hearts shall thaw, and when
The ice shall melt away from men;
And where the hearts now frozen stand,
Love then shall blossom o'er all the land!

* * * * *

THE GOLD-FIELDS OF NOVA SCOTIA.

It will probably be thought a startling statement, by the good people of
our staid Northern metropolis,--certainly by those of them whose
attention has not been called to the recent developments on this
subject,--that within thirty-six hours' travel from their own doors, by
conveyance as safe and even luxurious as any in the world, there exist
veins of auriferous quartz, practically inexhaustible in extent, teeming
throughout with virgin gold of a standard of almost absolute purity, and
yielding a return to the labors of the scientific miner, rivalling, if
not fairly surpassing, in their comparative results, the richest
deposits of California, Colorado, and Australia.

But then, if one has a startling fact to tell, why is it not best to
tell it out, all at once, and in a startling manner? If the house-maid
of our modest _menage_ should on a sudden discover that Aladdin's lamp
had come home from the auction-room among some chance purchases of her
mistress, and that the slave or genie thereof was actually standing in
the middle of our own kitchen-floor at the moment, and grumbling audibly
at lack of employment in fetching home diamonds and such like delicacies
by the bale for the whole household, could we reasonably expect the girl
to announce the fact, in the parlor above, in the same tone in which she
ordinarily states that the butcher has called for his orders? Aesop, in
his very first fable, (as arranged by good Archdeacon Croxall,) has
inculcated but a mean opinion of the cock who forbore to crow lustily
when he turned up a jewel of surpassing richness, in the course of his
ordinary scratching, and under his own very beak; why, then, should we
render ourselves liable to the same depreciatory moral? Something, at
least, must be pardoned to the _certaminis gaudia_ of this new-found
contest with the secrets of Nature,--and though the fact we have stated
be a startling one, the statements and authorities which go to support
it will, perhaps, in the end, surprise us still more. We shall give
them, at any rate, in such a form as "to challenge investigation and to
defy scrutiny." How far they will bear out our sensational opening
paragraph, then, the readers of the "Atlantic" cannot choose