MONGOLIAN BUDDHISTIC WRITING.

Facsimile of part of fragment of a Mongolian manuscript of the XVIth century. It was discovered by the Russians in the ruins of the Buddhist monastery of Ablal-Kied, a desert spot near the source of the river Irtisch.

peaks of alabaster snow, clear and sharp in the intense blue of the cloudless sky, which crown the whole marvelous picture with awful grandeur! Norway too has its peculiar glory of fiords worming their way like black water-snakes among gigantic mountains, lofty precipices, or primeval forests. But the scenery of the Western Highlands has a distinctive character of its own. It is not beauty, in spite of its knolls of birch and oak copse that fringe the mountain lochs and the innumerable bights and bays of pearly sand. Nor is it grandeur- although there is a wonderful vastness in its far-stretching landscapes of ocean meeting the horizon, or of hills beyond hills, in endless ridges, mingling afar with the upper sky. But in the sombre coloring of its mountains; in the silence of its untrodden valleys; in the extent of its bleak and undulating moors; in the sweep of its rocky corries; in the shifting mists and clouds that hang over its dark precipices: in all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions which ghost-like float around its ancient keeps, and live in the tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness, most affecting to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance and song, of clanships and of feudal attachments, which, banished from the rest of Europe, took refuge and lingered long in those rocky fastnesses, before they "passed away forever on their dun wings from Morven."

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MY LITTLE MAY

Y LITTLE May was like a lintie

Glintin' 'mang the flowers o' spring;
Like a lintie she was cantie,

Like a lintie she could sing;

Singing, milking in the gloamin',
Singing, herding in the morn,

Singing 'mang the brackens roaming,
Singing shearing yellow corn!
Oh the bonnie dell and dingle,
Oh the bonnie flowering glen,

Oh the bonnie bleezin' ingle,

Oh the bonnie but and ben!

Ilka body smiled that met her,
Nane were glad that said fareweel:

Never was a blyther, better,
Bonnier bairn, frae croon to heel!
Oh the bonnie dell and dingle,
Oh the bonnie flowering glen,
Oh the bonnie bleezin' ingle,

Oh the bonnie but and ben!

Blaw, wintry winds, blaw cauld and eerie, Drive the sleet and drift the snaw;

May is sleeping, she was weary,

For her heart was broke in twa!

Oh wae the dell and dingle,

Oh wae the flowering glen;
Oh wae aboot the ingle,

Wae's me baith but and ben!