awberries. I sometimes even dreamed of them on my
pillow. Now my agricultural library became far more interesting and
useful than before. I had had a touch of real, actual practice, and
could already understand and appreciate many suggestions which had
heretofore been of doubtful significancy. Thus the long winter came
gradually in, closing up the great volume of vegetable life, but
affording me abundant time for studying that other volume which had so
singularly fallen in my way.

A PAPER OF CANDLE-ENDS.

Who made all the old saws?--not the rusty steel affairs that Patrick and
John ply upon Down-East fire-wood at our back doors,--but those
sharp-pointed, trenchant ones that philosophers love to draw across the
hearts of men, cutting, tearing, grinding away, till the fibre of their
being quivers under the remorseless teeth. Many were forged, we all
know, in the celebrated workshop of W. Shakspeare; other particularly
fine-toothed ones were pointed by a French artisan named Rochefoucauld;
and many more, bright and lucent, are borrowed--reverently be it
spoken!--from that grand arsenal of truth and power built by the hands
of the great holy men of holy times. But who made the many tough old
blades which have a temper that outlives time,--whose rugged points have
never lost a whit of their keenness, after having torn their way through
human bosoms, been hung up and taken down again for centuries, and never
a maker's name upon them?

Going by a little squalid old house, some nights ago, I saw a light in a
ground-floor window; and peeping in,--my name is not Tom, nor was it any
Godiva I was espying, but I could not help a sort of curiosity to see
what that eleven-o'clock light might exhibit,--I saw a pale face, and a
thin, bent form. Soft hair was parted from a white brow, and fell in
ringlets upon a shabby dress. Eyes, that might have shone with
bewitching brilliancy in certain parlors I know of, were sadly and
intently fixed upon the quick-drawn needle which the thin fingers were
assiduously and wearily plying. The light came from a half-burnt
candle.--No, Mrs. Grundy, your friend Asmodeus did not knock nor go in;
but he thought of you, although you were at that moment virtuously
bestowed, with matronly grace, in curtained slumbers. Asmodeus looked,
and beheld, through a hole in the curtain, an old, rusty saw crunching
away across that poor, desolate, weary heart, _Le jeu ne vaut pas la
chandelle_.--"Stop, stop,