One day, out in the meadow
With strangers from the town,
Some secret plan discussing,

The men walked up and down.
Yet now and then seemed watching
A strange uncertain gleam,

That looked like lances 'mid the trees,
That stood below the stream.

At eve they all assembled,

Then care and doubt were fled;
With jovial laugh they feasted;
The board was nobly spread.
The elder of the village

Rose up, his glass in hand,
And cried, "We drink the downfall
Of an accursed land!

"The night is growing darker,
Ere one more day is flown,
Bregenz, our foemen's stronghold,
Bregenz shall be our own!"
The women shrank in terror,
(Yet Pride, too, had her part,)

But one poor Tyrol maiden
Felt death within her heart.

Nothing she heard around her,

(Though shouts rang forth again,) Gone were the green Swiss valleys, The pasture, and the plain;

Before her eyes one vision,

And in her heart one cry,
That said, "Go forth, save Bregenz,
And then, if need be, die!"

With trembling haste and breathless,
With noiseless step, she sped;
Horses and weary cattle

Were standing in the shed;

She loosed the strong, white charger, That fed from out her hand,

She mounted, and she turned his head Towards her native land.

Out-out into the darkness-
Faster, and still more fast;
The smooth grass flies behind her,
The chestnut wood is past;
She looks up; clouds are heavy:
Why is her steed so slow?-
Scarcely the wind beside them
Can pass them as they go.

"Faster!" she cries, "O faster!"
Eleven the church-bells chime:
"O God," she cries, "help Bregenz,
And bring me there in time!"
But louder than bells' ringing,
Or lowing of the kine,
Grows nearer in the midnight
The rushing of the Rhine.

Shall not the roaring waters

Their headlong gallop check?

The steed draws back in terror,
She leans upon his neck
To watch the flowing darkness;
The bank is high and steep;
One pause-he staggers forward,
And plunges in the deep.

She strives to pierce the blackness,
And looser throws the rein;
Her steed must breast the waters
That dash above his mane.
How gallantly, how nobly,

He struggles through the foam, And see in the far distance Shine out the lights of home!

Up the steep banks he bears her, And now, they rush again Towards the heights of Bregenz, That tower above the plain. They reach the gate of Bregenz, Just as the midnight rings, And out come serf and soldier

To meet the news she brings.

Bregenz is saved! Ere daylight
Her battlements are manned;

Defiance greets the army

That marches on the land.

And if to deeds heroic

Should endless fame be paid,

Bregenz does well to honor

The noble Tyrol maid.

Three hundred years are vanished,
And yet upon the hill
An old stone gateway rises,
To do her honor still.
And there, when Bregenz women
Sit spinning in the shade,
They see in quaint old carving
The Charger and the Maid.

And when, to guard old Bregenz,
By gateway, street, and tower,
The warder paces all night long
And calls each passing hour;
"Nine," "ten," "eleven," he cries aloud,
And then (O crown of Fame!)
When midnight pauses in the skies,
He calls the maiden's name!

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING.

SIR WALTER BESANT.

(From "Westminster.")

Who was the first printer?

You may read all the books, pamphlets, and articles; you may consider all the arguments, and in the long run you will know no more than you knew at the beginning. Perhaps it was Coster of Haarlem, or perhaps it was Gutenberg of Mainz. No one knows, and really it matters little except for the antiquary and the historian.

At this period some modification in the old method of copying was certain to be invented. It was by the greatest good luck, I have always thought,

that a sort of shorthand, a representation of words by little easy symbols, was not invented. For instance, supposing a separate symbol for each of the prepositions, articles, and auxiliary verbs, and other separate symbols for the commoner words, there might be some thousands of symbols in all to be learned by the scribe; but his labor would be reduced to one-tenth. They might have invented some such method. Then, satisfied with the result, we should have gone on for centuries, and the art of printing would still have to be invented.

But the time was come, and the invention, happily, came with it. Had printing been invented two centuries before, it would have been neglected and speedily forgotten, because there was no demand for books. Had it been invented two centuries later, it would have had to contend against some other contrivance for shortening labor and cheapening books.

If an ingenious projector discovers some great truth or invents some useful contrivance before or after his time, he is lost-he and his discovery. Thus, in the reign of James the First a man of great ingenuity contrived a submarine boat - he was before his age. In the middle of the last century another ingenious person discovered a way of sending messages by electricity-he was before his age. In a romance, now a hundred and fifty years old, the possibility of photography was imagined by another person before his age. Men whose ideas are much before their age receive, as their reward, contempt, certainly; imprisonment, probably; and perhaps death in one of its most unpleasant forms.

The generally received story, after all that has