thing, sir; but I, looking at the moon, as I floated there upturned to her yellow light, thought of the loved being whose tears I knew would flow when she heard of my singular fate, at once so grotesque, yet melancholy to awfulness.

And how often we have talked, too, of that Carian shepherd who spent his damp nights upon the hills, gazing as I do on the lustrous planet! who will revel with her amid those old super titi ns? Who, from our own unlegended woods, will evoke their yet undetected, haunting spirits? Who peer with her in prying scrutiny into nature's laws, and challenge the whispers of poetry from the voiceless throat of matter? Who laugh merrily over the stupid guesswork of pedants, that never mingled with the infinitude of nature, through love exhaustless and allembracing, as we have? Poor girl, she will be companionless.

Alas! companionless for ever-save in the exciting stages of some brisk flirtation. She will live hereafter by feeding other hearts with love's lore she has learned from me, and then, Pygmalion-like, grow fond of the images she las herself endowed with semblance of divinity, until they seem to breathe back the mystery the soul can truly catch from only one.

How anxious she will be lest the coroner shall have discovered any of her notes in my pocket?

I felt chilly as this last reflection crossed my mind. Partly at thought of the coroner, partly at the idea of Mary being unwilli. gly compelled to wear mouri.ing for me, in case of such a disclosure of our engagement. It is a provoking ing for a girl of nineteen to have to go into mourning for a deceased lover, at the beginning of her second winter in the metropolis.

The water, though, with my motionless position, must have had something to do with my chilliness. I see, sir, you think that I tell my story with great levity; but indeed, indeed I should grow delirious did I venture to hold steadily to the awfulness of my feelings the greater part of that night. I think indeed, I must have been most of the time hysterical with horror, for the vibrating emotions I have recapitulated did pass through my brain even as I have detailed them.

But as I now became calm in thought, I summoned up again some resolution of action.

If

I will begin at that corner (said I), and swim around the whole enclosure. I will swim slowly and again feel the sides of the tank with my feet. die I must, let me perish at least from well directed though exhausting effort, not sink from mere bootless weariness in sustaining myself till the morning shall bring relief.

The sides of the place seemed to grow higher as I now kept my watery course beneath them. It was not altogether a dead pull. I had some variety of emotion in making my circuit. When I swam in the shadow it looked to me more cheerful beyond in the moonlight. When I swam in the moonlight I had the hope of making some discovery when I should again reach the shadow. I turned several times on my back to rest just where those wavy lines would meet. The stars looked viciously bright to me from the bottom of that well; there was such a company of them; they were so glad in their lustrous revelry; and they had such space to move in? alone, sad to despair, in a strange element, prisoned, and a solitary gazer upon their mocking chorus. And yet there was nothing else with which I could hold communion?

I was

I turned upon my breast and struck out almost frantically, once more. The stars were forgotten, the moon, the very world of which I as yet formed

a part, my poor Mary herself was forgotten. I thought only of the strong man there perishing; of me in my lusty manhood, in the sharp vigor of my dawning prime, with faculties illimitable, with se ses all alert, battling there with physical obstacles which men like myself had brought together for my undoing. The Eterial could never have willed this thing! I could not and I would not perish thus. And I grew strong in insolence of self-trust; and I laughed aloud as I dashed the sluggish water from side to side.

Then came an emotion of pity for myself-of wild, wild regret; of sorrow, oh, infinite for a fate so desolate, a doom so dreary, so heart-sickening. You may laugh at the contradiction if you will, sir, but I felt that I could sacrifice my own life on the instant, to redeem another fellow creature from such a place of horror, from an end so piteous. My soul and my vital spirit seemed in that desperate moment to be separating; while one in parting grieved over the deplorable fate of the other.

And then I prayed!

It was

I prayed, why or wherefore I know not. not from fear. It could not have been in hope. The days of miracles are passed, and there was no natural law by whose providential interposition I could be saved. I did not pray; it prayed of itself, my soul within me.

Was the calmness that I now felt, torpidity? the torpidity that precedes dissolution, to the strong swimmer who, sinking from exhaustion, must at last add a bubble to the wave as he suffocates beneath the element which now denied his mastery? If it were so, how fortunate was it that my floating rod at that moment attracted my attention as it dashed through the water by me. I saw on the instant that a fish had entangled himself in the wire noose. The rod quivered, plunged, came again to the surface, and rippled the water as it shot in arrowy flight from side to side of the tank. At last driven towards the southeast corner of the Reservoir, the small end seemed to have got foul somewhere. The brazen butt, which, every time the fish sounded, was thrown up to the moon, now sank by its own weight, showing that the other end must be fast. But the cornered fish, evidently anchored somewhere by that short wire, floundered several times to the surface, before I thought of striking out to the spot.

You

The water is low now and tolerably clear. may see the very ledge there, sir, in yonder corner, on which the small end of my rod rested when I secured that rike with my hands. I did not take him from the slip-noose, however; but standing upon the ledge, handled the rod in a workmanlike manner, as I flung that pound pickerel over the ironrailing upon the top of the parapet. The rod, as I have told you, barely reached from the railing to the water. It was a heavy, strong bass rod which I had borrowed in the Spirit of the Times" office; and when I discovered that the fish at the end of the wire made a strong enough knot to prevent me from drawing my tackle away from the railing around which it twined itself as I threw, why, as you can at once see, I had but little difficulty in making my way up the face of the wall with such assistance. The ladder which attracted your notice is, as you see, lashed to the iron railing in the identical spot where I thus made my escape; and for fear of similar accidents they have placed another one in the corresponding corner of the other compartment of the tank ever since my remarkable night's adventure in the Reservoir.

We give the above singular relation verbatim as heard from the lips of our chance acquaintance; and

although strongly tempted to "work it up" after the fantastic style of a famous German namesake, prefer that the reader should have it in its American simplicity.

LUCRETIA MARIA AND MARGARET MILLER DAVIDSON.

THE sisters Lucretia Maria and Margaret Miller, were the daughters of Dr. Oliver Davidson, and Margaret Miller his wife. The parents were persons of education and refinement; and the mother, herself a poetess, had enjoyed the instructions of the celebrated Isabella Graham at New York. She was sensitive in body as well as mind, and subject to frequent attacks of sickness. Her daughter Lucretia was born at Plattsburgh, on the shore of Lake Champlain, September 27, 1808. Her infancy was sickly, and in her second year an attack of typhus fever threatened her life. She recovered from this, however, and with it the lesser disorders with which she had been also troubled, disappeared. At the age of four she was sent to school and soon learned to read and form letters in sand. She was an unwearied student of the little story books given her, neglecting for these all the ordinary plays of her age. We soon hear of her making books of her own. Her mother one day, when preparing to write a letter, missed a quire of paper; expressing her wonder, the little girl came forward and said, “Mamma, I have used it." Her mother, surprised, asked her how? Lucretia burst out crying and said, "she did not like to tell." She was not pressed to do so, and paper continued to disappear. Lucretia was often found busy with pen and ink, and in making little blank books; but would only cry and run away if questioned.

When she was six years old, these little books came to light on the removal of a pile of linen on a closet shelf, behind which they were hidden. "At first," says her biographer Miss Sedgwick, "the hieroglyphics seemed to baffle investigation. On one side of the leaf was an artfully sketched picture; on the other, Roman letters, some placed upright, others horizontally, obliquely, or backwards, not formed into words, nor spaced in any mode. Both parents pored over them till they ascertained the letters were poetical explanations in metre and rhyme of the picture in the reverse. The little books were carefully put away as literary curiosities. Not long after this, Lucretia came running to her mother, painfully agitated, her face covered with her hands, and tears trickling down between her slender fingers- Oh, Mama! mama!' she cried, sobbing, how could you treat me so? You have not used me well! My little books! you have shown them to papa, -Anne-Eliza, I know you have. Oh, what shall I do?' Her mother pleaded guilty, and tried to soothe the child by promising not to do so again; Lucretia's face brightened, a sunny smile played through her tears as she replied, 'Oh, mama, I am not afraid you will do so again, for I have burned them all;' and so she had! This reserve proceeded from nothing cold or exclusive in her character; never was there a more loving or sympathetic creature. It would be difficult to say which was most rare, her modesty, or the genius it sanctified."

She soon after learned to write in more legible

fashion, and in her ninth year produced the following lines, the earliest of her compositions which has been preserved :

ON THE DEATH OF MY ROBIN.

Underneath this turf doth lie
A little bird which ne'er could fly,
Twelve large angle worms did fill
This little bird, whom they did kill.
Puss! if you should chance to smell
My little bird from his dark cell,
Oh! do be merciful, my cat,

And not serve him as you did my rat.

66

She studied hard at school, and when needlework was given her as a preventive against this undue intellectual effort, dashed through the task assigned her with great rapidity, and studied harder than before. Her mother very properly took her away from school, and the child's health improved in consequence. She now frequently brought short poems to her mother, who always received them gladly, and encouraged her intellectual efforts. The kind parent has given us a glimpse of her daughter, engaged in her eleventh year in composition. Immediately after breakfast she went to walk, and not returning to dinner, nor even when the evening approached, Mr. Townsend set forth in search of her. He met her, and as her eye encountered his, she smiled and blushed, as if she felt conscious of having been a little ridiculous. She said she had called on a friend, and, having found her absent, had gone to her library, where she had been examining some volumes of an Encyclopædia to aid her, we believe, in the oriental story she was employed upon. She forgot her dinner and her tea, and had remained reading, standing, and with her hat on, till the disappearance of daylight brought her to her senses. A characteristic anecdote is related of her cramming" for her long poem, Amir Khan. "I entered her room-she was sitting with scarcely light enough to discern the characters she was tracing; her harp was in the window, touched by a breeze just sufficient to rouse the spirit of harmony; her comb had fallen on the floor, and her long dark ringlets hung in rich profusion over her neck and shoulders, her cheek glowed with animation, her lips were half unclosed, her full dark eye was radiant with the light of genius, and beaming with sensibility, her head rested on her left hand, while she held her pen in her right --she looked like the inhabitant of another sphere; she was so wholly absorbed that she did not observe my entrance.. I looked over her shoulder and read the following lines :—

What heavenly music strikes my ravished ear,
So soft, so melancholy, and so clear?
And do the tuneful nine then touch the lyre,
To fill each bosom with poetic fire?
Or does some angel strike the sounding strings
Who caught from echo the wild note he sings?
But ah! another strain, how sweet! how wild!
Now rushing low, 'tis soothing, soft, and mild.

"The noise I made in leaving the room roused her, and she soon after brought me her 'Lines to an_olian Harp.'"

In 1824, an old friend of her mother and a frequent visitor, the Hon. Moss Kent, happened to take up some of Lucretia's MS. poems which had

She was delighted with the opportunity afforded her of an improved literary culture, and on the 24th of November, 1824, left home in good health, which was soon impaired by her severe study. The chief mischief, however, appears to have been done by her exertions in preparing for the public examination of the school. Miss Davidson fell sick, Mrs. Willard sent for Dr. Robbins, who bled, administered an emetic, and allowed his patient, after making her still weaker, to resume her preparation for examination, for which she "must study morning, noon, and night, and

*Emma, the daughter of Samuel Hart, and a descendant from Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford, was born at New Berlin, Conn., in February, 1787. At the age of sixteen, she commenced the career to which her life has been devoted as the teacher of the district school of her native town.

After filling in succession the post of principal of several academies, she took charge of an institution of the kind at Middlebury, Vermont, where in 1809 she married Dr. John Willard of that state.

In 1819, Mrs. Willard, at the invitation of Governor Clinton, and other distinguished men of the state of New York, removed to Waterford to take charge of an institution for female education, incorporated, and in part supported, by the legislature. In consequence of being unable to secure an appropriate building at Waterford, Mrs. Willard accepted an invitation to establish a school at Troy, and in 1821 commenced the institu tion which has long been celebrated as the Troy Female Seminary, and with which she remained connected until 1833.

In 1830, Mrs. Willard made a tour in Europe,and on her return published her Travels, devoting her share of the proceeds of the sale to the support of a school in Greece, founded mainly by her exertions, for the education of female teachers.

Mrs. Willard has, since her retirement from Troy, resided at Hartford, where she has written and published several addresses on the subject of Female Education, especially as connected with the common-school system. She is also the author of a Manual of American History, A Treatise on Ancient Geography, and other works which have had an extensive school circulation. In 1830 she published a small volume of poems, and in 1846 A Treatise on the Motive Powers which produce the Circulation of the Blood, a work which attracted much attention on its appearance; and in 1849, Last Leaves of American History, a continuation of her "Manual." Died in 1870.

The

rise between two and four every morning." great event came off, "in a room crowded almost to suffocation," on the 12th of February.

In the spring vacation she returned home. Her mother was alarmed at the state of her health, but the physician called by her father to aid him in the treatment of her case recomiending a change of scene and air, she was allowed to follow her wishes and return to school, the establishment of Miss Gibson at Albany being at this time selected. She had been there but a few weeks when her disease, consumption, assumed its worst features. Her mother hurried to her, and removed her home in July. It is a touching picture that of her last journey. "She shrunk painfully from the gaze her beauty inevitably attracted, heightened as it was by that disease which seems to delight to deck the victim for its triumph." She reached home. "To the last she manifested her love of books. A trunk filled with them had not been unpacked. She requested her mother to open it at her bed--ide, and as each book was given to her, she turned over the leaves, kissed it, and desired to have it placed on a table at the foot of her bed. There they remained to the last day, her eye often fondly resting on them." She wrote while confined to her bed her last poem:

There is a something which I dread,
It is a dark and fearful thing;
It steals along with withering tread,
Or sweeps on wild destruction's wing.
That thought comes o'er me in the hour
Of grief, of sickness, or of sadness:
"Tis not the dread of death; 'tis more--
It is the dread of madness.
Oh! may these throbbing pulses pause,
Forgetful of their feverish course;
May this hot brain, which, burning glows
With all a fiery whirlpool's force,
Be cold and motionless, and still
A tenant of its lowly bed;
But let not dark delirium steal-
[Unfinished.]

The fear was a groundless one, for her mind was calm, collected, and tranquil during the short period that intervened before her death, on the 27th of August, 1825, one month before her seventeenth birthday.

THE WIDE WORLD IS DREAR.

(Written in her sixteenth year.)

Oh say not the wide world is lonely and dreary!
Oh say not that life is a wilderness waste!
There's ever some comfort in store for the weary,
And there's ever some hope for the sorrowful
breast.

There are often sweet dreams which will steal o'er the soul,

Beguiling the mourner to smile through a tear, That when waking the dew-drops of mem'ry may fall,

And blot out for ever, the wide world is drear.

There is hope for the lost, for the lone one's relief, Which will beam o'er his pathway of danger and

fear;

There is pleasure's wild throb, and the calm "joy of grief,"

KINDAR BURIAL SERVICE-VERSIFIED.

We commend our brother to thee, oh earth!
To thee he returns, from thee was his birth!
Of thee was he formed, he was nourished by thee;
Take the body, oh earth! the spirit is free.

Oh air! he once breathed thee, thro' thee he sur vived,

And in thee, and with thee, his pure spirit lived:
That spirit hath fled, and we yield him to thee;
His ashes be spread, like his soul, far and free.

Oh fire! we commit his dear reliques to thee,
Thou emblem of purity, spotless and free;
May his soul, like thy flames, bright and burning
arise,

To its mansion of bliss, in the star-spangled skies.

Oh water!. receive him; without thy kind aid He had parched 'neath the sunbeams or mourned in the shade;

Then take of his body the share which is thine, For the spirit hath fled from its mouldering shrine.

MARGARET MILLER DAVIDSON, at the time of her sister's death, was in her third year, having been born March 26, 1823. Her life seems in almost every respect a repetition of that of her departed sister. The same precocity was early developed. When she was six years old she read the English poets with "enthusiastic delight." While standing at the window with her mother she exclaimed

See those lofty, those grand trees;
Their high tops waving in the breeze;
They cast their shadows on the ground,
And spread their fragrance all around.

At her mother's request she wrote down the little impromptu, but committed it to paper in a consecutive sentence, as so much prose. The act was, however, the commencement of her literary career, and she every day, for some time after, brought some little scrap of rhyme to her parent. She was at the same time delighting the children of the neighborhood by her improvised stories, which she would sometimes extend through a whole evening.

Her education was conducted at home, under her mother's charge. She advanced so rapidly in her studies that it was necessary to check her ardor, that over exertion might not injure her

gentleman who had been much interested in the poems of Lucretia Davidson, visited her mother, in order to learn more concerning an author he so much admired. While the two were convers

ing, Margaret entered with a copy of Thomson's Seasons in her hanl, in which she had marked the passages which pleased her. The gentleman, overcoming the child's timidity by his gentleness, soon became as much interested in the younger as in the eller sister, and the little incident led to a friendship which lasted through

life.

During the summer she passed a few weeks at Saratoga Springs and New York. She enjoyed her visit to the city greatly, and returned home with improve health. In the winter she re

moved with her mother to the residence of a married sister in Canada. The tour was undertaken for the health of her parent, but with ill success, as an illness followel, which confined her for eighteen months to her bed, during which her life was often despaired of. The mother recovered, but in January, 1833, the daughter was attacked by scarlet fever, from which she did not become free until April. In May the two convalescents proceeded to New York. Margaret remained here several months, and was the life and soul of the household of which she was the guest. It was proposed by her little associates to act a play, provided she would write one. This she agreed to do, and in two days "produced her drama, The Tragedy of Alethia. It was not very voluminous," observes Mr. Irving, "but it contained within it sufficient of high character and astounding and bloody incident to furnish out a drama of five times its size. A king and queen of England resolutely bent upon marrying their daughter, the Princess Alethia, to the Duke of Ormond. The Princess most perversely and dolorously in love with a mysterious cavalier, who figures at her father's court under the name of Sir Percy Lennox, but who, in private truth, is the Spanish king, Rodrigo, thus obliged to maintain an incognito on account of certain hostilities between Spain and England. The odious nuptials of the princess with the Duke of Ormond proceed: she is led, a submissive victim, to the altar; is on the point of pledging her irrevocable word; when the priest throws off his sacred robe, discovers himself to be Rodrigo, and plunges a dagger into the bosom of the king. Alethia instantly plucks the dagger from her father's bosom, throws herself into Rodrigo's arms, and kills herself. Rodrigo flies to a cavern, renounces England, Spain, and his royal throne, and devotes himself to eternal remorse. The queen ends the play by a passionate apostrophe to the spirit of her daughter, and sinks dead on the floor.

"The little drama lies before us, a curious specimen of the prompt talent of this most ingenious child, and by no means more incongruous in its incidents than many current dramas by veteran and experienced playwrights.

"The parts were now distributed and soon learnt; Margaret drew out a play-bill in theatrical style, containing a list of the dramatis personæ, and issued regular tickets of admission. The piece went off with universal applause ·

Margaret figuring, in a long train, as the princess, and killing herself in a style that would not have disgraced an experienced stage heroine.”

May art M. David zor

In October she returned home to Ballston, the family residence having been changed from Plattsburgh, as the climate on the lake had been pronouned too trying for her constitution. She amused the family, old and young, during the winter, by writing a weekly paper called The Juvenile Aspirant. Her education was still conducted by her mother, who was fully competent to the task, and unwilling to trust her at a boarding-school. She studied Latin with her brother, under a private tutor. When she was eleven her delicate frame, rendered still more sensitive by a two months' illness, received a severe shock from the intelligence of the death of her sister, re-ident in Canada. A change of scene being thought desirable, she paid another visit to New York, where she remained until June. In December she was attacked by a liver complaint, which confined her to her room until Spring. During this fit of illness her mind hud remained in an unusual state of inactivity; but with the opening of spring and the faint return of health, it broke forth with a brilliancy and a restless excitability that astonished and alarmed. 'In conversation,' says her mother, her sallies of wit were dazzling. She composed and wrote incessantly, or rather would have done so, had I not interposed my authority to prevent this unceasing tax upon both her mental and phy-ical strength. Fugitive pieces were produced every day, such as The Shunamite, Belshazzar's Feast, The Nature of Mind, Boabail el Chico, &c. She seemed to exist only in the regions of poetry.' We cannot help thinking that these moments of intense poetical exaltation sometimes approached to delirium, for we are told by her mother that 'the image of her departed sister Lucretia mingled in all her aspirations; the holy elevation of Lucretia's character had taken deep hold of her imagination, and in her moments of enthusiasm she felt that she had close and intimate communion with her beautiful spirit." "

In the autumn of 1835 the family removed to a pleasant residence, "Ruremont," near the Shot

Tower, on Long Island Sound, below Hell Gate. Here Mrs. Davidson received a letter from he English visitor, inviting Margaret and herself pass the winter with him and the wife he ti recently married at Havana.

The first winter at the new home was a mournful one, for it was marked by the death of her little brother Kent. Margaret's own health was also rapidly failing-the fatal symptoms of consumption having already appeared. The accumulated grief was too much for the mother's feeble frame. "For three weeks," she says, “I hovered upon the borders of the grave, and when I arose from this bed of pain-so feeble that I could not sustain my own weight, it was to witness the rupture of a blood-vessel in her lung, caused by exertions to suppress a cough."

Long and anxious were the days and nights spent in watching over her. Every sudden movement or emotion excited the hemorrhage. 'Not a murmur escaped her lips,' says her mother, during her protracted sufferings. " How are you, my love? how have you rested during the night?" Well, dear mamma; I have slept sweetly." I have been night after night beside her restless couch, wiped the cold dew from her brow, and kissed her faded cheek in all the agony of grief, while she unconsciously slept on; or if she did awake, her calm sweet smile, which seemed to emanate from heaven, has, spite of my reason, lighted my heart with hope. Except when very ill, she was ever a bright dreamer. Her visions were usually of an unearthly cast: about heaven and angels. She was wandering among the stars; her sainted sisters were her pioneers; her cherub brother walked hand in hand with her through the gardens of paradise! I was always an early riser, but after Margaret began to decline I never disturbed her until time to rise for breakfast, a season of social intercourse in which she delighted to unite, and from which she was never willing to be absent. Often when I have spoken to her she would exclaim, " Mother, you have disturbed the brightest visions that ever mortal was blessed with! I was in the midst of such scenes of delight! Cannot I have time to finish my dream?" And when I told her how long it was until breakfast, "it will do,” she would say, and again lose herself in her bright imaginings; for I considered these as moments of inspiration rather than sleep. She told me it was not sleep. I never knew but one except Margaret, who enjoyed this delightful and mysterious source of happiness-that one was her departed sister Lucretia. When awaking from these reveries, an almost ethereal light played about her eye, which seemed to irradiate her whole face. A holy calm pervaded her manner, and in truth she looked more like an angel who had been communing with kindred spirits in the world of light, than anything of a grosser nature.'

It was during this illness that Margaret became acquainted with Miss Sedgwick. The disease unexpectedly yielding to care and skill, the invalid was enabled during the summer to make a tour to the western part of New York. Soon after her return, in September, the air of the river having been pronounced unfavorable for her health, the family removed to New York. Mar