heard, as of doors broken down, followed by the tramping of many feet, the clash of arms, the shrieking of women, and the shouts of men. The wary and unconquered old Baron Von Schmidt, at the head of a band of retainers, had managed, unperceived, to climb the precipice in rear of the castle, and, scaling the battlements, had forced his way into the strong-hold. The Count Johannes started up and grasped his sword, and those of his companions who were not obliviously drunk staggered to their feet. A terrible struggle ensued, but the half-tipsy revelers of the castle could not cope with the vigorous and vengeful followers of the Baron, and they were nearly all slain......Day was breaking when Asmodeus led me away from the place. The castle was in flames, and the victors were riding away laden with booty. At their head rode the Baron, leading an ass on which the unfortunate Count Johannes was strapped, Mazeppa-like, and grinding his teeth with rage and despair.

The Baron's son, the young and comely Count Von Schmidt, followed on a palfrey, bearing in his arms the Ladie Emilie, who had fainted

away.

III.

Once more, led by Asmodeus, I sped through space and through time, on, on, on until we found ourselves on the banks of the Tiber, in Imperial Rome, nearly half a century before the coming of our Lord. There was a terrible commotion in the city; citizens were hurrying to and fro, or whispering mysteriously together, and soldiers were rushing about brandishing their swords with looks of rage and hatred. In a corner of the forum a war-worn veteran was addressing a crowd from the steps of the temple of Jupiter.

"Cæsar is slain!" said he; "the noblest Roman of them all, the foremost man of all this world;" and his moistened eyes flashed fire, as with uplifted sword he called upon his hearers to "strike for their altars and their fires, and inflict vengeance on the assassins."

"Thou hast done the state good service, Furius," said he; "leave it now to younger arms to strike. Thy seven jugera at Laburnum, a virgin soil, wait the willing plow. There, with thy wife and children, thou mayest live in ease." A smile of inexpressible scorn passed over the features of Furius.

"What care I for filthy lucre!" said he, "and what is ease to me? His sword should be the Roman soldier's only bride; and as for children, since my Emilia was forcibly abducted by Licencius Sergius, I acknowledge no other offspring than my deeds. They shall hand my name down to posterity."

Just then a party of conspirators, headed by Brutus, Cassius, and Licencius Sergius, rushed into the forum shouting "Liberty!"

"Ye shall have it," cried Furius, "to roam in Hades!"

And with that he made at them, striking right and left. At a single blow he cut off the head of Licencius Sergius, and then made a lunge at Cassius; but that individual being exceedingly lean, the blade passed through the toga only, merely grazing the body. Brutus instantly seized him by the throat, while Cassius tripped him up from behind, and the other confederates pressing forward were on the point of dispatching him with their daggers, when Marcus Antonius appeared at the opposite side of the forum, at the head of a body of soldiery. The conspirators hereupon made a precipitate exit, leaving Furius Jonus struggling on the pavement sorely bruised, but vowing that he had life enough left for revenge.

IV.

Again Asmodeus bore me away. We traveled a long distance into time, but not so far in space, for we landed in Arcadia sometime during the Age of Stone.

I saw before me a rude hut, made of branches of trees interlaced together and plastered with mud. A hideous old crone, with a great ring in her nose, and but scantily clad in a garment made from the inner bark of a tree, was grind"Who is that old soldier ?" I inquired of As- ing some roots between two stones. Five or six modeus. "That is Furius Jonus," he replied, "the ones occasionally occupying themselves in makfamous centurion of the 10th legion."

The name struck me. "Can it be?" I thought; for in that scarred and weather-beaten visage, deeply marked with the lines of hardship, I saw a certain resemblance to the placid Jones. I looked inquiringly at Asmodeus. He read my thoughts, and nodded affirmatively.

"That cut across his face," said he, "was received in a hand-to-hand combat with Vercingetorix; and that scar above the eye, whence a piece of the skull has been extracted, shows where he was struck by a club in the hands of a painted savage, when, jumping from the trireme, he led the legion ashore on the barbarous coast of Britain."

At this moment a citizen stepped forward, and endeavored to calm the passion of the veteran.

naked children were lolling about, the elder

ing flint arrow-heads. A girl about sixteen years of age, whose whole costume consisted of a fringe of undressed leather about the loins, and whose tangled hair was matted with grease and dirt, was admiring herself in a neighboring pool of water, while engaged in staining her teeth black. A man dressed in skins soon came out of the surrounding woods. His hair was long and unkempt, and his grizzly beard came down to his waist. Some porcupine quills were stuck through his ears, and his arms and legs were tattoed. In one hand he carried a bow and arrows, and in the other a dead musk-rat.

"Woman," he said, in a harsh guttural voice, "I want to eat."

"Eat!" cried the harridan; ". you are always eating! and a fine hunter you are, for the last

moon we've had nothing but frogs and liz- are they to be heard to the exclusion of every ards!"

"And who is the sleeping barbarian in the few there be who find it. One of the first and hut?" I asked.

of a Wall Street speculator? a game at ball, battle-door, or croquet and billiards? If you like to have your interests and pleasures treated with respect, has not Jack the same desire and the same right? And as for the short duration which does the man in middle life, or the old man, remember best and most fondly, the years next him or those in which he was a boy?

his skin. It is plain you can not draw out a Polka Redowa? a house of cards or the life naughtiness from him by a counter irritant. But, Madam, every human being is an organ, and you can play on him, if you know the stops. You have not yet found out your boy; but he is get-at-able, and it is your business never to rest till you do get at him. There is something he loves and something he fears, and you can discover it if you have the patience. He may be open to reason, or touched by an appeal to his honor. He may dread rigidly enforced quiet, or the loss of a pleasure, or worse than all, the sad coldness of those he loves. But to declare that he is unmanageable, is simply to declare that you are too busy, or too lazy to experiment till you hit on a motive power; and, in that case, to be plain with you, you had better retire with your boy to a hermitage; for Jack howling, and Jack breaking up all conversation, and Jack in your neighbor's trees, and breaking his windows, and in full chase after his chickens, and disobeying you right and left, is insupportable and not to be endured by society.

He

Jack has another inconvenient aspect. is something else besides a sweet little piece of mechanism that must be made to obey, if he is to be tolerable. Be determined fully within yourself to be obeyed on those few grand points on which obedience is necessary for home comfort and the child's safety, and lay no gins and snares for his poor little stumbling feet, in the shape of numerous rules, regulations, and restrictions; and, unless in exceptional cases, you will find discipline an easy matter. But Jack is an individual with rights that you are bound to respect. It is so excessively disagreeable and troublesome to respect the rights of those much weaker than ourselves that we are apt to dispense with that little ceremony altogether. If Mrs. Glycers willfully breaks her word, you have ways of being unpleasant to Mrs. Glycers, and vice versa. But if you disappoint Jack he has no means of holding you to your word. He was a thousand times more eager for his cart or book than you were for Mrs. Glycer's company at your party, and his disappointment goes fathoms below yours; for you are calmly sure that there are more Mrs. Glycers, while he is passionately certain that there will never be another cart, book, or happy moment for him. He has exactly the same right to expect fidelity from you that you have from Mrs. Glycers, and when you brush him away with "Some other time," and "How foolish to cry!" you are trampling on his rights because he is not old enough or strong enough to exact it; and when you do that you are a tyrant.

Jack has his troubles and his delights. We call them childish. We mean by that they are of slight value and of short duration. They interest us slightly; as a consequence we argue they take light hold on him, and we laugh often at his eager interest in them, and make him ashamed of them. But I appeal to the Man in the Moon, or the gentleman from Saturn, which is the most childish, a game of hop and skip or VOL. XXXIII.-No. 196.-M м

Jack has a right to be heard. When he bursts in on your conversation, eager and palpitating, if he is a tolerably well-behaved Jack he will wait for the end of your paragraph, and then it is your turn for politeness and a hearing. Especially should he be heard when under suspicion, and believed, if his truthfulness is up to the average; if it is not, I am afraid you are to blame. If the matter is complicated by relations with Bob, or "some other fellow," he has the moral right to the patient investigation and dispassionate judgment that we accord to our felons, under the name of trial by jury.

It is useless to say, "These are stilted notions and beyond the appreciation of children," unless you think that your Jack is a little beast, and not a little man. If he is the last he has the germs of honor, truth, and self-respect. If you mean to develop honor, truth, and self-respect you must begin by believing in them. Respect him and he will respect himself. Trust him and he will feel the full responsibility. Outrage his childish dignity and delicacy, and though he has no words in which to express the sting, it will rankle deep in his little heart. Call on the good that is in him and it will answer you. Rouse the evil and it will grow. Be as wide awake for his good points as for his shortcomings, and you will find such praise the best guano for the small boy virtue-crop. If you wish him to say "Thank you," thank him yourself when he waits on you. If you desire him to be well-bred, treat him with scrupulous politeness. If you lose your temper, don't flatter yourself that you can wipe it out with ten pages of the Bible; or that it will escape him, even if he does not look up in your face with round, wondering eyes, and ask softly, 'Mamma, aren't you quarreling?" as once happened to a friend of mine. If you have a truth for his digestion spread it abroad in the atmosphere. Don't make it into a potion or a pill. Live it, speak it, find it in a story, and tell or read it to him; but count it as just so much lost time when you sit down and say, sepulchrally, "My child, we are made of the dust of the earth to teach us humility. We ought to be good in order to be happy; and we shall be happy if we are good." A child is sure to shirk lumpy instruction like that, dodge precepts, and look straight at example.

I am aware that this view of Jack's rights and perceptions is a troublesome one. It will break in often on calls and concerts, on pie-making and frock-braiding, on reading and writing. It will take a piece here out of the best hour, and nip off a bit there from an agreeable plan. It

requires a care and caution with which we are pleasantly apt to dispense in dealing with our children. If we are irritated when Jack bursts in upon our reading or shakes the table in the middle of a long-tailed letter, do we not irritate him in turn when we call him off from his play to bring us a pin? Have we any business to demand of him a self-control which we are unable to practice ourselves when we knock down the house that he was an hour in building with one sweep of our skirts?

am not selfish, for that is impossible for a Wife and Mother. I am nervous, but that is only natural in a Wife and Mother.

"I believe that I do wrong in a general way, but never on any particular count, being a Wife and Mother. If my house is out of order, our expenses beyond our income, and the children sickly, fretful, and quarrelsome, it is not that there is any thing amiss in my management, but simply that my house and children are entirely unlike all others, and there is no possible method of keeping them clean and under discipline. To think otherwise would be to cast a slur on me, a Wife and Mother; and no matter how repulsive and provoking I should appear were I somebody else, as a Wife and Mother I have a right to expect the entire devotion of both husband and children, unless they are miracles of

A troublesome view, I admit again. Here have you a little stranger in this world, whose incessant drafts on your sympathy you must honor, because you are the only firm on whom this young gentleman has as yet any credit of the sort. You can't wind him up and set him running, in a safe place, out of harm's way. You can't tie him in a theory, like a baby-jump-infidelity and ingratitude." er, and leave him there. You can't snub him and turn him off, though he walks straight through all your plans, as he is sure to do. At least you will not, if you are wise.

Settle down at your crochet or your gossip and leave your little son to spend four-fifths of his day with his nurse or in the street at your peril. Push him off, with "Don't bother!" and "I am busy," to take his little interests outside for sympathy, and see if he will bring you his larger anxieties. Fold your hands and let the wind be sown in his heart, and see what you will find there when you come to look for fruit.

I know there are women to whom all this is the very superfluity of needless painstaking. Women who believe that there is some magic virtue inherent in the two words "Wife" and "Mother"—with all the qualities belonging thereto left out. It is enough for them that one day long ago they married and since have brought children into the world. On the strength of these two facts alone, husband and children are henceforth expected to love them straight through to the end of their lives, no matter how unlovable they may be. Their creed apparently runs like this:

"I believe that I am a Wife and Mother. That I can present myself constantly to husband and children with mouth down at the corners, temper out of joint, hair down my back, and the worst wrapper in town; and though they dislike untidiness, whining, and ill-temper in other people it will not affect them in the least; but they will enthusiastically prefer me to the rest of the world, because I am a Wife and Mother.

"I can habitually sour their sport and take the sparkle out of their pleasure, and still they will come to me for sympathy and find nothing pleasant without me, because I am a Wife and Mother.

"I believe that every thing in my house may run with a creak or a jar, and still they will prefer home, because I am in it, a Wife and a Mother. I believe that I have nothing to learn, because I am a Wife and a Mother. I believe that I can snap my fingers in the face of human nature, because I am a Wife and Mother. I

Ladies may protest and indignantly disclaim such a creed, but is not that a very common practice reduced to words? Oh! the pity! the pity of it! that the mortal folly of all this can not be driven home to the comprehension of women. Think of a woman settling down in the midst of her household and spreading out into a great, fat vegetable. Her husband is modified by years and experience, but she learns nothing. Her children grow and she only develops—cabbageward. She instinctively looks after shirts and puddings; and to give her whole mind to these matters she sends her troublesome, meddling, busy, inquisitive little Jack any where out of her way.

The poor little fellow goes about with the "Why?" that God set on the end of his tongue, to be answered sometimes by a wise man, oftener by a fool, oftenest by a liar, picking up his mental and moral training like cold victuals. He grows to companionable age, and finds that he regards his mother with traditional respect and a certain interest due to the source from whence his shirt-buttons and lunch-baskets are derived. But he has a habit of finding all the enthusiasm, romance, and delight of his young life outside of his home; a habit acquired years before, when he was a very little boy, and much in his mother's way. In those days she was the oldest, the loveliest, the wittiest, and the dearest woman in the world; and he rather pined for her society. In these days she is unmistakably frouzy. She wears preternatural nightcaps and huge flannel petticoats; she proses intolerably; she has all the exploded notions of fifty years ago. She is weak, vain, irritable, rash, and undignified; endowed with all the attributes, in fact, proper to a woman who has vegetated without once asking whether those about her might not prefer a Woman to a Cabbage. Jack has an instinctive tenderness and respect for her as his mother; but she insists on an active personal preference and admiration. How can Jack prefer a woman stupid and selfish enough to have learned nothing in the last half century? and if he would walk half a mile out of his way to avoid such a woman, if she

were not his mother, by what stretching and pulling of possibilities can he admire and venerate her?

I meet enough of such women, uneasy, dissatisfied, and pained. I often hear Her Cabbageship bewailing herself over the undutiful tendencies of this generation. I see also the gentle, gracious, keen-eyed, intelligent mother; the woman who, having her children, recognized the full value of what she had at stake, and the full weight of her responsibility. Very determined and unwearying was this little woman in her quiet way. When the plan that worked so well with Clara failed with Bob, with gentle, sagacious patience she set herself to find another. When she caught herself undoing her precept by her practice she took herself to task and rebuked herself with severity. As her children grew she grew with them, dreading only to be left behind. She called them her roses, and when she was selfish or lazy, said to herself, "But my roses will not clamber and shade my door-stone through the heat unless I weed, and water, and prune, and cut, and tie, and watch them now." Her Cabbageship looked on sneering, or stupidly indifferent. She had tried all that; or why be the slave of your children? But to-day I see our little Mother hanging on her son's arm, and very proud of Jack, who is quite as proud of her, while over the way Her Cabbageship sits alone, groaning over her thistle-crop.

OUR VEGETABLES.

it too, for it grows wild upon our Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and our canvas-backs and their friends love to dine upon it. But the British, as usual, have all the credit, as it is down in their books.

Garlic came from Sicily, where, for my part, I wish it had staid. The Caulo-rapa, an afflicted cross between the turnip and cabbage, claims the Vaterland for its own. Beans blossomed first within sight of embryo mummies, in the land of the Sphinx; and the Egg-plant first laid its glossy treasures under an African sun.

Peru and Chili were the first countries enlivened by the dazzling hues of the Nasturtian vine; and Southern Europe gave us the Artichoke and the Beet.

To Persia we stand indebted for Peaches, Walnuts, Mulberries, and a score of everyday luxuries and necessities; to Arabia we owe the cultivation of Spinage; and to Southern Europe we must bow in tearful gratitude for the Horseradish.

At Siberia the victims of modern intemperance may shake their gory locks forever-for from that cold, unsocial land came Rye, the father of the great fire-water river which has floated so many jolly souls on its treacherous tides, and engulfed so much of humanity's treasure.

The Chestnut, dear to squirrels and young America, first dropped its burrs on Italian soil, while its giant cousin, yclept the "Horse," is a native of Thibet.

Who ever dreams, while enjoying his "Bergamotte," his "Flemish Beauty," or his "JarN these days, when nearly all the good things gonelle," that the first Pear-blossoms opened

mopolitan, it is interesting to trace the nation-school-girl of all the pickle-eating tribe, dreams ality of some of the most familiar things in our of thanking the East Indies for her Cucumbers? daily fare. Seldom, while munching our ma- Apropos of this, I once was told by a worthy tutinal radish, do we pause to conjure an imag-old lady of Long Island, a singular item in reinary bed of buried crimson and white in the far lands of Fang-Chou and Ptys-Wampi; yet from China and Japan were the first Radishes introduced to the outside barbarians of Europe. Neither, at supper, in meeting with a peculiarly flavorous morsel in our cake, do we inwardly thank the home of Demosthenes for the luxury; yet the earliest Citron-groves breathed their perfume on the sunny Grecian ether. Our Quinces, hanging from crooked, crowded limbs, the most neglected of all our luxuries, may be forced to stand in drunken rows along broken-down fences, or act as outposts to barns and outhouses; but the great-great-grandmother of all the Quinces was a plucky little tree of high station, looked up to by sweet-scented shrubs in the Island of Crete.

Fennel grew wild along the banks of European rivers long before the first entertainment of the "Arabian Nights" was dreamed of; and Celery, once known as "Smallage," was munched by many an ancient Druid, let us believe, plucking it during his solitary walks along the old British coast. Even then, it may be, the ducks of an unknown continent were munching

gard to the last-named edible. She said that in its wild state it grew on very luxuriant vines that trailed in every direction over the ground, tangling themselves among the bushes at such a rate that the progress of grazing animals was thereby much impeded; hence, she assured me, the name, cow-cumber. The old lady's learning, I admit, was generally not of the most reliable order, but I give her suggestion for what it may be worth. Probably she was in some way akin to that other worthy old lady in New Jersey who, when asked by her city nephew, why in the world she called a certain vegetable "Sparrow-grass," replied, innocently:

"Well, child, I can't say where these names comes from gen'rally, but certain it's as plain as the nose on your face that sparrow-grass must get its name from the sparrows feedin' on it so plentiful when it's in seed."

The nephew chuckled inwardly, of course. But he, poor fellow, was ignorant in his turn; for he didn't know that Asparagus was first found in Russia and Poland; and that in its wild state, as gathered along the shores of Long Island Sound and elsewhere, it is a most delicious edible.