out ov it, and got badly stung into the bargin, he finds thare ain't mutch margin in it. Next to poor molassis, bumblebee hunny iz the poorest kind ov sweetmeats in market. Bumblebees hav allwuss been in fashion, and probably allwuss will be, but whare the fun or profit lays in them i never could cyper out. The proffit don't seem to be in the hunny, nor in the bumblebee neither. They bild their nest in the ground, or enny whare else they take a noshun to. It ain't afrade to fite a whole distrikt skool if they meddle with them. I don't blame the bumblebee nor enny other fellow, for defending hiz sugar; it iz the fust and last Law ov natur, and i hope the law won't never run out. The smartest thing about the bumblebee iz their stinger.

6. Edgar Wilson Nye (Bill Nye).

THE GARDEN HOSE

It is now the proper time for the cross-eyed woman to fool with the garden hose. I have faced death in almost every form, and I do not know what fear is, but when a woman with one eye gazing into the Zodiac and the other peering into the middle of next week, and wearing one of those floppy sunbonnets, picks up the nozle of the garden hose and turns on the full force of the institution, I fly wildly to the Mountains of Hepsidam.

Water won't hurt any one, of course, if care is used not to forget and drink any of it, but it is this horrible suspense and uncertainty about facing the nozle of a garden hose in the hands of a cross-eyed woman that unnerves and paralyzes me.

Instantaneous death is nothing to me. I am as cool and collected where leaden rain and iron hail are thickest, as I would be in my own office writing the obituary of the man who steals my jokes. But I hate to be drowned slowly in my good clothes and on dry land, and have my dying gaze rest on a woman whose ravishing beauty would drive a narrow-gage mule into convulsions and make him hate himself t' death.

7. Donald Grant Mitchell, "Ik Marvel" (1822-1908), was a graduate of Yale. His best-known work is Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), which was immensely popular a generation or two ago. His writings have a freshness and charm which are rarely found.

THE SEA

(From Reveries of a Bachelor-"Fourth Reverie")

The sea is around me. The last headlands have gone down under the horizon, like the city steeples, as you lose yourself in the calm of the country, or like the great thoughts of genius, as you slip from the pages of poets into your own quiet Reverie.

The waters skirt me right and left; there is nothing but water before, and only water behind. Above me are sailing clouds, or the blue vault, which we call, with childish license, heaven. The sails white and full, like helping friends, are pushing me on; and night and day are distent with the winds which come and go-none know .whence, and none know whither. A land-bird flutters aloft, weary with long flying, and lost in a world where are no forests but the careening masts, and no foliage but the drifts of spray. It cleaves a while to the smooth spars, till urged by some homeward yearning, it bears off in the face of the wind, and sinks and rises over the angry waters, until its strength is gone, and the blue waves gather the poor flutterer to their cold and glassy bosom.

All the morning I see nothing beyond me but the waters, or a tossing company of dolphins; all the noon, unless some white sail, like a ghost, stalks the horizon, there is still nothing but the rolling seas; all the evening, after the sun has grown big and sunk under the water-line, and the moon risen white and cold to glimmer across the tops of the surging ocean, there is nothing but the sea and the sky to lead off thought, or to crush it with their greatness.

Hour after hour as I sit in the moonlight upon the taffrail, the great waves gather far back and break,—and gather nearer, and break louder, and gather again, and roll down swift and terrible under the creaking ship, and heave it up

lightly upon their swelling surge, and drop it gently to their seething and yeasty cradle, like an infant in the swaying arms of a mother, or like a shadowy memory upon the billows of manly thought.

Conscience wakes in the silent nights of ocean; life lies open like a book, and spreads out as level as the sea. Regrets and broken resolutions chase over the soul like swift winged night-birds; and all the unsteady heights and the wastes of action lift up distinct and clear from the uneasy but limpid depths of memory. . .

But ocean has its storms, when fear will make strange and holy companionship; and even here my memory shifts swiftly and suddenly.

-It is a dreadful night. The passengers are clustered, trembling, below. Every plank shakes; and the oak ribs groan as if they suffered with their toil. The hands are all aloft; the captain is forward shouting to the mate in the cross-trees, and I am clinging to one of the stanchions by the binnacle. The ship is pitching madly, and the waves are toppling up sometimes as high as the yard-arm, and then dipping away with a whirl under our keel, that makes every timber in the vessel quiver. The thunder is roaring like a thousand cannons; and at the moment the sky is cleft with a stream of fire that glares over the tops of the waves, and glistens on the wet decks and the spars,-lighting up all so plain, that I can see the men's faces in the main-top, and catch glimpses of the reefers on the yard-arm, clinging like death; then all is horrible darkness.

The spray spits angrily against the canvas; the waves crash against the weather-bow like mountains; the wind howls through the rigging, or, as a gasket gives way, the sail, bellying to leeward, splits like a crack of a musket. I hear the captain in the lulls screaming out orders; and the mate in the rigging screaming them over, until the lightning comes, and the thunder, deadening their voices as if they were chirping sparrows.

In one of the flashes I see a hand upon the yard-arm lose his foothold as the ship gives a plunge; but his arms

are clenched around the spar. Before I can see any more, the blackness comes, and the thunder, with a crash that half deafens me. I think I hear a low cry, as the mutterings die away in the distance; and at the next flash of lightning, which comes in an instant, I see upon the top of one of the waves along-side the poor reefer who has fallen. The lightning glares upon his face.

But he has caught at a loose bit of running rigging as he fell; and I see it slipping off the coil upon the deck. I shout madly, "Man overboard!" and catch the rope, when I can see nothing again. The sea is too high, and the man too heavy for me. I shout, and shout, and shout, and feel the perspiration starting in great beads from my forehead as the line slips through my fingers.

Presently the captain feels his way aft and takes hold with me; and the cook comes as the coil is nearly spent, and we pull together upon him. It is desperate work for the sailor; for the ship is drifting at a prodigious rate; but he clings like a dying man.

By-and-by at a flash we see him on a crest two oars' length away from the vessel.

"Hold on, my man!" shouts the captain.

"For God's sake, be quick!" says the poor fellow, and he goes down in the trough of the sea. We pull the harder, and the captain keeps calling to him to keep up courage and hold strong. But in the hush we can hear him say, "I can't hold out much longer; I'm 'most gone!"

Presently we have brought the man where we can lay hold of him, and are only waiting for a good lift of the sea to bring him up, when the poor fellow groans out, “It's no use I can't-good-by!" And a wave tosses the end of the rope clean upon the bulwarks.

At the next flash I see him going down under the water. I grope my way below, sick and faint at heart; and wedging myself into my narrow berth, I try to sleep. But the thunder and the tossing of the ship, and the face of the drowning man as he said good-by, peering at me from every corner, will not let me sleep.

Afterward come quiet seas, over which we boom along,

leaving in our track at night a broad path of phosphorescent splendor. The sailors bustle around the decks as if they had lost no comrade; and the voyagers, losing the pallor of fear, look out earnestly for the land.

At length my eyes rest upon the coveted fields of Britain; and in a day more the bright face, looking out beside me, sparkles at sight of the sweet cottages which lie along the green Essex shores. Broad-sailed yachts, looking strangely yet beautiful, glide upon the waters of the Thames like swans; black, square-rigged colliers from the Tyne lie grouped in sooty cohorts; and heavy, three-decked Indiamen-of which I had read in story-books-drift slowly down with the tide. Dingy steamers, with white pipes and with red pipes, whiz past us to the sea; and now my eye rests on the great palace of Greenwich; I see the wooden-legged pensioners smoking under the palace-walls, and above them upon the hill-as Heaven is true-that old fabulous Greenwich, the great center of schoolboy Longitude.

Presently, from under a cloud of murky smoke, heaves up the vast dome of St. Paul's and the tall Column of the Fire, and the white turrets of London Tower. Our ship glides through the massive dock-gates, and is moored amid the forest of masts which bears golden fruit for Britons.

8. Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. He was a distinguished Unitarian minister who won deserved fame in the literary world through his story The Man Without a Country, published in 1863. This is now recognized as one of our classics. One of his most amusing short stories is given below.

MY DOUBLE AND HOW HE UNDID ME

(SLIGHTLY ABRIDGED)

. . . I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I was settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the finest water-powers in Maine.