en you see him coming,
Light of heart and strong of limb,
Make your lover-bees stop humming;
Turn your blushes round to him--
Blush, dear flowers, that he may learn,
How a woman's heart can burn!

Wind--oh, wind--you happy rover!
Oh that I were half as free--
Leave your honey-bells and clover,
Go and seek my love for me.
Find, kiss, clasp him, make him know
It is _I_ who love him so!

MARY AINGE DE VERE.

THE HEAD OF HERCULES.

One of the most curious cases that ever came under my notice in a long
course of criminal practice was not brought into any court, and, as I
believe, has never been published until now. The details of the affair
came under my personal cognizance in the following manner:

In 1858 I went down into the Shenandoah valley to spend my summer
vacation among the innumerable Pages, Marshalls, and Cookes who all
hailed me as cousin, by right of traditional intermarriages generations
back. My first visit was to the house of McCormack Beardsley, a kinsman
and school-fellow whom I had not seen since we parted at the university
twenty years before.

We were both gray-haired old fellows now, but I had grown thin and sharp
in the courts of Baltimore and Washington, while he had lived quietly on
his plantation, more fat and jovial and genial with every year.

Beardsley possessed large means then, and maintained the unlimited
hospitality usual among large Virginia planters before the war. The
house was crowded during my stay with my old friends from the valley and
southern countries. His daughter, too, was not only a beauty, but a
favorite among the young people, and brought many attractive, well-bred
girls about her, and young men who were not so attractive or well bred.
Lack of occupation and a definite career had reduced the sons of too
many Virginia families at that time to cards and horses as their sole
pursuits; the war, while it left them penniless, was in one sense their
salvation.

One evening, sitting on the verandah with Beardsley, smoking, and
looking in the open windows of the parlor, I noticed a woman who sat a
little apart, and who, as I fancied, was avoided by the younger girls.
In a Virginia country party there are always two or three unmarried
women, past their first youth, with merry blue eyes, brown hair, and
delicate features--women "with a history," but who are none the less
good dancers, riders, an