bs with their tents and horses, and
Leonidas told her of Red Indians with their war-paint, and little
Negroes dancing round the sugar-boiling, till her head began quite to
swim and her ears to buzz; and all the children she had seen and she had
not seen seemed to come round her, and join hands and dance. Oh, such a
din! A little Highlander in his tartans stood on a whisky-barrel in the
middle, making his bagpipes squeal away; a Chinese with a bald head and
long pigtail beat a gong, and capered with a solemn face; a Norwegian
herd-boy blew a monstrous bark cow-horn; an Indian juggler twisted
snakes round his neck to the sound of the tom-tom; and Lucy found
herself and Leonidas whirling round with a young Dutch planter between
them, and an Indian with a crown of feathers upon the other side of her.

"Oh!" she seemed to herself to cry, "what are you doing? how do you all
come here?"

"We are from all the nations who are friends and brethren," said the
voices; "we all bring our stores: the sugar, rice, and cotton of the
West; the silk and coffee and spices of the East; the tea of China; the
furs of the North: it all is exchanged from one to the other, and should
teach us to be all brethren, since we cannot thrive one without the
other."

"It all comes to our country, because we are clever to work it up, and
send it out to be used in its own homes," said the Highlander; "it is
English and Scotch machines that weave your cottons, ay, and make your
tools."

"No; it is America that beats you all," cried Leonidas; "what had you to
do, but to sit down and starve, when we sent you no cotton?"

"If you send cotton, 'tis we that weave it," cried the Scot.

Lucy was almost afraid they would come to blows over which was the
greatest and most skilful country. "It cannot be buying and selling that
make nations love one another, and be peaceful," she thought. "Is it
being learned and wise?"

"But the Prussian boys are studious and wise, and the French are clever
and skilful, and yet they have that dreadful war: I wonder what it is
that would make and keep all these countries friends!"

And then there came an echo back to little Lucy: "For out of Zion shall
go forth the Law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall
judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall
beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shal