pond in the pit. The water was three feet deep. An Act of
Parliament will certainly be passed against her playing any more!"

Few poems have been more generally admired or paraphrased in the various
tongues of earth than that commencing with the lines--

"Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
This lamb was sure to go."

The story is current at the national capital that Mr. Evarts, when
Secretary of State, on one occasion, in a jocular crowd of his friends,
was desired to condense into prose these immortal verses. Urgently
solicited, Mr. Evarts yielded, and wrote as follows:

"Mary, a female, judged to be of the race of man, whose family name is
unknown, whether of native or foreign birth, of lofty or lowly lineage,
and whose appearance, manners, and mental cultivation are involved in
the most profound mystery, which probably will never be fully
ascertained unless through the most profound researches of an historian
admirably trained in his profession, who shall devote the ablest efforts
of his life to the investigation of the subject, uninfluenced by either
passion or prejudice, and having only in view the sacred truth, at the
same time being utterly regardless of the plaudits or censures of the
world, we are informed by one who, it has been stated, at one time while
living in that part of the United States of America known as
Massachusetts, whose fishermen have frequently been involved in
difficulties with the authorities of her Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen
of Great Britain and Empress of the Indies, whose domains extended over
a large share of the habitable globe, thereby endangering the peace
which should so happily exist between nations of the same blood and
language, had an infant sheep, of which there are many millions of
various stocks and qualities now in our country, constantly adding
wealth and prosperity to our republic, and enabling us to be entirely
independent of all other nations for our supply of wool, now ample for
the use of factories already busily employed, and for those which ere
long will be constructed in all parts of our land, working both by water
and steam power, and in whatever direction the said Mary traveled, this
animal, whose fleece was snow-white, even as the lofty mountain-regions
in the silent solitudes of eternal winter, as the ethereal vapors which
oft float over an autumnal sky, 'darkly, deeply, beautifully blue' or as