lemish. It is the one fatal defect in
chickens that they grow. With them, youth and beauty are truly
inseparable terms. The better they are, the worse they look. After they
are three weeks old, every day detracts from their comeliness. They lose
their plump roundness, their fascinating, soft down, and put out the
most ridiculous little wings and tails and hard-looking feathers, and
are no longer dear, tender chicks, but small hens,--a very uninteresting
Young America. It is said, that, if you give chickens rum, they will not
grow, but retain always their juvenile size and appearance. Under our
present laws it is somewhat difficult, I suppose, to obtain rum, and I
fear it would be still more difficult to administer it. I have concluded
instead to keep some hen sitting through the summer, and so have a
regular succession of young chickens. The growth of my little patient
was not arrested at a sufficiently early stage to secure his perpetual
good looks, and, as I intimated, he will never, probably, be the
Windship of his race; but he has found his appetite, he is free from
acute disease, he runs about with the rest, under-sized, but bright,
happy, and enterprising, and is therefore a well-spring of pleasure.
Indeed, in view of the fact that I have unquestionably saved his life,
we talk seriously of opening a _Hotel des Invalides_, a kind of
Chicken's Home, that the benefits which he has received may be extended
to all his unfortunate brethren who stand in need.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] I say _sit_ out of regard to the proprieties of the occasion; but I
do not expose myself to ridicule by going about among the neighbors and
talking of a _sitting_ hen! Everywhere, but in the "Atlantic," hens
_set_.

HARPOCRATES.

"The rest is silence."--HAMLET.

I.

The message of the god I seek
In voice, in vision, or in dream,--
Alike on frosty Dorian peak,
Or by the slow Arcadian stream:
Where'er the oracle is heard,
I bow the head and bend the knee;
In dream, in vision, or in word,
The sacred secret reaches me.

II.

Athwart the dim Trophonian caves,
Bat-like, the gloomy whisper flew;
The lisping plash of Paphian waves
Bathed every pulse in fiery dew:
From Phoebus, on his cloven hill,
A shaft of beauty pierced the air,
And oaks of gray Dodona still
Betrayed the Thunderer's presence there.

III.

The warmth of love, the