d,
and he would have no other,) with their wives and children, shipwrecked
on a remote island, just to see how splendidly they would reorganize
society. They could build a city,--they have done it; make constitutions
and laws; establish churches and lyceums; teach and practise the healing
art; instruct in every department; found observatories; create commerce
and manufactures; write songs and hymns, and sing 'em, and make
instruments to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a journal
almost as good as the "Northern Magazine," edited by the Come-outers.
There was nothing they were not up to, from a christening to a hanging;
the last, to be sure, could never be called for, unless some stranger
got in among them.

----I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn't make much
difference to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of pale
Sherry and similar elements. All at once he jumped up and said,--

Don't you want to hear what I just read to the boys?

I have had questions of a similar character asked me before,
occasionally. A man of iron mould might perhaps say, No! I am not a man
of iron mould, and said that I should be delighted.

The Professor then read--with that slightly sing-song cadence which is
observed to be common in poets reading their own verses--the following
stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about two feet and a half,
with an occasional movement back or forward for better adjustment, the
appearance of which has been likened by some impertinent young folks
to that of the act of playing on the trombone. His eyesight was never
better; I have his word for it.

MARE RUBRUM.

Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!--
For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine,
Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade;
But every ghost of boyhood's dream
By Nature's magic power is laid
To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.

It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer's cloudless day
Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
It pictures still the bacchant shapes
That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,--
The maidens dancing on the grapes,--
Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.

Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
Those flitting shapes that never die,
The swift-winged visions of the pas