ened to reason, and you know where I am going.
Leave me: you are rich--I am poor: you love me to-day--who can say if
you will love me to-morrow? We began a delightful dream, let us not
spoil it by a bad ending. Let our dream continue unbroken in its
freshness and romance. Our crooks are both broken; they have killed
two of our sheep; they have cut down the willows in the meadow. You
perceive that our bright day is over. The lady I saw yesterday
should be your wife. Marry her, then; and if ever, in your hours of
happiness, you wander on the banks of the Lignon, my shade will
appear to you. But _then_ it shall be with a smile!"

"Daphne! Daphne! I love you! I will never leave you! I will live or
die with you!"

* * * * *

It was fifty years after that day, that one evening, during a
brilliant supper in the Rue St. Dominique, Gentil Bernard, who was
the life of the company, announced the death of an original, who had
ordered a broken stick to be buried along with him.

"He is Monsieur de Langevy," said Fontenelle. "He was forced against
his inclination to marry the dashing Clotilde de Langevy, who eloped
so shamefully with one of the Mousquetaires. M. de Langevy had been
desperately attached to Bribri Deshoulieres, and this broken stick
was a crook they had cut during their courtship on the banks of the
Lignon. The Last Shepherd is dead, gentlemen--we must go to his
funeral."

"And what became of Bribri Deshoulieres?" asked a lady of the party.

"I have been told she died very young in a convent in the south,"
replied Fontenelle; "and the odd thing is, that, when they were
burying her, they found a crook attached to her horse-hair tunic."

* * * * *

THE FOUNDING OF THE BELL.

WRITTEN FOR MUSIC.

BY CHARLES MACKAY.

Hark! how the furnace pants and roars!
Hark! how the molten metal pours,
As, bursting from its iron doors,
It glitters in the sun!
Now through the ready mould it flows,
Seething and hissing as it goes,
And filling every crevice up
As the red vintage fills the cup:
_Hurra! the work is done_!

Unswathe him now. Take off each stay
That binds him to his couch of clay,
And let him struggle into day;
Let chain and pulley run,
With yielding crank and steady rope,
Until he rise from rim to cope,
In rounded beauty, ribb'd in strength,
Without a flaw in all his length:
_Hurra!