mother, when she had finished. "We have a little green door, too; only ours is on the outside of the house, in the north wall. There's a spruce tree growing close up against it that hides it, but it is there. Our parents have forbidden us to open it, too, but we have never disobeyed." She said the last with something of an air of superior virtue. Letitia felt terribly ashamed. "Is there any key to your little green door?" she asked, meekly. For answer, her great-great-grandmother opened the secret drawer of the chest again, and pulled out a key, with a green ribbon in it, the very counterpart of the one in the satin-wood box. Letitia looked at it wistfully. "I should never think of disobeying my parents, and open the little green door," remarked her great-greatgrandmother, as she put back the key in the drawer. “I should think something dreadful would happen to me. I have heard whispered that the door opened into the future. It would be dreadful to be all alone in the future without one's kinsfolk." "There may not be any Indians or catamounts there," ventured Letitia. 66 There might be something a great deal worse," returned her great-great-grandmother, severely. After that there was silence between the two, and possibly also a little coldness. Letitia sat gazing forlornly into the fire, thinking that it would be much more comfortable to be alive in the future than in the past, and her great-great-grandmother sat stiffly on her opposite stool, knitting with virtuous industry, until she began to nod. Suddenly Letitia looked up, and she was fast asleep. Then, in a flash, she thought of the key and the little green door. It might be her only chance, for nobody knew how long. She pulled off her shoes, tiptoed in her thick yarn stocking-feet up to the loft, got her own clothes out of the chest and put them on instead of her homespun garb. The little great-aunts did not stir. Then she tiptoed down, got the key out of the secret drawer, gave a loving farewell look at her great-great-grandmother, and was out of the house. It was broad moonlight outside. She ran around to the north wall of the house, pressed in under the low branches of the spruce tree, and there was the little green door. Letitia gave a sob of joy and thankfulness. She fitted the key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, and there she was, back in the cheese-room. She shut the door hard, locked it and carried the key back to its place in the satin-wood box. Then she looked out of the window, and there were her great-aunt Peggy and the old maid-servant just coming home from church. Letitia that afternoon confessed what she had done to her aunt, who listened gravely. "You were disobedient," said she, when she had finished. "But I think your disobedience brought its own punishment, and I hope now you will be more contented." "Oh, Aunt Peggy," sobbed Letitia, "everything I've got is so beautiful, and I love to study and crochet and go to church." "Well, it was a hard lesson to learn, and I hoped to spare you from it, but perhaps it was for the best," said her great-aunt Peggy. "I was there a whole winter," said Letitia, "but when I got back you were just coming home from church.” It doesn't take as long to visit the past as it did to live it," replied her aunt. Then she sent Letitia into her room for the satin-wood box, and, when she brought it, took out of it a little parcel, neatly folded in white paper, tied with a green ribbon. "Open it," said she. Letitia untied the green ribbon and unfolded the paper, and there was the little silver snuff-box which had been the treasure of her great-great-grandmother, Letitia Hopkins. She raised the lid, and there was also the little glass bottle. Copyright 1896, by BACHELLER, JOHNSON AND BACHELLER. REILIGRATH, FERDINAND, a German poet; born at Detmold, June 17, 1810; died at Cannstatt, Würtemberg, March 18, 1876. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a grocer at Soest, and was subsequently employed in mercantile clerkships at various places. While serving his apprenticeship he mastered the English, French, and Italian languages, and began to write verses for newspapers. His first book, a series of translations from the Odes and Songs of Victor Hugo, appeared in 1836. This was followed two years later by his first original volume of Gedichte. In 1842 he endeavored to establish a periodical to be called Britannica: für Englisches Leben und Englische Literatur, and received promises of contribution from Bulwer and Dickens; and in that year he received a pension of 300 thalers from King William IV. of Prussia. Up to this time he had taken no part in political agitations; but about 1844 he threw up his pension, identified himself with the Liberal party in Germany, published Mein Glaubensbekenntniss (My Creed), and on account of the sentiments therein expressed was forced to leave the country. In 1848 he was on the point of emigrating to America. The amnesty of 1849 permitted him to return to Germany, taking up his residence at Düsseldorf; but he was soon after prosecuted on account of a poem entitled Die Todten on die Lebenden; he was acquitted by the jury; but new prosecutions drove him to London in 1851, where he became a clerk in a banking establishment, at the same time making admirable translations into German from British poets. A volume of these translations ap peared in 1854 under the title of The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock. Among his numerous translations from the English into German are Shakespeare's Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, Longfellow's Hiawatha, and nearly all of the poems of Burns. He resided in England until 1886, when the suspension of the banking institution by which he was employed threw him into pecuniary straits. But a national subscription, amounting to 60,000 thalers, was raised in Germany, with which an ample annuity was purchased for him. A general amnesty for all political offenders was proclaimed in Germany in 1868, and Freiligrath returned to his native country, settling at Stuttgart, and in 1875 at Cannstatt, where he died. the next year. An edition of his collected works in six volumes appeared in New York in 1859. After this, during the Franco-German War, he wrote the popular songs Hurrah Germania; the Trompete von Gravelotte, and some others. The year after his death a new and much enlarged edition of his works appeared in Germany. A volume of selections from his Poems, translated into English by his daughter, appeared in 1870, in Tauchnitz's Collection of German Authors. Freiligrath's political poems are perhaps more highly esteemed in Germany than his earlier works. He is there styled "the poet-martyr,” “the bard of freedom," and "the inspired singer of the revolution." But for readers of the English language translations of his earlier non-political poems will give a better idea of his peculiar genius. MY THEMES. " Most weary man! why wreathest thou Again and yet again," methinks I hear you ask, Wilt never vary Thy tristful task, But sing, still sing, of sand and seas, as now Housed in thy willow zumbul on the dromedary? Thy tent has now o'er many times Been pitched in treeless places on old Ammon's plains; We long to greet in blander climes The love and laughter Thy soul disdains. Why wanderest ever thus, in prolix rhymes, Through snows and stony wastes, while we come toiling after? 66 Awake! thou art as one who dreams! Thy quiver overflows with melancholy sand! Thou faintest in the noontide beams! Thy crystal beaker Of juice is banned! Filled with juice of poppies from dull streams In sleepy Indian dells, it can but make thee weaker! "O cast away the deadly draught, And glance around thee, then, with an awakened eye! At Europe's fountains Still bubble by, Bright now as when the Grecian Summer laughed And Poesy's first flowers bloomed on Apollo's mountains! "So many a voice thine era hath, And thou art deaf to all! O, study mankind! probe Its joys and sorrows! Not round the globe, O'er flood and field and dreary desert-path, But, into thine own bosom look, and thence thy marvels borrow! Weep! Let us hear thy tears resound From the dark iron concave of life's cup of woe! |