left to put forth stunted pines, and await
the recuperative powers of nature. Thus men live on, with an increasing
family and a large and rapidly increasing number of servants to support,
until perhaps the head of the house is called away by death, and the
estate, if free from incumbrance, is divided among the children. Another
generation succeeds, and another division takes place--the soil all this
time becoming poor and poorer, and the quantity of land at each
subdivision becoming less for every member,--until a general exhaustion
is perceived, the land is left a wilderness, and the family scattered
over the country; the females, sensitive, well-educated, and spirited,
unfitted for contact with the world, and the sons too often branded as
spendthrifts because they cannot manage to live upon the land that
supported their fathers and their grandfathers.

A WORD ABOUT THE ARMY-PRIVATE.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE.

We cannot make up our mind to look on this member of the universal
Yankee nation with quite as much distrust as is often evinced; with that
distrust which lies most where he is least known. Scarce one-sixth of
the lookers-on--as the liveried gentleman with a straight knee and stiff
upper-lip keeps up the ninety to a minute down the sunny side of
Greenwich-street--know aught of the animal, save that every day he
struts up and down at about the same hour. Mothers have nothing to say
for him, while fathers pass him with quite a look of contempt. Betty,
perhaps, is the least timid, and is foolish enough to let spurs and
cock-feathers tinge her dreams all night long, beside thinking of them a
dozen times next day. If she is from the old country, she has seen them
all her life, and has many friends "as went a soldiering." The little
boys are more of the Betty order, and always show him the greatest
admiration and respect: as may be seen, any day, in the miniature
evolutions to the public squares, which always display enthusiasm, if
not the accuracy of strategical art. If there is but one private, you
will always be sure to find a captain and a drummer, and the army is
complete.

Why the senior and more intellectual world and his wife are more wary of
the Greenwich dragoon, is a question not easy of solution. Perhaps they
have read in books that he is apt to commit sundry excesses, not
approved of in the Scriptures, after the siege is over; or that, like
Captain Dalgetty, he will sometimes fig