"Rascal, why are you telling lies? Where in the world have men ever become beasts!

At length this dispute came before the Cadi, and the Cadi asked thus: "Oh! carpenter, tell us how the sons of this man became bear's whelps?" He replied, Worshipful sir, the two boys were playing about upon the ground, and suddenly they turned into bear's whelps. The Cadi said, "How shall I know that this story is true?" Then the carpenter began to say, "My lord, I have seen and read in a book, that once upon a time a number of people were, through the wrath of God, turned into animals; but the sense of these people remains the same as before they are changed, and their regards and affections continue the same. It is expedient, therefore, that you bring those two bear's whelps immediately into the public court before all the people, and if they be his boys, then they will show their regard for him, and if not, do unto me as to you seemeth good."

This remark of his was approved by the Cadi; and having made the bear's whelps be brought into the court, he caused them to be let loose in presence of the goldsmith. On account of his appearance they immediately testified a regard for him; and singling him out from amidst the whole crowd, they spontaneously ran towards him, and began to rub their faces against his legs, and push their heads into his bosom. Then the Cadi said, "Oh! false goldsmith, these two are thy boys, it is evident to me; therefore come here, and having taken them up, carry them to your own house. Why should you unjustly desert them, and throw blame upon this poor carpenter?" Then the goldsmith fell at the carpenter's feet, and began to make supplication thus: "Oh friend! if this is a contrivance of yours to get your own share, then take it, and restore to me my boys." He replied, "Oh, goldsmith! your conduct has been very wicked, and a violation of confidence; but if you will now leave off treachery and falsehood, and seriously repent, then perhaps your boys may return to their original form." In short, the goldsmith gave him his share, and got back his

two sons.

Deal.

TO THE CLOUDS AT SUNSET.

BY G. R. CARTER.

Ye pageants of the sky! that beam afar
Like isles of eastern light;

Rich with resplendent tints your bosoms are,
And from the sunset to the evening star
Ye lure the wandering sight.

Ye seem suspended like ethereal homes
Amid the sapphire heaven;

And beauty's roseate flush upon ye blooms,
And chrystal light your sacred path illumes,
As ye are onward driven.

Oh! do ye fly, bright pageants! in the air,
Sustained on viewless wings?

Does Cynthia's crown display its splendor there,
Or magic lutes like fountains breathe their pray'r
From song-enchanted strings?

Your hallowed mysteries ye ne'er disclose
Ere man receives his doom;
No, they alone immortally repose

Amid your gorgeous homes, whose slumber knows
The midnight of the tomb !

EPIGRAM.

BY T. A. TEMPLETON, L. L. B.

Tom once invited me to dine,
And taste some excellent port wine,-
He ask'd, and I embraced it.

A more exact man I ne'er knew;
His invite literally was true,-

He only let me taste it!

CHURCH-YARD LITERATURE.

There should be something beautiful and pathetic in the "trivial, fond records" which affection loves to write upon the tombstones of those who have fled from life to immortality. How is it, then, that we so rarely see any thing touching or tender in the epitaphs wherewith our churchyards are full?

We err, greatly, on the side of affectation:-between that and affection there is but a syllabic difference, yet how fatal is it. We seek to be striking: to make the marble eloquent with our grief: we should simply record what the survivor feels and what the departed was. We write down in Greek and Latin, a studied character of the dead, instead of inscribing it in plain and simple words. We shut out ninetenths of the world from the very knowledge of what we feel or mean to imply as our feelings. And in doing so we fail. The many never hold in sympathy with the few:the unlearned, in classical tongues, distrust (and so do we) the pomp which chronicles its grief in an unknown tongue. The few that can translate, what is rarely worth being translated, must not expect to find their griefs (if any) echoed by the unlearned.-Give us a plain, simple, English epitaph, above all the display which loads the mute marble with its show of learning. Far more touching is the scanty epitaph "O, rare Ben Jonson !" than the learned lumber which Parr wrote for the monumental inscription of Dr. Johnson.

What would Shakespeare's epitaph have been, if written in the Latin instead of the English language? Here it is:"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here,

Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."

The chief fault of modern epitaphs is, their glaring and presumptuous impiety. What right has any one to say of another that he is gone to heaven? There is death first, then judgment, and after that-for some-heaven.

Pope's on Sir Isaac Newton, is scarcely free from fault. Yet it is a beautiful inscription :

"Nature and Nature's works lay hid in night,
God said 'Let Newton be,' and all was light."

Some epitaphs are quite ludicrous. There is one on a child that died young :

"What was I begun for,

To be so soon done for?"

And that serio-comic couplet over a grave in Fairfield church-yard :

"Beneath this stone here lie two children dear,

The one at Stoney Middleton-the other here."

In Ashburn church, on the pedestal of a monument, (by Banks) to the memory of Sir Brooke Boothby's only daughter, an infant, there is a most touching inscription:

"She was in form and intellect most exquisite. The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark, and the wreck was total."

Coleridge has written a most beautiful quartet on an infant, which now may be found in almost every churchyard in the empire :

"Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care;

The opening bud to heaven conveyed,

And bade it blossom there."

Shelly, too, has one scarce less beautiful, but in a different vein, and on a different subject:

"These are two friends whose lives were undivided,
So let their memory be, now they have glided
Under the grave; let not their bones be parted,
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted."

We have always thought the epitaph on the poet Keats as singularly pathetic. It is full of sweet and touching pathos. We think, as we read it, of him "who died too soon." How solemnly does Shelley's dirge rise, like the

sound of a morning song, over this young poet. He has said:

"

- he is not dead, he doth not sleep

He hath awakened from the dream of life-
'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirits knife
Invulnerable nothings-we decay,

Like corpses in a charnel: fear and guilt
Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living
clay."

But we must not trust ourselves to quote from Shelley. Every stanza of his sublime "Elegy on the Death of John Keats" is full of linked sweetness, awakening most sad yet sweet memories within the hearts of those who read it. Let the lover of beautiful and true verse refer to "Adonais" for the context from which we have severed the above stanza. Well will it repay them for many, many perusals. We would think coldly of the man who could read this tribute from genius living to genius dead, without being somewhat subdued in melancholy.

Keats died at Rome in 1821. He faded, like a thought, away; not suddenly, not fleetly-but like a thought whose image we fix on the tablets of the heart. He said, not long before he died, that he "felt the flowers growing over him." He was buried in the romantic and lowly cemetry of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which was erected in the time of Cestius, and the massy wall, and stones, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetry is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. "It might make one live in love with death." says Shelley, "to think that we should be buried in so sweet a place." The tombstone is a white marble, bearing the following inscription, surmounted by a lyre, in basso relievo :

"This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired