l
Till the breath came back to his lips so pale.

And the third little Goblin leered round at me--
And there were no lids on his eyes at all--
And he clucked one eye, and he says, says he,
"What is the style of your socks this fall?"
And he clapped his heels--and I sighed to see
That he had hands where his feet should be.

Then a bald-faced Goblin, gray and grim,
Bowed his head, and I saw him slip
His eyebrows off, as I looked at him,
And paste them over his upper lip;
And then he moaned in remorseful pain--
"Would--Ah, would I'd me brows again!"

And then the whole of the Goblin band
Rocked on the fence-top to and fro,
And clung, in a long row, hand in hand,
Singing the songs that they used to know--
Singing the songs that their grandsires sung
In the goo-goo days of the Goblin-tongue.

And ever they kept their green-glass eyes
Fixed on me with a stony stare--
Till my own grew glazed with a dread surmise,
And my hat whooped up on my lifted hair,
And I felt the heart in my breast snap to
As you've heard the lid of a snuff-box do.

And they sang, "You're asleep! There is no board-fence,
And never a Goblin with green-glass eyes!--
'Tis only a vision the mind invents
After a supper of cold mince-pies,--
And you're doomed to dream this way," they said,--
"_And you sha'n't wake up till you're clean plum dead!_"

OUR VERY WISHES

BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD

It was natural that it should be quiet for Mrs. Cairnes in her empty
house. Once there had been such a family of brothers and sisters there!
But one by one they had married, or died, and at any rate had drifted
out of the house, so that she was quite alone with her work, and her
memories, and the echoes in her vacant rooms. She hadn't a great deal of
work; her memories were not pleasant; and the echoes were no pleasanter.
Her house was as comfortable otherwise as one could wish; in the very
centre of the village it was, too, so that no one could go to church, or
to shop, or to call, unless Mrs. Cairnes was aware of the fact, if she
chose; and the only thing that protected the neighbors from this
supervision was Mrs. Cairnes's mortal dread of the sun on her carpet;
for the sun lay in that bay-windowed corner nearly all the day, and even
though she filled the window full of geraniums and vines and
calla-lilies she could not