iends still toiling in the sun,--
Ye dearer ones who, gone before,
Are watching from the eternal shore
The slow work by your hands begun,--

Rejoice with me! The chastening rod
Blossoms with love; the furnace heat
Grows cool beneath His blessed feet
Whose form is as the Son of God!

Rejoice! Our Marah's bitter springs
Are sweetened; on our ground of grief
Rise day by day in strong relief
The prophecies of better things.

Rejoice in hope! The day and night
Are one with God, and one with them
Who see by faith the cloudy hem
Of Judgment fringed with Mercy's light!

PERE ANTOINE'S DATE-PALM.

A LEGEND OF NEW ORLEANS.

I.

MISS BADEAU.

It is useless to disguise the fact: Miss Badeau is a Rebel.

Mr. Beauregard's cannon had not done battering the walls of Sumter,
when Miss Badeau was packed up, labelled, and sent North, where she
has remained ever since in a sort of aromatic, rose-colored state of
rebellion.

She is not one of your blood-thirsty Rebels, you know; she has the good
sense to shrink with horror from the bare mention of those heathen who,
at Manassas and elsewhere, wreaked their unmanly spite on the bodies
of dead heroes: still she is a bitter little Rebel, with blonde hair,
superb eyelashes, and two brothers in the Confederate service,--if I may
be allowed to club the statements. When I look across the narrow strait
of our boarding-house table, and observe what a handsome wretch she
is, I begin to think that if Mr. Seward doesn't presently take her in
charge, _I_ shall.

The preceding paragraphs have little or nothing to do with what I am
going to relate: they merely illustrate how wildly a fellow will write,
when the eyelashes of a pretty woman get tangled with his pen. So I let
them stand,--as a warning.

My exordium should have taken this shape:--

"I hope and trust," remarked Miss Badeau, in that remarkably scathing
tone which she assumes in alluding to the U.S.V., "I hope and trust,
that, when your five hundred thousand, more or less, men capture my New
Orleans, they will have the good taste not to injure Pere Antoine's
Date-Palm."

"Not a hair of its head shall be touched," I replied, without having the
faintest idea of what I was talking about.

"Ah! I hope not," she said.

There was a certain tenderness in her voice which struck me.

"Who is Pere Antoine?" I ventured to ask. "And what is this tree that
seems to interest