dren. Them
has friend Wood-thrush verily seen, and against them he strove to warn
us. But, ah! what avails it? What can we do, or whither shall we flee!
Can a nation take wing like a Wood-thrush? Can Leafland flit about like
a Swallow? And who should warrant us that the Red-coats should not
pursue us to remotest fastnesses? Nay, they may be even now upon us.
Woe! woe is me! We were Leaflanders; Oakwich was, and the great glory of
the Elmthorpians! But now we be all dead men!"

At this, the Leaflanders only paused long enough to upbraid the young
woman. "See now whether anything is the matter!" and immediately fell to
upon their despair.

"A nation in ruins!" cried the statesman. "Leafland falls from its lofty
summit, and I live to see the day."

"I behold the gods departing from Leafland," spake the scholar. "This is
the end of the fates of Leafland."

"Now I do not care for your gods and your fates and your what-all,"
sobbed a nervous little lady. "I never could see that they were of any
use in housekeeping; but who shall watch over the tender birdlings when
we are gone?"

"And never any more dances! Forever, never, never, forever!" You may
know it was a belle said that.

"Dances are but the vanity of this world," moaned a sedate matron; "but
woe for my dear pet Aphides, with their six hundred thousand children,
who will be dead before they are born!"

"Bother your six hundred thousand children!" growled a crusty
philosopher. "If they _are_ dead, it is the only good thing ever I heard
about them. It might be worth while to have one's country crashing about
one's ears occasionally, for the sake of being well rid of such trash.
Here are all our laboratories broken up, and the sun's occupation gone,
and you making a to-do about a parcel of babies!"

"O the sweet sunshine!" wept a poet, but most musically,--"the warm,
delicious sunshine, that our hungry souls can feed upon no more, nor
ever fill our drinking-cups with nectared dew!"

And so in Mapleton and Sumachford and through all Leafland was nothing
heard but the voice of lamentation, and nothing seen but floods of
tears, and nothing thought of but how to avert or escape the threatened
calamity; and, in their terror and trouble, the Leaflanders almost lost
their fine tempers, and were often on the brink of quarrelling; and the
people walking in Netherworld met each other under blue cotton
umbrellas, and exclaimed, "What a spell of weather!" and altogether it