of fluttering drapery.
He has no thought of any wrong,
He scans me with a fearless eye;
Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
The little sandpiper and I.

Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night,
When the loosed storm breaks furiously?
My drift-wood fire will burn so bright!
To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
I do not fear for thee, though wroth
The tempest rushes through the sky;
For are we not God's children both,
Thou, little sandpiper, and I?

_C. T._

THE PORTRAIT.

They were a family that had long outlived their grandeur,--the
Fotheringtons. And though the last generation had been kept alive with
traditions of it, the present one knew those traditions only as vague
dreams that might or might not be true, and which, either way, had
nothing at all to do with their absolute want of bread and butter, other
than as having fostered past pride they had hindered honest labor. Of
all those great colonial possessions, nothing remained to them but the
rambling old house and its well-worn hereditaments; and though various
parts even of the old mansion itself had been sold and moved away, still
much more room remained than was needed by the mother and her five
children,--the mother, whose woful condition had brought her to an utter
contempt of the ancestral Fotheringtons, the children, who yet preserved
a certain happiness in the midst of their poverty in remembering that at
their great-grandfather's wedding a hundred guests were entertained for
a week in the house after princely fashion. Not that the Fotheringtons
of to-day did not present a decent appearance;--gowns were turned, and
ribbons were pressed, and laces were darned till there was nothing left
of them; nobody knew exactly how poor they were, which perhaps made it
all the harder. The eldest daughters had been quite comfortably educated
before everything was gone; the elder son had pushed his own way through
college with but small debt, and was now studying his profession at
home, finding much reason for unhappiness, and vexed out of patience by
little Sarah's troublesome tongue and fingers, and young Tommy's musical
fancy, which occasioned him opportunity of exercising his lungs and his
shrill little voice all day long and sometimes half the night. It was
hard work for poor Frederick Fotherington to try and bury himself in the
dismal profundities of