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"And meantime, did no other vessel pass the isle ?"

"Nay, Señor ;-but

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"You do not speak; but what, Hunilla?"

"Ask me not, Señor."

"You saw ships pass, far away; you 'waved to them; they passed on;—was that it, Hunilla?"

'Señor, be it as you say."

Braced against her woe, Hunilla would not, durst not trust the weakness of her tongue. Then when our Captain asked whether any whale-boats had

But no, I will not file this thing complete for scoffing souls to quote, and call it firm proof upon their side. The half shall here remain untold. Those two unnamed events which befell Hunilla on this isle, let them abide between her and her God. In nature, as in law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.

Still, how it was that although our vessel had lain three days anchored nigh the isle, its one human tenant should not have discovered us till just upon the point of sailing, never to revisit so lone and far a spot; this needs explaining ere the sequel come.

The place where the French captain had landed the little party was on the farther and opposite end of the isle. There too it was that they had afterwards built their hut. Nor did the widow in her solitude desert the spot where her loved ones had dwelt with her, and where the dearest of the twain now slept his last long sleep, and all her plaints awaked him not, and he of husbands the most faithful during life.

Now, high broken land rises between the opposite extremities of the isle. A ship anchored at one side is invisible from the other. Neither is the isle so small, but a considerable company might wander for days through the wilderness of one side, and never be seen, or their halloos heard, by any stranger holding aloof on the other. Hence Hunilla, who naturally associated the possible coming of ships with her own part of the isle, might to the end have remained quite ignorant of the presence of our vessel, were it not for a mysterious presentiment, borne to her, so our mariners averred, by this isle's enchanted air. Nor did the widow's answer undo the thought.

"How did you come to cross the isle this morning then, Hunilla?" said our Captain.

Señor, something came flitting by me. It touched my cheek, my heart, Señor." "What do you say, Hunilla ?"

"I have said, Señor; something came through the air."

It was a narrow chance. For when in crossing the isle Hunilla gained the high land in the centre, she must then for the first have perceived our masts, and also marked that their sails were being loosed, perhaps even heard the echoing chorus of the windlass song. The strange ship was about to sail, and she behind. With all haste she now descends the height on the hither side, but soon loses sight of the ship among the sunken jungles at the mountain's base. She struggles on through the withered branches, which seek at every step to bar her path, till she comes to the isolated rock, still some way from the water. This she climbs, to reassure herself. The ship is still in plainest sight. But now worn out with over tension, Hunilla all but faints; she fears to step down from her giddy perch; she is feign to pause, there where she is, and as a last resort catches the turban from her head, unfurls and waves it over the jungles towards us.

During the telling of her story the mariners formed a voiceless circle round Hunilla and the Captain; and when at length the word was given to man the fastest boat, and pull round to the isle's thither side, to bring away Hunilla's chest and the tortoise-oil; such alacrity of both cheery and sad obedience seldom before was seen. Little ado was made. Already the anchor had been recommitted to the bottom, and the ship swung calmly to it.

But Hunilla insisted upon accompanying the boat as indispensable pilot to her hidden hut. So being refreshed with the best the steward could supply, she started with us. Nor did ever any wife of the most famous admiral in her husband's barge receive more silent reverence of respect, than poor Hunilla from this boat's

crew.

Rounding many a vitreous cape and bluff, in two hours' time we shot inside the fatal reef; wound into a secret cove, looked up along a green many-gabled lava wall, and saw the island's solitary dwelling.

It hung upon an impending cliff, sheltered on two sides by tangled thickets, and half-screened from view in front by juttings of the rude stairway, which climbed the precipice from the sea. Built of canes, it was thatched with long, mildewed grass. It seemed an abandoned hayrick, whose haymakers were now no more. The roof inclined but one way; the eaves coming to within two feet of

the ground. And here was a simple apparatus to collect the dews, or rather doubly-distilled and finest winnowed rains, which, in mercy or in mockery, the nightskies sometimes drop upon these blighted Encantadas. All along beneath the eaves, a spotted sheet, quite weatherstained, was spread, pinned to short, upright stakes, set in the shallow sand. A small clinker, thrown into the cloth, weighed its middle down, thereby straining all moisture into a calabash placed below. This vessel supplied each drop of water ever drunk upon the isle by the Cholos. Hunilla told us the calabash would sometimes, but not often, be half filled over-night. It held six quarts, perhaps. "But," said she, "we were used to thirst. At Sandy Payta, where I live, no shower from heaven ever fell; all the water there is brought on mules from the inland vales."

Tied among the thickets were some twenty moaning tortoises, supplying Hunilla's lonely larder; while hundreds of vast tableted black bucklers, like displaced, shattered tomb-stones of dark slate, were also scattered round. These were the skeleton backs of those great tortoises from which Felipe and Truxill had made their precious oil. Several large calabashes and two goodly kegs were filled with it. In a pot near by were the caked crusts of a quantity which had been permitted to evaporate. "They meant to have strained it off next day," said Hunilla, as she turned aside.

I forgot to mention the most singular sight of all, though the first that greeted us after landing; memory keeps not in all things to the order of occurrence.

Some ten small, soft-haired, ringleted dogs, of a beautiful breed, peculiar to Peru, set up a concert of glad welcomings when we gained the beach, which was responded to by Hunilla. Some of these dogs had, since her widowhood, been born upon the isle, the progeny of the two brought from Payta. Owing to the jagged steeps and pitfalls, tortuous thickets, sunken clefts and perilous intricacies of all sorts in the interior; Hunilla, admonished by the loss of one favorite among them, never allowed these delicate creatures to follow her in her occasional birds'-nests climbs and other wanderings; so that, through long habituation, they offered not to follow, when that morning she crossed the land; and her own soul was then too full of other things to heed their lingering behind. Yet, all along she had so clung to them, that, besides what moisture they lapped up at early day

break from the small scoop-holes among the adjacent rocks, she had shared the dew of her calabash among them; never laying by any considerable store against those prolonged and utter droughts, which in some disastrous seasons warp these isles.

Having pointed out, at our desire, what few things she would like transported to the ship her chest, the oil, not omitting the live tortoises which she intended for a grateful present to our Captain—we immediately set to work, carrying them to the boat down the long, sloping stair of deeply-shadowed rock. While my comrades were thus employed, I looked, and Hunilla had disappeared.

It was not curiosity alone, but, it seems to me, something different mingled with it, which prompted me to drop my tortoises, and once more gaze slowly around. I remembered the husband buried by Hunilla's hands. A narrow pathway led into a dense part of the thickets. Following it through many mazes, I came out upon a small, round, open space, deeply chambered there.

The mound rose in the middle; a bare heap of finest sand, like that unverdured heap found at the bottom of an hourglass run out. At its head stood the cross of withered sticks; the dry, pealed bark still fraying from it; its transverse limb tied up with rope, and forlornly adroop in the silent air.

Hunilla was partly prostrate upon the grave; her dark head bowed, and lost in her long, loosened Indian hair; her hands extended to the cross-foot, with a little brass crucifix clasped between; a crucifix worn featureless, like an ancient graven knocker long plied in vain. She did not see me, and I made no noise, but slid aside, and left the spot.

A few moments ere all was ready for our going, she reappeared among us. I looked into her eyes, but saw no tear. There was something which seemed strangely haughty in her air, and yet it was the air of woe. A Spanish and an Indian grief, which would not visibly lament. Pride's height in vain abased to proneness on the rock; nature's pride subduing nature's torture.

Like pages the small and silken dogs surrounded her, as she slowly descended towards the beach. She caught the two most eager creatures in her arms :-"Mia Teeta! Mia Tomoteeta!" and fondling them, inquired how many could we take on board.

The mate commanded the boat's crew; not a hard-hearted man, but his way of

life had been such that in most things, even in the smallest, simple utility was his leading motive.

"We cannot take them all, Hunilla; our supplies are short; the winds are unreliable; we may be a good many days going to Tombez. So take those you have, Hunilla; but no more."

She was in the boat; the oarsmen too were seated; all save one, who stood ready to push off and then spring himself. With the sagacity of their race, the dogs now seemed aware that they were in the very instant of being deserted upon a barren strand. The gunwales of the boat were high; its prow-presented inland-was lifted; so owing to the water, which they seemed instinctively to shun, the dogs could not well leap into the little craft. But their busy paws hard scraped the prow, as it had been some farmer's door shutting them out from shelter in a winter storm. A clamorous agony of alarm. They did not howl, or whine; they all but spoke.

"Push off! Give way!" cried the mate. The boat gave one heavy drag and lurch, and next moment shot swiftly from the beach, turned on her heel, and sped. The dogs ran howling along the water's marge; now pausing to gaze at the flying boat, then motioning as if to leap in chase, but mysteriously withheld themselves; and again ran howling along the beach. Had they been human beings hardly would they have more vividly in

spired the sense of desolation. The oars were plied as confederate feathers of two wings. No one spoke. I looked back upon the beach, and then upon Hunilla, but her face was set in a stern dusky calm. The dogs crouching in her lap vainly licked her rigid hands. She never looked behind her; but sat motionless, till we turned a promontory of the coast and lost all sights and sounds astern. She seemed as one, who having experienced the sharpest of mortal pangs, was henceforth content to have all lesser heart

strings riven, one by one. To Hunilla, pain seemed so necessary, that pain in other beings, though by love and sympathy made her own, was unrepiningly to be borne. A heart of yearning in a frame of steel. A heart of earthly yearning, frozen by the frost which falleth from the sky.

The sequel is soon told. After a long passage, vexed by calms and baffling winds, we made the little port of Tombez in Peru, there to recruit the ship. Payta was not very distant. Our captain sold the tortoise oil to a Tombez merchant; and adding to the silver a contribution from all hands, gave it to our silent passenger, who knew not what the mariners had done.

The last seen of lone Hunilla she was passing into Payta town, riding upon a small gray ass; and before her on the ass's shoulders, she eyed the jointed workings of the beast's armorial cross. (To be continued.)

SORRENTO.

PASS, hazy dream of drowsing noon!
I Wake, Naples, with thy nightly glow!
O'er Capri's stately cloud the moon
Her golden crescent raises slow.

Those stars among the orange blooms
Outshine the wanderers of the skies;
More sweet than evening's still perfumes
Love's voiceless longings rise.

Of white and tremulous hopes she weaves
Her bridal crown the moon beneath.
Shine on, bright moon! those buds and leaves
Will be fair in a funeral wreath!

I

CONNECTICUT GEORGICS.

"FARMED it" two summers, when I was eleven and twelve years old. I had been brought up within a paved city ; was lean, white, slender, school-worn, bookish. Analyzing now the phases of interior life which I only experienced then, I seem to have been impregnated with city associations; or rather the boy's soul in me was paved over with brick and stone, like the walls whose hot reflections smote my eyes in summer, and girded me in always. I can remember how I shed a shrunken epidermis, as it were, like a moulting crab, as if I really grew inwardly by the fresh fulness of the country. I found that, besides the side of human life on which I had theretofore been gazing; dry and scaly with brick and stone, dead and still on Sundays, dinning and resounding all the week with the clash of pavements under armed heel and hoof, with rattle and groan of wheels-the unrelenting and desperate onwardness of the great Yankee dollar-chase ;-that, besides this, there was another-infinite, calm, peaceful, sun-lighted, dewy, free, full of life, unconstrained, fresh, vigorous-the world of God; as the city is the world of men— and of devils.

I was to enter upon my agricultural novitiate under the tutorship of an uncle, a farmer near the south shore of Connecticut. I departed for my destination early one morning in the end of Spring, from my city home in the interior of the State, riding in the wagon of a certain landholder from my uncle's vicinity, who had come thither on business in his private conveyance. All the day I rode southward, through town and village, wood and field, in the absorbing trance of deep delight which a child enjoys in any discursive or adventurous enterprise, however humble. Every thing was enjoyable. The steady, binary progression of the old farm-horse's persistent trot; the rattling of the bones of the hard-seated and springless wagon; the boundless woods, full of new forms and colors, on rocks, branches and leaves; sprinkled on surface, and permeated through unfathomable depths, with sparkling specks of sunlight; the occasional chip squirrel, provincially called "chipmunk," jerking or gliding along the fences; sometimes a "very magnificent threetailed bashaw "-a red or gray compeer of the rodent tribe-a beast which I was almost as much surprised to see, at least outside of a rotatory tin gymnasium, as if he had been a giraffe or an ornithorhyn

chus; the wide, open fields, with their "industrial regiments" on active service, in undress uniform; the twisting and writhing trout-brooks; the quiet and composed rivers; the steep hills, and deep, still ponds, of each of which the neighbors aver with pride that the bottom has never been found a fact, perhaps, to be accounted for by its never having been considered worth looking after ;-all were new, all overflowing with light, and life. and joy.

I was startled at being vanquished by my companion in a strife, with whose weapons I had presumed him unacquainted. I began to "tell stories," and at first acquitted myself to my satisfaction; but soon I found that I had met my match. Mr. N.'s talents as a raconteur were infinitely above my own. Not only were his stories funnier than mine, but whenever I boggled, he kindly suggested the missing matter; and when I did not boggle, he invariably furnished an improved catastrophe.

We stopped to dine at the house of a farmer. And then and there-with shame I tell it did I first feel the excitement of the intoxicating cup. That excitement, however, did not in the present instance exhibit itself in the gorgeous colors poetically supposed to clothe it. The flowing bowl was represented, upon the pine

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mahogany "of our Connecticut Amphitryon, by a broken-nosed earthen pitcher: and the mighty wine, by equally mighty cider, of so hard a texture that our host stated that it could only with great difficulty be bitten off by the partaker, at the end of his draught. Of this seductive fluid I drank two tumblers-full; and to me, unconscious and verdant, it tasted good, as sour things are wont to do to children. But a quick retribution came upon me. The puckery stuff began to bite like a serpent, and sting like an adder, with a promptitude not adverted to by Solomon.

We came safe to our journey's end; arriving, as the evening fell, at the farmstead, my summer home. Darkness was already gathering among the thick shadowing of great elms and prim locusts in the wide dooryard. Piles of saw-mill slabs fortified the woodpile, which, paved with chips, the mangled remains of slaughtered King Log, spread before the "stoop"; a façade of lofty barns-the "old" barn and the " new" were ranged across the background in the north, shel

tering the lane, into which we had driven, and which, leaving woodpile and stoop to the east, led northward to the abutting front of the two barnyards. A woodshed, opening to the south, ran out from the house, displaying, within, a vast and miscellaneous concourse of firewood, lumber, tools, and all the mechanico-agricultural apparatus of a farmer's tinkering shop. Entering the house, after greeting due, and a proper refection for my inner boy, I was speedily asleep; and, next morning early, was enrolled in the ranks of industry, and detailed for skirmishing and outpost service: in other words, I was promoted to the captaincy over a platoon of "milky mothers," whose daily march to and from near and distant pastures I was to guard and guide. By ap propriate degrees, I was led deeper and deeper within the agricultural mysteries of planting and hoeing, and the aftercoming work of haying and harvest.

Perhaps descriptions of a few separate days' experience will best portray what manner of life I led.

THE FRESH MEADOW.

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WITH empty cart and full dinner-pails, we set out early for the assault upon the June grass. The "fresh meadow was a level intervale, the road to which ran through a large upland mowing lot, descended through a secret chasm in a ledge of rocks crowned with trees, and led us out into the open sunny meadow behind, like the downward paths by which princes in fairy tales descend into realms of underground loveliness, ruled by expectant queens.

In such expeditions I took my first lessons in the ox-compelling art. The mysteries of "haw" and " gee, " of "hwo"

and "hwish". -the last an outlandish Vermontese barbarism, signifying “back,” were duly explained. The cartwhip exercise was demonstrated; whose adaptation to the intellectual capacities of the bovine race is marked by the simplicity of genius. For the single lesson taught the ox appeals with metaphysical truth to the desire of happiness common to beasts with men ; and with practical wisdom developes in a utilitarian direction his natural instinct to get away from what hurts him. If, therefore, I wish him to go forward, I “flick " him à posteriori; if I would have him retrogress, I pound his nose with the whipstock; if he should come towards me, I touch him up on the further side with the lash, and if he should go from me, I prod his hither ribs with the butt. These ma

nœuvres having been accompanied with dexterous intonations of the four aforesaid sounds, together with "go 'lang!" "what are ye 'ba-a-a-ut?" and other interjections hortatory, mandatory, and sometimes, I grieve to say, imprecatory, all developed by skilful teamsters into many wonderful, intricate, and imaginative variations executed through the nose, the intelligent beast gradually learns to do, at the sound alone, what he did at first, at the sound accompanied with action. Some imagine that herein is the true solution of the myth of Amphion's song, viz.: He played -a Greek prototype of the great Italian fiddler-a pagan Paganini-upon a onestringed TAEKтpov, plectrum, or whip (comp. plago, plagare, to scourge), which he accompanied with the voice, probaby in the Lydian mode; and as he worked powerfully upon the feelings of his cattle, by his vigorous instrumental performance, executed fortissimo, forestissimo, sforzando, and confuoco molto, so, when he performed as vocal solos these impassioned variations upon one string, the vivid recollections of his masterly instrumentation induced his cattle to manoeuvre with such remakable agility, as to give rise to the present slightly varied account, that he played to the beasts, instead of on them. This, however, is a digression, for which, now that I have followed it out to my satisfaction, I ask pardon.

Theory such as I have adverted to was imparted to me; and very soon 1 flourished the pliant hickory, and bawled out the scientific monosyllables with a nasality as easy and workmanlike as that of any Bill or Joe, to the manner born.

The meadow is entered; the cart left in a corner, resting on its wheels and long nose, like that Australian bird who locates himself, for his case, tripodwise upon his two legs and his bill; the dinner-pails are sheltered in its shadow; scythes are hung and whetted, and "forward four." The best man goes foremost; and the strongbacked scythemen, each with "rifle" whetstone in his red right hand, girded low and tight, stepping wide and bending forward, seem to gesture the falling grass into the long straight swaths which grow close under and after the left hand of each.

"And forward, and forward,

Resistlessly they go;

For strong arms wave the long keen glaive That vibrates down below."

or

Is any thing more inspiriting than the "rhythmic sweep" of a platoon of mowers? They seem to beat the time to some mysterious marching music. Strength is

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