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fragments of trees or other obstructions encountered as they were hurled along, by the swollen, discoloured torrent. The little sufferer was deprived of all sensibility, and his piteously bruised and lacerated person was now unresistingly tossed about and hurried onward by the muddy stream, amid logs and portions of buildings or trees, into the bayou, where the angry element sought its level.

Meanwhile the cries of "Crevasse!" had sounded in the ears of Mrs. Morel with fearful associations of danger to her precious boy, until the loss of all consciousness gave the relief of temporary death. When sufficiently recovered, the presence of strange faces around her brought back the reality of her sad position. Her first words were to call for Leopold, whilst the frantic manner and unintelligible nature of her demand, to the strangers with whom she now chanced to be, gave rise to the thought that they had sheltered a poor maniac. When the distressed mother more calmly insisted upon personally going in search of her Leopold, at a moment when the streets were scarcely safe to the stoutest man, there remained no doubt in the minds of those around her, as to the nature of the duty they had to perform. Gentle but positive restraint was now resorted to, and the suffering stranger, while in a supposed lucid interval, was promised that efforts more effective than her own should at once be made, to find her lost Leopold. Orders were accordingly given in her hearing, but with the accompanying wink that negatives their fulfilment, that the servants of the house should with all possible speed and assistance, go towards the cemetery in search of the lost boy.

The poor afflicted widow gradually sank into a state of calm submission to the will of heaven; her good sense told her how vain were her own individual exertions to aid in finding her son, and her drooping heart seemed yet sustained by hope, and her burning brain relieved by tears. Her mind dwelt unavoidably upon the dreadful consequences to life and property that had been known to follow a serious break or crevasse in the Levee, occasioned by a sudden or great rise in the Mississippi; and then she would attempt to persuade herself, against her better judgment, that possibly Leopold had been able to reach his home before the severity of the storm, or at least before the greater danger from the crevasse.

The Levee, banking out the river and reclaiming thousands of acres of valuable land between its channel and the more or less distant bluffs, consists of artificial mounds, thrown up, and composed of cypress logs and clay, to the height of about fifteen feet, and thirty at their base. At New Orleans, the spring floods often create a rise of twelve feet in the Mississippi, causing the singular spectacle of a city lying as many feet below the threatening level of that mighty stream first seen by De Soto, which receives the swelling waters of numerous tributaries, during its circuitous and hurried course of more than three thousand miles.

For the two or three succeeding days after that on which the Widow Morel was left under the surveillance of strangers, who had mistaken her misery for madness, the flooded city was still navigated by small boats; and each day brought intelligence to the housed inhabitants, of newly discovered calamities. Among these painful recitals was one of a fair-haired boy, apparently nine years of age, drowned in the bayou, whose body, rescued by two sailors, remained unclaimed by his friends. This sad story, on the third day of the flood, reached the mansion where Mrs. Morel was still a guest against her will, and at the moment too when its misjudging inmates had succeeded in securing a place in the lunatic department of the hospital, for the bereaved mother whom Heaven had permitted them thus accidentally to

succour.

Expressions of regret and well-founded sympathy now came too late, as they mostly do, when deep and irreparable injuries or neglect have been inflicted. The opulent are as helpless in restoring life, as the poor and suffering to whom it is equally precious; and the bereaved mother heard the idle words, feeling that God alone could bring quiet or resignation to her lonely heart.

Each succeeding spring, for some years after the date of our story, a fragile pale woman might be seen strewing fresh flowers upon an unostentatious tomb, where more newly-made letters from the sculptor's chisel had added to the words "MY EMMA," those of "MY LEOPOLD," with only these simple lines:

"Twins in a mother's love and care,

Though doomed this narrow grave to share,
Their spirits shall in union rise,

To claim the mansion of the skies."

THE SNOW.

BY MRS. C. H. ESLING.

HURRAH for the snow, the winter snow,
It cometh with stealthy tread,
It covers the ground with a robe of white,
It falleth between us and the light,
And it whirleth overhead.

It peepeth in at the window pane,

It lodgeth upon the sill,

And we sing, as its white flakes come and go,

Hurrah for the snow, the winter snow,

Though its stormy breath be chill

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