double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat apples and hand round daguerreotypes,-I say, I think the conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition, were he getting up a new temptation of St. Anthony.

There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful harmonies we hope to enjoy.-But why should I tell lies? If my friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth. I never heard but two voices in my life that frightened me by their sweetness.

-Frightened you?-said the schoolmistress.Yes, frightened me. They made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with such a chord in her voice to some string in another's soul, that, if she but spoke, he would leave all and follow her, though it were into the jaws of Erebus. Our only chance to keep our wits is, that there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.-But I tell you this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who followed him?

Whose were those two voices that bewitched

me so?-They both belonged to German women One was a chambermaid, not otherwise fascinating The key of my room at a certain great hotel was missing, and this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information respecting it. The simple soul was evidently not long from her mother-land, and spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect. But to hear her wonder and lament and suggest, with soft, liquid inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full of serious tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child that had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her features and figure been as delicious as her accents,-if she had 'ooked like the marble Clytie, for instance,-why, all

[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]

I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself. For Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a mésalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the squareroots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la Morues, until one came

to beings that ate with knives and said "Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a single moment.

The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have said, that of another Gerinan woman. -I suppose I shall ruin myself by saying that such a voice could not have come from any Americanized human being.

-What was there in it?-said the schoolmistress,—and, upon my word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic remark above reported.-Oh, I said, it had so much woman in it,—muliebrity, as well as femineity;-no self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Taci tus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil, independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things for the larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us, -I have known families famous for them, but ask the first person you meet a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic, matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your

first impulse is to retire at once from the pre cincts.

-Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard in a French hospital. Between two and three years old. Fell out of her chair and snap ped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards. C'est tout comme un serin, said the French student at my side.

These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl. There must be other things besides aërolites that wander from their own spheres to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may be nearer the literal truth than we dream. If mankind generally are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more trial to reach the shore,—as some grave theologians have maintained,-if, in plain Eng. lish, men are the ghosts of dead devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from.

Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts thiee or four score summers,-why, there must have been a few good spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak of must belong to them.

-I wish you could once hear my sister's voice, -said the schoolmistress.

If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one,said I.

I never thought mine was anything, said the

schoolmistress.

How should you know?-said I.-People never hear their own voices,-any more than they see their own faces. There is not even a looking-glass for the voice. Of course, there is something audible to us when we speak; but that something is not our own voice as it is known to all our acquaintances. I think, if an image spoke to us in our own tones, we should not know them in the least.-How pleasant it would be, if in another state of being we could have shapes like our former selves for playthings,-we standing outside or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to us just what we used to be to others!

-I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call "play," after our earthly toys are broken,said the schoolmistress.

Hush,—said I,—what will the divinity-student

say?

[I thought she was hit, that time;-but the shot