ture before he could get his ten pounds of
arsenic, as some have suggested, is unques-
tionably inexpedient; for besides the incon-
venience of the plan to the purchaser, it tends
to identify the magistrate or the doctor with
any improper use which might be made of
the mineral; and these gentlemen would
strongly resist such a use of their names.

The best of all safeguards is that of con-
fining the sale of poison to those only who
are qualified by education, to exercise whole-
some care, and to use a sound judgment in
dispensing it; and thus be the subject of an
inexpensive license.

Minor precautions might also be added.
The plan of forcing vendors of poisons to sell
it in bottles of particular shapes, or in papers
of a certain colour, could not always be ad-
hered to, in spite of threatened pains of fine
and forfeiture. Of this class of preventive,
the best we have seen is the sympathetic
powder, which Mr. Slade Davies proposes
should be added to arsenic, in the proportion
of one per cent. When brought in contact
with liquid or other aliment, it immediately
changes colour so as to ensure detection.

THE TWO BLACKBIRDS.

A BLACKBIRD in a wicker cage,
   That hung and swung 'mid fruits and flowers,
Had learnt the song-charm, to assuage
   The drearness of its wingless hours.

And ever when the song was heard,
   From trees around the grassy plot
Frisk'd another glossy bird,—
   Whose mate not long ago was shot,

Not to console its own wild smart,
   But, with a kindling instinct strong,
The novel feeling of its heart
   Beats for the captive bird of song.

And when those mellow notes are still,
   It hops from off its choral perch,
O'er path and sward, with busy bill,
   All grateful gifts to peck and search.

Store of ouzel dainties choice
   To those white swinging bars it brings;
And with a low consoling voice,
   It talks between its fluttering wings.

Deeply in their bitter grief
   Those sufferers reciprocate,
The one sings for its wingéd life,—
   The other for its murder'd mate.

But deeper doth the secret prove,
   Uniting those sad creatures so;
Humanity's great link of love,
   The common sympathy of woe.

Well divined from day to day,
   Is the swift speech between them twain;
For when the bird is scared away,
   The captive bursts to song again.

Yet daily with its nattering voice,
   Talking timid its fluttering wings,
Store of ouzel dainties choice,
   With busy bill the poor bird brings.

And shall I say, till weak with age
   Down from its drowsy branch it drops,
It will not leave that captive cage,
   Nor cease those busy searching hops?

Ah, no! the moral will not strain;
   Another sense will make it range,
Another mate will soothe its pain,
   Another season work a change.

But, through the live-long summer, tried—
   A pure devotion we may see;
The ebb and flow of nature's tide—
   A pitying, loving sympathy.

THE "FRESHMAN'S" PROGRESS.

URGENT business demanding my presence at
Yarmouth, some few weeks ago, I was induced
to entrust my life and limbs to the care of the
Eastern Counties Railway Company. It hap-
pened to be about the time of the commence-
ment of Term at Cambridge University, and
the remaining compartments of the carriage
in which I found a place, were filled with
Freshmen—young men who, as the term im-
plies, are about to make their first experience
of the pleasures and advantages, the perils and
temptations, of a college life. These are
among the many for whose advantage and
welfare the Royal Commission to inquire into
the Condition of the Universities, was nominally
appointed. Will the result of its labours
eventually descend to the freshman under-
graduate—to, in short, my fellow-travellers?

Youth is proverbially open-hearted and
communicative. There is seldom much to
think upon, beyond the passing object of the
hour. There is no unquiet turning of the
mind to visions of a sick family at home,
falling funds abroad, or foundering ships at
sea, which stamp moodiness on the brow, and
an air of absence on the replies, of older
travellers. Before we had reached Brox-
bourne, we were all perfectly well acquainted.
One was going up to Trinity, a second to St.
John's, a third to Christ's. The hopes and
anticipations of each were rather suffered to
ooze out, than given in so many words; but
they were not, on that account, the less easily
to be perceived. It was clear that one had
set his mind on academic honours, and would
commence his career with the determination
—or fancying that he felt the determination—
to win a high place by his exertions. A second
seemed to be filled with an anticipation of the
pleasures rather than the advantages held out
by a college course. While a third appeared
to have merged every other sensation, in one
of unmitigated delight at his escape from
school—from the bullying tutor, the eleven
o'clock lesson, Poetæ Græci, and the block.

My young friends got out at the Cambridge
Station; and when, after a vain attempt to
drink down a boiling cup of tea and snatch a
hurried bun, I again threw myself unrefreshed
into my seat, I found that I was alone. A
feeble attempt at a lamp, let in through the