinal birds, carrying us dreamily deep into the shadow of wildwoods, where other sounds faded from the ear, and all our senses merged towards one centre, where gleamed the glowing breast of the cardinal bird, lifted above the bare branches, which stood gauntly out from the green, embosoming leaves which would have shut him from the sunlight had he descended.

The lark leaping upward, chaunted his song with a saddened tone that made us weep, while we felt how even the presence of those gay companions was no compensation for the clear sky, which had filled his eye with such liquid light,