--when asleep so still and
silent--seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the owls in
their revelry--and answers to their mirth and merriment through
all her clouds. The moping owl, indeed!--the boding owl,
forsooth! the melancholy owl, you blockhead! why, they are the
most cheerful, joy-portending, and exulting of God's creatures.
Their flow of animal spirits is incessant--crowing cocks are
a joke to them--blue devils are to them unknown--not one
hypochondriac in a thousand barns--and the Man-in-the-Moon
acknowledges that he never heard one utter a complaint.

_THE NOONING._

Mr. Darley's very characteristic picture on the opposite page
needs no description, it so thoroughly explains itself, and
realizes his intention. The following lines from Mary Howitt seem
very appropriate to the sketch:

"O golden fields of bending corn,
How beautiful they seem!
The reaper-folk, the piled up sheaves,
To me are like a dream;
The sunshine and the very air
Seem of old time, and take me there."

_A MANDARIN._

FROM THE FRENCH OF AUGUSTE VITU.

It was Saturday night, and the pavement sparkled with frost
diamonds under flashing lights and echoing steps in the opera
quarter. Tinkling carnival bells and wild singing resounded from
all the carriages dashing towards Rue Lepelletier; the shops were
only half shut, and Paris, wide awake, reveled in a fairy-night
frolic.

And yet, Felix d'Aubremel, one of the bright applauded heroes of
those orgies, seemed in no mood to answer their mad challenge.
Plunged in a deep armchair, hands drooping and feet on the
fender, he was sunk in sombre revery. An open book lay near him,
and a letter was flung, furiously crumpled, on the floor.

An orphan at the age of twelve, Felix had watched his mother's
slow death through ten years of suffering. The Marquis Gratien
d'Aubremel, ruined by reckless dissipation, and driven by
necessity, rather than love, into a marriage with an English
heiress, Margaret Malden, deserted her, like the wretch he was,
as soon as the last of her dowry melted away. A common story
enough, and ending in as common a close. D'Aubremel sailed for
the Indies to retrieve his fortune, and met death there by yellow
fever. So that the sad lessons of Felix's family life stimulated
to excess his innate leaning towards misanthropy--if that name
may define a resistless urgency of belief in the appearances of
evil, linked with a doubt of the rea