"Mother, mother, stoop and hold!"
The voice came fainter from beneath;
And she flung up a jewell'd sheath.
The sheath was thick with many a gem;
The old woman carefully counted them.

"Rachel, Rachel, thee must I praise
Who makest pleasant thy mother's days.
Blessed be thou in all thy ways!
Surely for this must I praise thee, my daughter,
And therefore in fulness shalt thou dwell
As a fruitful fig-tree beside the water
That layeth her green leaves over the well.
More gold, Rachel, yet again!
And we shall have houses and servants in Spain,
And thou shalt walk with the wealthiest ladies,
And fairest, in Cordova, Seville, or Cadiz,
And thou shalt be woo'd as a Queen should be,
And tended upon as the proud are tended,
And the algazuls shall doff to thee
For thy face shall be brighten'd, thy raiment be splendid,
And no man shall call thee an evil name,
And thou shalt no longer remember thy shame,
And thy mother's eyes, as she waxes old
Shall see the thing she would behold—
More gold yet, and still more gold!"

"Mother, the light is very low—
—Out! out! ... Ah God, they are on me now!
Mother" (the old woman hears with a groan),
"Leave me not here in the darkness alone!"

The mother sits by the grave, and listens.
She waits: she hears the footsteps go
Far under the earth,—bewilder'd—slow.
She looks: the light no longer glistens.
Still the voice of Rachel from below,

"Mother, mother, they have me, and hold!
Mother, there is a curse on thy gold!
Mercy! mercy! The light is gone—
Leave me not here in the darkness alone—
Mother, mother, help me and save!"

Still Rachel's voice from the grave doth moan.
Still Rachel's mother sits by the grave.

PET PREJUDICES.

I HAVE a crying grievance against fate and
circumstance, and one for which I see no hope
or remedy. I am perpetually doomed to listen
to the pet prejudices of unphilosophicai people—
I, who have none of my own, or at least so faint
and few, that they can scarce be called prejudices
at all I, who boast of being cosmopolitan,
unsectarian, and rigidly just and impartial—I,
who hate nothing and nobody, and want only to
be allowed to believe that most men are heroes
and all women angels, and that the chief duty we
have in life is to love one another as hard as we can,
and suspect no evil anywhere. Yet here I have
been associated, I may say from my birth, with
prejudices of a decidedly antagonistic and
unpleasant character, and for ever doomed to listen
to heresies which afflict my sense of justice and
disturb my sense of right, and which call for
emphatic but useless remonstrance against their
bigotry and injustice. Now, is it not distressing
to be always in opposition when one only asks
to sail down with the tide smoothly, and give
no offence to mouse or man?

There was my poor old father, as kind-
hearted and compassionate a man as ever lived,
yet who had the most perverse and unreasoning
hatred to France, and who would, I believe,
have disinherited any of his daughters who had
so far departed from the virtue of womanhood
as to marry a Frenchman. Not an honest man was
there in France, according to him; nay, not even a
brave one, "for ferocity is not bravery, sir," he
would say, settling his powdered Prince Regent
wig with the air of a man who has propounded an
unanswerable syllogism. "Virtue! pah! were
there not Pompadours and Du Barrys to give
the measure of that?" And as for the youth
of the country— the less said about them the
better, seeing that there was no domestic
life, and that there were no family ties, and
that filial respect and paternal affection were
dead letters, and that the modesty and reverence
of youth were unknown. In fact, according to
him, the whole population was given up to
corruption and uncleanness, and it was ever a
matter of pious wonder and puzzled faith that
they were suffered to exist at all, and not swept
clean away out of life and history by human
wrath and heavenly vengeance united.

Of the French revolution, it was dangerous to
speak. At the mere mention of the time or any of
the actors therein, though usually so genial and
good natured, he would become violently agitated,
and empty out such a vial of high church indignation
as it is not often given to laymen to be
acquainted with. For once in his life my father
joined hands with the Romish Church, and, to
better abuse the revolutionists, took even the
priests and abbés of the Regency under his wing.
This little bit of official sympathy used always to
amuse me—it was so naïve and thorough. One
of my elder brothers was at that time an ardent
Jacobin. He had a small medallion of Robespierre,
by David, hanging up in his room, and a
classic-looking bust, which he called Brutus,
standing on the shelf above his bed, and he
learned whole passages of Rousseau's Social
Contract off by heart, and scored all the prayers
for the king and royal family out of the prayerbook
—whereby he made it an unsightly-looking
thing enough—and would have had a universal
guillotine for the especial benefit of all crowned
heads whatsoever: in short, he was in the full
fever of the republican frenzy, and just as
unreasonable in his way as my father was in his.
But he was young, high spirited, and as
beautiful as an Apollo, so got condonation for his
follies from most people. But when he and my
father foregathered together, and the dreaded
topic came "upon the carpet," as it always did
somehow, our drawing-room was converted into
a temporary Bedlam: while words more graphic
than courteous, and epithets both unfilial and
unclerical, made the air loud and heated for a
couple of hours or so. Indeed, we often did
not know how this discussion on the rights of
man and the divine appointment of law would
end, for both were passionate, and of dangerous
facility of muscle. My poor father! I think I
hear him now, with his deep sonorous voice—