hen space and time are
in a fair way to be annihilated, and nothing is so sacred that it may
not be questioned, no problem so hard that men may not try to solve it?
In the days when Bramshill House was built our forefathers believed
firmly in a whole unseen or rarely-seen world around them of fairies,
ghosts, spirits and witches. In some out-of-the-way corners in
England--even in these days of board schools and competitive
examinations, when we are told that King Arthur never existed and that
William Tell is a "sun-myth"--some remnants of this belief still linger.
In Devonshire folks speak shyly and with bated breath of the "good
people;" and even in the year of grace 1879 a Warwickshire laborer was
had up before the magistrates for having with a pitchfork half killed a
poor old woman whom he declared to be a witch. But be that as it may, in
the reign of James I. no one doubted the existence of the spirit-world
about us, and on St. John's Eve all its denizens, good and bad, were
supposed to wander freely where they would. One only thing they feared,
and that was the great St. John's wort. Therefore, all who wished to
guard house and home from the unwelcome visitors, who pinched the maids,
turned the milk sour and plagued their victims with a thousand impish
tricks, planted it freely about their gardens; and thus it is that you
see its golden flowers amid their shining rich green leaves and crimson
shoots round nearly all old English homes.

Do not laugh at these old fables, gentle reader. When we wander over the
green turf and through the wide halls we seem to have opened a door that
leads us back into the past out of the turmoil of the nineteenth
century. And surely for a moment it can do us no harm to leave our
striving, hurrying, anxious modern life, and picture to ourselves the
days when our forefathers maybe were ignorant and superstitious, but
when they knew how to build and how to fight and how to write--the days
when England became "a nest of singing birds."

ROSE G. KINGSLEY.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In hunting dialect the warning "'ware" or "beware" is shortened to
"war'," as in the old advice, "War' horse, war' hound, war' heel!"

CANOEING ON THE HIGH MISSISSIPPI.

TWO PAPERS.--I.

[Illustration]

The Kleiner Fritz and Hattie of Louisville and the Betsy D. of
Cincinnati made the canoe-fleet which the Northern Pacific Railway
shunted out upon its station-platform at Detroit City, Minnesota, in th