eps no longer.

The scene changes, as the clock strikes in the entry. We are lingering
in the piazza of the Winged Lion, and the bronze giants in their turret
overlooking the square raise their hammers and beat the solemn march of
Time. As we float away through the watery streets, old Shylock
shuffles across the bridge,--black barges glide by us in the silent
canals,--groups of unfamiliar faces lean from the balconies,--and we
hear the plashing waters lap the crumbling walls of Venice, with its
dead Doges and decaying palaces.

Again we stir the fire, and feel it is home all about us. But we like
to sit here and think of that rosy evening, last summer, when we came
walking into Interlachen, and beheld the ghost-like figure of the
Jungfrau issuing out of her cloudy palace to welcome the stars,--of a
cool, bright, autumnal morning on the western battlements overlooking
Genoa, the blue Mediterranean below mirroring the silent fleet that lay
so motionless on its bosom,--of a midnight visit to the Colosseum with
a band of German students, who bore torches in and out of the time-worn
arches, and sang their echoing songs to the full moon,--of days, how
many and how magical! when we awoke every morning to say, "We are in
Rome!"

But it grows late, and it is time now to give over these reflections. So
we wind up our watch, and put out the candle.

* * * * *

A DRY-GOODS JOBBER IN 1861.

What is a dry-goods jobber? No wonder you ask. You have been hunting,
perhaps, for our peripatetic postoffice, and have stumbled upon Milk
Street and Devonshire Street and Franklin Street. You are almost ready
to believe in the lamp of Aladdin, that could build palaces in a night.
Looking up to the stately and costly structures which have usurped the
place of once familiar dwellings, and learning that they are, for the
most part, tenanted by dry-goods jobbers, you feel that for such huge
results there must needs be an adequate cause, and so you ask, What is a
dry-goods jobber?

It is more than a curious question. For parents desirous of finding
their true sphere for promising and for unpromising sons, it is
eminently a practical question. It is a question comprehensive of
dollars and cents,--also of bones and sinews, of muscles, nerves, and
brains, of headache, heartache, and the cyclopaedia of being, doing,
and enduring. An adequate answer to such a question must needs ask your
indulgence, for it canno