XXXIX. CLIMATE OF THE CATSKILLE MOUNTAINS. 1. I SHALL never forget my first view of these mountains.2 It was in the course of a voyage up the Hudson," in the good old times, before steamboats and railroads had driven all poëtry and romance out of travel. Such an excursion in those days was equal to a voyage to Europe at present, and cost almost as much; but we enjoyed the river then. My whole voyage up the Hudson was full of wonder and romance. I was a lively boy, somewhat imaginative, of easy faith, and prone to relish everything which partook of the marvellous. Among the passengers on board of the sloop was a veteran Indian" trader, on his way to the lakes to traffic with the natives. He had discovered my propensity, and amused himself throughout the voyage by telling me Indian legends and grotesque stories about every noted place on the river. 2. The Catskill Mountains, especially, called forth a host of fanciful traditions. We were all day tiding along in sight of them, so that he had full time to weave his whimsical narratives. In these mountains, he told me, according to Indian belief, was kept the great treasury of storm and sunshine for the region of the Hudson. An old squaw spirit had charge of it, who dwelt on the highest peak of the mountain. Here she kept Day and Night shut up in her wigwam, letting out only one of them at a time. She made new moons every month, and hung them up in the sky, cutting up the old ones for stars. The great Manitou, or master spirit, employed her to manufacture clouds: sometimes she wove them out of cobwebs, gossamers, and morning dew, and sent them off, flake after flake, to float in the air and give light summer showers; sometimes she would brew up black thunder-storms, and send down drenching rains, to swell the streams, and sweep everything away. ΕΙ 3. He had many stories, also, about mis'chievous spirits, who infested the mountains in the shape of animals, and played all kinds of pranks upon Indian hunters, decoying them into quag mires and morass'es, or to the brinks of torrents and precipices. All these were doled out to me as I lay on the deck, throughout a long summer's day, gazing upon these mountains, the everchanging shapes and hues of which appeared to realize the magical influences in question. Sometimes they seemed to approach; at others, to recede. During the heat of the day they almost melted into a sultry haze. As the day declined they deepened in tone; their summits were brightened by the last rays of the sun, and, later in the evening, their whole outline was printed in deep purple against an amber sky. As I beheld them thus shifting continually before my eye, and listened to the marvellous legends of the trader, a host of fanciful notions was conjured into my brain, which have haunted it ever since. ΕΙ 4. As to the Indian superstitions concerning the treasury of storms and sunshine, and the cloud-weaving spirits, they may have been suggested by the atmospherical phenomena of these mountains, the clouds which gather round their summits, and the thousand aërial effects which indicate the changes of weather over a great extent of country. They are epit'omes of our variable climate, and are stamped with all its vicissitudes. 40 And here let me say a word in favor of those vicissitudes, which are too often made the subject of exclusive repining. If they annoy us occasionally by changes from hot to cold, from wet to dry, they give us one of the most beautiful climates in the world. 5. They give us the brilliant sunshine of the south of Europe, with the fresh verdure of the north. They float our summer sky with clouds of gorgeous tints or fleecy whiteness, and send down cooling showers to refresh the panting earth and keep it green. Our seasons are all poetical; the phenomena of our heavens are full of sublimity and beauty. Winter with us has none of its proverbial gloom. It may have its howling winds, and chilling frosts, and whirling snow-storms; but it has also its long intervals of cloudless sunshine, when the snow-clad earth gives redoubled brightness to the day; when, at night, the stars beam with intensest lustre, or the moon floods the whole landscape with her most limpid radiance. 6. And then the joyous outbreak of our Spring, bursting at once into leaf and blossom, redundant with vegetation, and vociferous with life! And the splendors of our Summer; its morning voluptuousness and evening glory; its airy palaces of sun-gilt clouds piled up in a deep azure sky; and its gusts of tempest of almost tropical grandeur, when the forked lightning and the bellowing thunder volley from the battlements of heaven and shake the sultry atmosphere ! And the sublime melancholy of our Autumn, magnificent in its decay, withering down the pomp and pride of a woodland country, yet reflecting back from its yellow forests the golden serenity of the sky! Surely we may say that, in our climate, "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth forth his handiwork: day unto day uttereth speech; and night unto night showeth knowl edge." IRVING. 1.- HAPPINESS. - Keble. THERE are166 in this rude stunning tide Of the everlasting chime; Through dusty lane and wrangling mart, Plying their daily toil with busier feet, Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat. 2.- FRIENDSHIP.- Wordsworth. Sunall service is true service while it lasts; Protects the lingering dew-drop from the sun. 3.- COMFORT IN ADVERSITY. - Southey. Methinks, if ye would know How visitations of calamity Affect the pious soul, 't is shown you there! Look yonder at that cloud, which, through the sky, Sailing alone, doth cross in her career The rolling moon! I watched it as it came, And deemed the deep opaque would blot her beams Too curious man, why dost thou seek to know 5. SHORTSIGHTEDNESS OF MAN. - Trench. A dew-drop, falling on the ocean-wave, And, happy now, the grace did magnify Which thrust it forth as it had feared-to die; 6.- INDEPENDENCE. - Thomson. 1 care not, Fortune, what you mel56 deny; Of Fancy, Reason, Virtue, naught can me bereave! 7.- THE MORAL LAW. Wordsworth. All true glory rests, EI All praise of safety, and all happiness, And the arts died by which they had been raised. Upon the plain of vanished Syracuse, Is that philosophy whose sway is framed 8. THE RUINED CITY. I asked of Time, from whom those temples rose, And, borne on swifter wing, he hurried by !- And, whilst his visage wore Pride's scornful smile, "Haply thou know'st;-then, tell me whose!" I cried,"Whose these vast domes that even in ruin shine?" "I reck not whose," he said; "they now are mine! "" XLI. -JOHN POUNDS, THE COBBLER. 1. JOHN POUNDS was one of those good Samaritans of whom every generation apparently produces some examples. Born on the 17th of July, in the year 1766, at Portsmouth in England, he was apprenticed, when twelve years of age, to a shipwright, with whom he served three years of his term, when a serious accident happened to the boy. Falling one day from a considerable height into one of the dry docks, he dislocated his thigh, and was in other respects very grievously injured. Time and surgical ingenuity sufficed to restore him to a tolerable state, but he was crippled in such a manner as to be unfitted to resume his trade; and so John Pounds became a cobbler. ΕΙ 2. He lived a lonely kind of life. Having no household soci ety," and being little disposed to go abroad in quest of entertainment, he relieved his involuntary solitude by rearing and domesticating all kinds of singing birds and harmless animals; teaching some of them a variety of amusing tricks, and accustoming those of opposite propensities to live together in harmony. He would sit with a cat upon one shoulder, and a canary-bird on the other, charming away fear from the one, and curbing destructive inclinations in the other. 3. The notion of undertaking the gratuitous education" of poor children seems to have been suggested accidentally to John Pounds. A brother of his, who was a seafaring man with a large family, had amongst the rest a feeble little boy, with deformed feet. John benevolently took charge of this lad, cured him of his deformity, and taught him to read. Thinking it would be well for the boy to have a companion in study, he took another, and then another poor child under his care, until at length he became a sort of ragged schoolmaster-general to all the poorer population; and, in a spirit of noble disinterestedness, performed a most serviceable work in his generation. 4. He might be seen, day after day, in his small workshop, about six feet wide, and eighteen in length, in St. Mary-street, Portsmouth, seated on his stool, mending shoes, and attending at the same time to the studies of a busy crowd of ragged children, clustering around him. Sometimes there would be assembled in his shop as many as forty boys and girls, the latter of whom he kept a little apart from the rest. In receiving pupils, he made choice of those who seemed most in need of his reforming discipline. He had a decided predilection for "the little blackguards," and was frequently at great pains to attract such within his door. He was once seen following a young vaga |