I knew the perfume of their flowers,
     The glorious shining rays
    Around these happy smiling hours
      Were lit in by-gone days.
    O stay, I cried—bright visions, stay,
     And leave me not forlorn!
    But, smiling still, they pass'd away,
     Like shadows of the morn.

    One spirit still remain'd, and cried,
     "Thy soul shall ne'er forget!"
    He standeth ever by my side—
     The phantom called Regret!

    But still the spirits rose, and there
     Were weary hours of pain,
    And anxious hours of fear and care
     Bound by an iron chain.

    Dim shadows came of lonely hours,
     That shunn'd the light of day,
    And in the opening smile of flowers
     Saw only quick decay.

    Calm hours that sought the starry skies
     For heavenly lore were there;
    With folded hands and earnest eyes,
     I knew the hours of prayer.

    Stern hours that darken'd the sun's light,
     Heralds of coming woes,
    With trailing wings, before my sight
     From the dim past arose.
  
    As each dark vision pass'd and spoke
     I pray'd it to depart:
    At each some buried sorrow woke
     And stirr'd within my heart.
    Until these hours of pain and care
     Lifted their tearful eyes,
    Spread their dark pinions in the air
      And pass'd into the skies.

              CATS AND DOGS.

WITH deep shame and humiliation I confess
that I am not great in argument—oral argument,
at least. I have strong lungs, sufficient
impudence, a tolerable memory, a
temper that does not boil under an extraordinary
degree of provocation, and I have
seen some things and read some books. Yet I
am continually being worsted in argument.
There must be something wrong with my
major or my minor; there must be a screw
loose in my postulates. Perhaps my manner
of argument is aggressive, and my language
abusive, for nine out of ten arguments in
which I engage myself always end in violent
personal altercation. One of the subjects
of dispute I remember—one on the defensibiilty
of paradoxes in literature, and one
in which I really believe that I was shining
considerably—was suddenly cut short by
my adversary seizing and throwing at my
head, from the other end of the room, a pewter
pot, holding one pint, imperial measure.
The missile fortunately struck me transversely
—had it hit me point blank I should
never have held any more arguments on this
earth. I escaped with a tremendous bruise;
but though I collared my assailant and
threatened to give him in charge to the
police, and though I was confident that I was
right about the paradoxes, the whole company
seemed evidently to think that he had
the best of the argument, and that he had
proved more with his pewter pot than I with
my periods.

Pattlepot, the professor of modern languages
in the university of Bincumbancum,
treated me very ill in argument. I maintained
that Elagabalus was a dissolute tyrant,
and proved it as I thought, by argument
and illustration. What did Pattlepot do
but threaten, if I called Elagabalus a tyrant
again, to kick me down stairs! And he is
over six feet in height, and as strong as
Milo!

The mortifications and humiliations I have
sustained in argument are innumerable, and
I almost incredible. Lyman H. Waterclame,
supercargo of the United States ship, Wolfert
Webber, whom I met at a hotel in Hull, told
me quietly that if I were to repeat any fine
morning, at Saratoga springs, what I had
said to him concerning the execution of Major
André, I should very soon have a bowie-knife
in me. Professor Bopp of Schinkenhausen
was very rude to me. He was a man of very
strong and somewhat free opinions was Professor
Bopp, and was especially famous among
his North German colleagues for having, in a
quarto treatise, finished up the moon—that
is, confuted and put to rout the last remnant
of believers in that luminary. I had a letter
of introduction to Bopp from Buldeschrag,
the good-natured bookseller of Todgraben. I
was told that I must expect to find the professor
somewhat brusque and blunt in argument,
but that he was strictly just, and unflinchingly
logical. I went to Bopp, and found
him in a little room on the fourth story of a
house. There were some books in the room—
not many; a seraphine; several beer-mugs;
some bones, possibly antediluvian, but apparently
of beef, and of a recent date; a tremendous
smell of onions, and a no less tremendous
smell of tobacco smoke. I found Bopp to be
indeed all that he had been described—
exceedingly brusque and blunt. He was that
day occupied in finishing up,—not the moon,
but his dinner. He did not ask me to have
any; he did not ask me to sit down; but he
began immediately to question me about the
manners, customs, and social state of England.

"You have no four-story houses in your
country;" he asked me, "none so high,
eh?"

''Pardon me," I replied, "we build them
in some cases to a greater height. We have
large warehouses six and even seven stories
high."

He looked at me steadily, shut up his book
(he had been reading all through the conversation)