THE AUTUMN RAMBLE.

Come my darlings for a ramble,
To the woods so dun and sere,
Don your cloaks and tie your bonnets,
For the morn is cold and clear.

Glows each face with expectation,
For the treasures to be found,
Nuts and cones, with pretty acorns,
Strewed upon the leafy ground.

Don and Dash are on before us,
Bounding merrily up the hill,

Looking back with furtive glances
Barking their impatient will.

Shall we to the grove of cedars,

Winter there is ever green,

And the sun with side-long glances
Flings to earth a paler sheen.

Nay, reluctant, you would rather
To the beechen woods below,

Where we found the dark green fern leaves

Only a few days ago.

Now with little hands close pressing,

Tender palms love-linked in mine,

Pattering feet to laughing measure,

Happy glides the merry time.

DR. JOHNSON.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON was born on the 18th of September, 1709, at Lichfield, in Staffordshire. From neither father nor mother had he any great amount of intellect to inherit. Their extraction was obscure. His father is represented as being an unwavering devotee to the house of Stuart, and strongly prejudiced in favor of their cause. He was a bookseller and stationer in Derbyshire. His mother, with a mind unimproved by education, was nevertheless a woman of good natural understanding, eminently pious and conscientious according to her standard of religious faith, and her

son in after years acknowledged, with gratitude and almost veneration, the benefits of her early instruction. The effects of the many castigations Johnson received at school from his severe but attentive teacher, influenced him in favor of a free use of the rod, and in all his conversations on the subject he declared strenuously in favor of the same. He commanded respect from his school-fellows by his remarkable proficiency and aptitude; it always exceeded his apparent diligence, but, in truth, when he seemed idle he was often laboring. Dr. Adams said of him: "No young man ever entered the university better qualified.' In order to defray his expenses there he became companion to a gentleman of Shropshire, who spontaneously undertook to support him. Among his companions he was

looked up to as a man of wit and spirit, but he was always subject to fits of melancholy (which he inherited from his father), accompanied by alternate irritation and languor. From nature he had received an uncouth figure ard diseased constitution, as a kind of detraction, perhaps, for his great mental abilities, for after all our common mother is not as partial in her gifts as we are apt to consider her, and her doctrine of compensation very often comes in most opportunely as an offset to repress our presumption or save us from despair. At Mr. Jordan's (his teacher's) request, he translated Pope's Messiah into Latin verse as a Christmas exercise. Shortly after leaving college. his father died. The means he left were scarcely sufficient to afford a temporary support to his mother, and in the following