yet to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cozy and hilarious as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the least idea of.

So plain, too! Bless you, you might have understood it like a book. With its warm breath gushing forth in a light cloud, which merrily and gracefully ascended a few feet, then hung about the chimney-corner as its own domestic heaven, it trolled its song with that strong energy of cheerfulness that its iron body hummed and stirred upon the fire.

That this song of the kettle's was a song of invitation and welcome to somebody out-of-doors-to somebody at that moment coming on toward the snug, small home and the crisp fire-there is no doubt whatever. Mrs. Perrybingle knew it perfectly as she sat musing before the hearth. It's a dark night, sang the kettle, and the rotten leaves are lying by the way; and above, all is mist and darkness; and below, all is mire and clay; and there's only one relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don't know that it is one, for it's nothing but a glare of deep and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together set a brand upon the clouds for being guilty of such weather; and the widest open country is a long dull streak of black; and there's hoar-frost on the finger-post, and thaw upon the track; and the ice it isn't water, and the water isn't free; and you couldn't say that anything is what it ought to be; but he is coming, coming, coming!

And here, if you like, the cricket did chime in with a chirrup, chirrup, chirrup of such magnitude, by way of chorus, with a voice so astoundingly disproportionate to its size, as compared with the kettle (size! you couldn't see it!), that if it had then and there burst itself like an overcharged gun, if it had fallen a victim on the spot and chirruped its little body into fifty pieces, it would have seemed a natural and inevitable consequence, for which it had expressly labored.

The little kettle had had the last of its solo perform

ance. It persevered with undiminished ardor; but the cricket took first fiddle, and kept it. Good heaven, how it chirped! It's shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star. Yet they went very well together, the cricket and the kettle. The burden of the song was

still the same; and louder, louder, louder still, they sang it in their emulation.

The fair little listener lighted a candle, glanced at the haymaker on the top of the clock, who was getting in a pretty average crop of minutes; and looked out of the window, where she saw nothing, owing to the darkness, but her own face imaged in the glass. And my opinion is (and so would yours have been), that she might have looked a long way, and seen nothing half so agreeable. When she came back and sat down in her former seat, the cricket and the kettle were still keeping it up with a perfect fury of competition. The kettle's weak side clearly being, that he didn't know when he was beat.

There was all the excitement of the race about it. Chirp, chirp, chirp! cricket a mile ahead. Hum, hum, hum-m-m! kettle sticking to him in his own way; no idea of giving in. Chirp, chirp, chirp! cricket round the corner. Hum, hum, hum-m-m! kettle sticking to him in his own way; no idea of giving in. Chirp, chirp, chirp! cricket fresher than ever. Hum, hum, hum-m-m! kettle slow and steady. Chirp, chirp, chirp! cricket going to finish him. Hum, hum, hum-m-m; kettle not to be finished. Until at last they got so jumbled together, in the hurry-skurry, helterskelter, of the match, that whether the ketttle chirped and the cricket hummed, or the cricket chirped and the kettle hummed, or they both chirped and both hummed, it would have taken a clearer head than yours or mine to have decided with anything like certainty. But, of this there is no doubt; that the kettle and the cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out through the window, and a long way down the lane.

And this light, bursting on a certain person who approached it through the gloom, exprest the whole thing to him, literally in a twinkling, and cried, "Welcome home, old fellow! Welcome home, my boy!"

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BY WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

"And for our tong, that still is so empayred
By traveling linguists,-I can prove it clear
That no tong has the muses' uttterance heyred
For verse, and that sweete music to the ear

Strook out of Rhyme so naturally as this."-CHAPMAN.

Give me, of every language, first my vigorous English Stored with imported wealth, rich in its natural minesGrand in its rhythmical cadence, simple for household employment

Worthy the poet's song, fit for the speech of man.

Not from one metal alone the perfected mirror is shapen, Not from one color is built the rainbow's aerial bridge; Instruments blending together yield the divinest of music; Out of a myriad flowers sweetest of honey is drawn.

So unto thy close strength is welded and beaten together,
Iron dug from the North, ductile gold from the South;
So unto thy broad stream the ice-torrents born in the
mountains

Rush, and the rivers pour brimming with sun from the plains.

Thou hast the sharp clean edge and the downright blow

of the Saxon,

Thou the majestical march and the stately pomp of the

Latin,

Thou the euphonious swell, the rhythmical roll of the Greek;

Thine is the elegant suavity caught from sonorous Italian, Thine the chivalric obeisance, the courteous grace of the Norman

Thine the Teutonic German's inborn gutteral strength.

Raftered by firm-laid consonants, windowed by opening vowels,

Thou securely art built, free to the sun and the air;

Over thy feudal battlements trail the wild tendrils of fancy,

Where in the early morn warbled our earliest birds; Science looks out from thy watch-tower, love whispers in at thy lattice,

While o'er thy bastions wit flashes its glitttering sword.

Not by corruption rotted nor slowly by ages degraded, Have the sharp consonants gone crumbling away from our words;

Virgin and clean is their edge, like granite blocks chiseled by Egypt;

Just as when Shakespeare and Milton laid them in glorious

verse.

Fitted for every use like a great majestical river,

Blending thy various streams, stately thou flowest along, Bearing the white-winged ship of Poesy over thy bosom, Laden with spices that come out of the tropical isles, Fancy's pleasuring yacht with its bright and fluttering

pennons,

Logic's frigates of war and the toil-worn barges of trade.

How art thou freely obedient unto the poet or speaker When, in a happy hour, thought into speech he translates; Caught on the words sharp angles flash the bright hues of his fancy

Grandly the thought rides the words, as a good horseman his steed.

Now, clear, pure, hard, bright, and one by one, like to hailstones,

Short words fall from his lips fast as the first of a shower— Now in a two-fold column, Spondee, Iamb, and Trochee, Unbroke, firmset, advance, retreat, trampling along— Now with a sprightlier springiness bounding in triplicate syllables,

Dance the elastic Dactylics in musical cadences on, Now their voluminous coil intertangling like huge anacondas,

Roll overwhelmingly onward the sesquipedalian words.

Flexile and free in thy gait and simple in all thy construction.

Yielding to every turn thou bearest thy rider along;

Now like our hackney or draft-horse serving our commonest uses,

Now bearing grandly the Poet Pegasus-like to the sky.

Thou art not prisoned in fixt rules, thou art no slave to a

grammar,

Thou art an eagle uncaged scorning the perch and the chain;

Hadst thou been fettered and formalized, thou hadst been tamer and weaker.

How could the poor slave walk with thy grand freedom of gait?

Let then grammarians rail and let foreigners sigh for thy

signposts,

Wandering lost in thy maze, thy wilds of magnificent growth.