smoking a cigar with imperturbable firmness. So we all concluded to go back again and see the rest of the show. When we got to the door we found the entrance fee was twenty-five cents. We represented that we had been in before. "That may be," replied the cash-taker, "but we don't sell season tickets at this establishment."

Finding the discussion was likely to be violent upon this point, I retired, with some suspicions of having been slightly swindled. When I got home, Mrs. S. asked me "if we had seen the elephant?" I told her the whole story. "Well," said she, "that's just the way I thought it would be. I'm glad I did not go in."

It seems to me the country is marvellously beautiful in winter time. The number of bright days and moonlight nights is surprising. The sky is not less blue in January than in June, nor is a winter landscape without its charms. The lost verdure of the woods is compensated by the fine frost-work woven in the delicate tracery of the trees. To see a noble forest wreathed in icy gems, is one of the transcendental glories of creation. You look through long arcades of iridescent light, and the vision has an awful majesty, compared with which the most

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brilliant cathedral windows pale their ineffectual fires. It is the crystal palace of Jehovah! Within its sounding aisles a thought even of the city seems irreverent. We begin to love the country more and more.

"Its dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,
With sunset, and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness;
And autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,

And winter, robing with pure snow and crowns

Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs;

And spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes
Her first sweet kisses."

Here you begin to apprehend the wonderful order of creation, the lengthening days after the winter solstice; all the phenomena of meteoric machinery, every change in the wind, every change in the temperature; in the leafless trees you see a surprising variety of forms. The maple, the oak, the chestnut, the hickory, the beech, have each an architecture as distinct as those of the five orders. Then the spring is tardy in town, but if you have a hotped in the country, you see its young green firstlings bursting from the rich mould long before the city has shaken off the thraldom of winter.

One day in the month of March, I heard there was to be some sport on the Nepperhan in the way of fishing, so I took my young ones to see it. The Nepperhan is an historical river-the Tiber of Yonkers. It runs in a straight line for about forty yards from the Hudson, then proudly turns to the right, then curves to the left, and in fact exhibits all the peculiarities of the Mississippi without its turbulence and monotony. It was a cold day in spring, the air was chill, the sky grey, the Palisades still ribbed with snow. As we approached the stream we saw that a crowd had collected on the deck of a wrecked coal-barge moored close to the bank, and on the side of the bank opposite to the barge, a man was standing, with one foot in the water, holding up the end of a net stretched across the tide. The other end of the net was fastened to the barge, and the bight, as the sailors say, was in the water. In the middle of the crowd there stood upright a fair, portly-looking man of good presence. His face looked like a weatherbeaten, sign-board portrait of General Washington with white whiskers. He was looking up the stream, which from this point made a rush for the south for about one hundred feet, then gave it "р,

THE MYSTERY SOLVED.

61

and turned off due east, around a clump of bushes. What particular animosity General Washington had to this part of the stream I could not imagine, but he was damning that clump of bushes with a zeal worthy of a better cause. I never heard suck imprecations. The oaths flew from his lips, up stream, as the sparks fly from an express locomotive at midnight. Dr. Slop's remarks concerning the knots in the string of the green bag of surgical in struments, beside them, was like tender pity. Suck ill-natured, uncharitable, unamiable, mordacious malignant, pitiless, ruthless, fell, cruel, ferocious proscriptive, sanguinary, unkind execrations werc never fulminated against a clump of bushes before By-and-by a flat-boat, filled with men, turned the corner and came broadside down stream. The mer were splashing the water on every side of the flatboat to drive the fish towards the net! They had oars, sticks, boards, boughs, and branches. Then I understood General Washington. He had been offended because the flat-boat was behind time.

Now it was all right: I saw a placid expression spreading over his weather-beaten countenance, as a drop of oil will spread over rough water, and mollify its turbulent features. The flat-boat, or

scow, was long enough to stretch almost from shore to shore. The shouts and splashes were frightening the fish, and below us, in the water, we could occasionally see a spectral sucker darting hither and thither. I looked again at General Washing ton. He had untied the end of the net, and was holding it in his hand. His face expressed intense inward satisfaction-deep-not vain-glorious. Near and nearer swept the broadside of the boat, down stream was the net, between both were the accumulating fish. General Washington's hand trembled he was getting excited. Here it comes, close upon us, and then-by the whiskers of the Great Mogul! one end of the scow grounded on the opposite bank, the bow rounded to, and cat-fish, perch, bull-head, and sucker, darted through the gap, and made tracks for the most secluded parts of the Nepperhan! But he who held the net was equal to the emergency-he cursed the boat out at right angles in an instant-a small minority of the fish still remained, and these were driven into the net. General Washington, with an impulse like that of a Titan rooting up an oak, pulled up his end of the net-the fish were fairly above the water--a smile gleamed out of his weather-beaten