Cried he: My legs are thin and few Where once I had a swarm.

Soft, fuzzy fur

a joy to view

Once kept my body warm

Before these flapping wing things grew To hamper and deform.”

At that outrageous bug I shot
The fury of my eye.

Said I, in scorn, all burning hot,
With rage and anger high,
"You ignominious idiot,

Those wings are made to fly."

"I do not want to fly," said he. "I only want to squirm." And he dropped his wings dejectedly, But still his voice was firm. "I do not want to be a fly, I want to be a worm."

Oh, yesterday of unknown luck,
Today of unknown bliss,

I left my fool in red and black.
The last I saw was this-

The creature madly climbing back
Into his chrysalis.

A PREJUDICE.

I was climbing up a mountain path,
With many things to do,
Important business of my own,
And other people's, too,

When I ran across a Prejudice
That quite cut off the view.

My work was such as could not wait, My path quite clearly showed;

My strength and time were limited

I carried quite a load;

And there that hulking Prejudice
Sat all across the road.

So I spoke to him politely,

For he was huge and high,

And begged that he would move a bit
And let me travel by.

He smiled, but as for moving
He didn't even try.

And then I reasoned quietly

With that colossal mule.

My time was short, no other path,
The mountain winds were cool.
I argued like a Solomon;
He sat there like a fool.

Then I flew into a passion;

I danced and howled and swore; I pelted and belabored him

Till I was stiff and sore.

He got as mad as I did,

But he sat there as before.

And then I begged him on my knees I might be kneeling still

If so I hoped to move that mass

Of obdurate ill will

As well invite the monument

To vacate Bunker Hill!

So I sat before him helpless

In an ecstasy of woe.

The mountain mists were rising fast,

The sun was sinking slow,

When a sudden inspiration came,

As sudden winds do blow.

I took my hat; I took my stick:
My load I settled fair.

I approached that awful incubus

With an absent-minded air,

And I walked directly through him,
As if he wasn't there!

ILMORE,

JAMES ROBERTS ("EDMUND

KIRKE"), an American novelist, poet and biographer; born at Boston, September 10, 1823. At eleven years of age he was thrown upon his own resources by the death of his father. While employed in a counting-house by day, he pursued his studies at night, and fitted himself for Harvard, but the necessity of supporting himself and his mother obliged him to relinquish the hope of a college education. The house in which he was engaged, and of which, at the age of nineteen, he became a partner, transacted much business with the South, and Mr. Gilmore frequently visited the Southern States, and became acquainted with their people. Soon after the breaking out of the Civil War he was associated with Robert J. Walker and Charles G. Leland in establishing The Continental Monthly, for which he wrote a series of papers afterward collected and published under the title Among the Pines (1862). It was very popular, as were his following works, My Southern Friends (1862); and Down in Tennessee (1863). Besides these he published during the war On the Border; Among the Guerillas; Adrift in Dixie; and Patriot Boys and Prison Pictures. His later works are a Life of James A. Garfield (1880); The Rear Guard of the Revolution and John Sevier as a Commonwealth Builder (1887); The Advance Guard of

Western Civilization (1888); A Mountain-White Heroine (1889), and, in conjunction with Lyman Abbott, The Gospel History, a Complete Connected Account of the Life of our Lord (1881). During the Civil War he was intrusted, with Colonel Jaquess, with an unofficial mission to the Confederate Government with a view of ascertaining on what terms the South would treat for peace.

THE SETTLERS OF TENNESSEE.

The over-mountain settlers were not fugitives from justice, nor needy adventurers seeking in the untrodden West a scanty subsistence which had been denied them in the Eastern settlements. And they were not merely Virginians - they were the culled wheat of the Old Dominion, with all those grand qualities which made the name of "Virginian" a badge of honor throughout the colonies. Many of them were cultivated men of large property, and, though the larger number were poor in this world's goods, they all possessed those more stable riches which consist of stout arms and brave hearts, unblemished integrity and sterling worth. They were so generally educated that in 1776 only two in about two hundred were found unable to write their names in good, legible English. Order-loving and God-fearing, they lived together for twelve years, without so much as one capital crime among them. Shut out by wide forests and high mountain-barriers from civilized law, they made their own laws, and framed for themselves a government which was with the sole exception of the "Fundamental Agreement," entered into by the "free planters" of New Haven on June 4, 1639 — the first absolutely “free and independent" constitution that existed in this country. The ruling motive of many of these men as it is generally of those who seek new fields of enterprisewas, no doubt, the bettering of their worldly condition; nevertheless, I think much the larger number sought in their western homes not so much worldly wealth as political freedom.

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Under two leaders, John Sevier and James Robertson, these people had developed a boundless courage, a constant fortitude, a self-devoted patriotism, worthy of the most heroic ages. When only a handful of thirty men able to wield an axe or handle a rifle, they ventured beyond the Alleghanies, and in the mountain-girt valley of the Watauga built their cabins and tilled their fields, encompassed by twenty thousand armed savages, and shut off by a trackless wilderness from all civilized succor. There for five years they held their ground, till they grew to number about two hundred riflemen, and then, under John Sevier, they began a career for which it is hard to find a parallel in history. Outnumbered more than twenty to one, they held for six years the gateways of the Alleghanies against the savage horde which Great Britain had enlisted for the destruction of the colonies. Time and again they met the savage onset, and time and again they beat it back, and carried havoc and death into the very heart of the Indian country. And so well did they guard the mountain-passes that in all these years not one savage band broke through to carry the torch and the tomahawk to the homes of Eastern Carolina. Their own cabins went up in flames, their own firesides were drenched in blood, and their mothers and wives and children fell before the merciless scalpingknife of the Cherokee, yet they never shrank and never wavered, but stood, from first to last, the immovable rear-guard of the Revolution. And not content with this, when the day was at the darkest, when seaboard Carolina was trodden under foot by the red dragoon, and the young republic seemed in the very throes of dissolution, they left their own homes wellnigh unprotected, and mustering their bravest and best, rushed over the mountains to the rescue of their distant countrymen. Making an unexampled march of two hundred miles, they hurled themselves, only nine hundred and fifty strong, against the almost impregnable defences of King's Mountain, and in one hour annihilated the left wing of the army of Cornwallis! The result, in logical sequence, was Yorktown and American independence.— John Sevier as a Commonwealth Builder.