a woman may
live with a man in open concubinage without serious detriment to her
character or position, so long as she remains faithful to him.[1] It
is only when she becomes "light o' love" and indiscriminate in her
conduct, that she is avoided and despised. And although the remark
may sound strangely to American ears, I have no question that this
left-hand compact, on the whole, is here quite as well kept as the
vows which have secured the formal sanction of the law and the
Church.

[Footnote 1: But few statistics relating to this subject are in
existence; but those few quite bear out these observations. According
to the official returns of the District of Amatitlan in Guatemala,
the whole number of births in that Department for the year 1858 was
1394, of which 581 were illegitimate!]

[To be continued.]

THE "CATTLE" TO THE "POET."[Footnote]

How do _you_ know what the cow may know,
As under the tasselled bough she lies,
When earth is a-beat with the life below,
When the orient mornings redden and glow,
When the silent butterflies come and go,--
The dreamy cow with the Juno eyes?

How do _you_ know that she may not know
That the meadow all over is lettered, "Love,"
Or hear the mystic syllable low
In the grasses' growth and the waters' flow?
How do _you_ know that she may not know
What the robin sings on the twig above?

[Footnote: See "The Poet's Friends,"
_Atlantic Monthly_, vol. v., p. 185.]

MORE WORDS ABOUT SHELLEY.

There is a moral or a lesson to be found in the life of almost every
man, the chief duty of a biographer being to set forth and illustrate
this; and a history of the commonest individual, if written truly,
could not fail to be interesting to his fellows; for the feelings and
aspirations of men are pretty much alike all the world over, and the
elements of genius not very unequally distributed through the mass of
mankind,--the thing itself being a development due to circumstances,
very probably, as much as to anything singular in the man. But there
are few good biographies extant; the writers, for the most part,
contenting themselves with superficial facts, refusing or unable to
follow the mind and motive powers of the subject,--or following these
imperfectly. For this reason, they who would read the truest kind of
biographies must turn to those written by men of themselves,--that
is, the autobiographies; and these are, in fact, found