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PICTURES OF MEMORY.

BY ALICE CARY.

Among the beautiful pictures
That hang on Memory's wall,
Is one of a dim old forest,

That seemeth best of all;
Not for its gnarled oaks olden,
Dark with the mistletoe;

Not for the violets golden,

That sprinkle the vale below;
Not for the milk-white lilies,

That lean from the fragrant hedge,
Coquetting all day with the sunbeams,
And stealing their golden edge;
Not for the vines on the upland,

Where the bright red berries rest,
Nor the pinks, nor the pale, sweet cowslip,

It seemeth to me the best.

I once had a little brother,

With eyes that were dark and deep;

In the lap of that dim old forest,
He lieth in peace asleep:
Light as the down of the thistle,

Free as the winds that blow,

We roved there the beautiful summers,
The summers of long ago;

But his feet on the hills grew weary,

And, one of the autumn eves,

I made for my little brother,

A bed of the yellow leaves.

NEW MCGUF. FIFTH

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Sweetly his pale arms folded
My neck in a meek embrace,
As the light of immortal beauty
Silently covered his face;
And when the arrows of sunset
Lodged in the tree tops bright,
He fell, in his saintlike beauty,
Asleep by the gates of light.
Therefore of all the pictures
That hang on Memory's wall,
The one of the dim old forest
Seemeth the best of all.

VOICES OF ANIMALS.

BY LOUIS AGASSIZ.

The voices of animals have a family character not to be mistaken. All the dog family bark and howl— the fox, the wolf, the dog, have the same kind of utterance, though on a somewhat different pitch. All the bears growl, from the white bear of the Arctic snows to the small black bear of the Andes. All the cats mew, from our quiet fireside companion to the lions and tigers and panthers of the forest and jungle.

This last may seem a strange assertion; but to any one who has listened critically to their sounds and analyzed their voices, the roar of the lion is but a gigantic mew, bearing about the same proportion to that of a cat as its stately and majestic form does to the smaller, softer, more peaceable aspect of the cat. Yet notwithstanding the

difference in their size, who can look at the lion, whether in his more sleepy mood, as he lies curled up in the corner of his cage, or in his fiercer moments of hunger or of rage, without being reminded of a cat? And this is not merely the resemblance of one carnivorous animal with another; for no one was ever reminded of a dog or wolf by a lion.

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Again, all the horses and donkeys neigh; for the bray of a donkey is only a harsher neigh, pitched on a different key, it is true, but a sound of the same character as the donkey himself is but a clumsy and dwarfish horse. All the cows low, from the buffalo roaming the prairie, the musk ox of the Arctic ice fields, or the yak of Asia, to the cattle feeding in our pastures.

Among the birds, this similarity of voice in families is still more marked. We need only recall the harsh and noisy parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or, take as an example the web-footed family. Do not all geese and the innumerable host of ducks quack? Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the songster family--the nightingales, the thrushes, the mockingbirds, the robins; they differ in the greater or less perfection of their note, but the same kind of voice runs through the whole group.

Can we suppose that characteristics like these have been communicated from one animal to another? When we find that all the members of one zoölogical family, however widely scattered over the surface of the earth,

inhabiting different continents and even different hemispheres, speak with one voice, must we believe that they have originated in the places where they now occur, with all their distinctive peculiarities?

Who taught the American thrush to sing like his European relative? He surely did not learn it from his cousin over the waters. We have much yet to learn from investigations of this kind, with reference not only to families among animals, but to nationalities among men also.

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The similarity of motion in families is another subject well worth the consideration of the naturalist: — the soaring of the birds of prey,—the floating of the swallows, with their short cuts and angular turns, the hopping of the sparrows, the deliberate walk of the hens and the strut of the cocks, - the waddle of the ducks and geese, the slow, heavy creeping of the land turtle, the graceful flight of the sea turtle under the water, the leaping and swimming of the frog, the swift run of the lizard, like a flash of green or red light in the sunshine, the dart of the pickerel, -the leap of the trout, -the fluttering flight of the butterfly, the quivering poise of the humming bird, the slow crawling of the snail, the sideway movement of the sand crab, - the backward walk of the crawfish, the almost imperceptible gliding of the sea anemone over the rock. In short, every family of animals has its characteristic action and its peculiar voice; and yet so little is this endless variety of rhythm and cadence both of motion and sound in the organic world understood, that we lack words to express one half its richness and beauty.

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OWL AGAINST ROBIN.

BY SIDNEY LANIER.

Frowning, the owl in the oak complained him

Sore, that the song of the robin restrained him

Wrongly of slumber, rudely of rest.

"From the north, from the east, from the south, and the

west,

Woodland, wheat field, cornfield, clover,

Over and over and over and over,

Five o'clock, ten o'clock, twelve, or seven,
Nothing but robin songs heard under heaven :
How can we sleep?

"Peep! you whistle, and cheep! cheep! cheep!
Oh, peep if you will, and buy, if 'tis cheap,
And have done; for an owl must sleep.

"Are ye singing for fame, and who shall be first?
Each day's the same, yet the last is worst,
And the summer is cursed with the silly outburst
Of idiot redbreasts peeping and cheeping

By day, when all honest birds ought to be sleeping.
Lord, what a din ! And so out of all reason.
Have ye not heard that each thing hath its season?
Night is to work in, night is for playtime;

Good heavens, not daytime!

"A vulgar flaunt is the flaring day,

The impudent, hot, unsparing day,

That leaves not a stain nor a secret untold
Day the reporter, the gossip of old,
Deformity's tease, man's common scold-

Poh! Shut the eyes, let the sense go numb

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