glacier; and so it would travel down the gorges, down the valleys toward the frozen ocean, sweeping buried mammoths bodily in its resistless stream. Thus, in the course of ages, their mummied forms would reach a latitude more northern than that in which they had been inhumed. It may even have been the case that living mammoths lingered in the country which had witnessed the snowy burial of herds of their fellows. Some must have escaped the first great snow-deluge, and there must have been a return of sunny days, during which they could seek to resuscitate their famished bodies; and spring must have come back at last, and another hope-inspiring summer-cheering, but short and illusory. And if a secular pause in the severity of the climate ensued, a few survivors may have lingered for many years. But winter, dire and permanent, was on the march, and the record which it has left declares that the mammoth population struggled in vain against the despotism of frost, and that the empire which was set up has crumbled only under the attacks of many thousand summers. Geological evidences of a great and somewhat sudden change of climate throughout the north temperate zone, in times geologically recent, are too familiar to require more than a mere mention. The greater part of Europe, and all America, to the latitude of 36°, were once buried beneath sheets of glacier ice. In Europe we have the evidence of the presence of man while the continental glaciers were flooding the rivers of France by their rapid dissolution. At the same time the mammoth was there. While thousands of his fellow-mammoths were lying frozen and stark in the icy cemeteries of the north, a few of the giants of a former age had chanced to dwell in latitudes which perpetual snow had not invaded. These were a part of the game which the primeval inhabitants of Europe pursued. Of his ivory they made handles for their implements and weapons. On his ivory they etched figures of the maned and shaggy proboscidian, of which neither history nor tradition has preserved the memory. The bones and teeth of the mammoth are strewed through all the cavern homes and sequestered haunts of the oldest tribes who hunted and fought upon the plains and along the valleys of Europe. The reader will irresistibly inquire, "How many years have elapsed since Siberian elephants were encased in ice? How many since their survivors thundered through the forests of England and central Europe before the chase of the human hunter? To answer these questions we must ascertain the remoteness of the epochs of continental glaciation, and of the disappearance of the continental glaciers. These are unsolved problems in science. The present writer is of the opinion that the geological events which have taken place since the epoch of general glaciation do not demand over ten thousand years; and he inclines to think that the pluvial epoch of western Europe may correspond with those cataclysms of Europe and Western Asia known as the deluges of Ogyges, Deucalion, Noah, and perhaps of the Great Yu in China. THE William Cowper Prime. BORN in Cambridge, Washington Co., N. Y., 1825. EVENING ON FOLLANSBEE. [I Go A-Fishing. 1873.] HE day had died most gloriously. The "sword of the sun," that had lain across the forest, was withdrawn and sheathed. There was a stillness on land and water and in the sky that seemed like the presence of an invisible majesty. Eastward, the lofty pine trees rested their green tops in an atmosphere whose massive blue seemed to sustain and support them. Westward, the rosy tints along the horizon deepened into crimson around the base of the St. Regis, and faded into black toward the north. No sign of life, human or inhuman, was anywhere visible or audible, except within the little boat where we two floated; and peace, that peace that reigns where no man is-that peace that never dwells in the abodes of men-here held silent and omnipotent sway. But a change was coming. The first premonition of it was a sound in the tree-tops-that sighing, soughing of the pines which you have so often heard. At all times and places it is a strange and a melancholy sound, but nowhere so much so as in the deep forest. It is at first a heavy, distant breath, like the deep respiration, or rather the expiration of many weary men-nay, rather of women, for it is gentle and low. But it rises into the sound of a great grief, the utterance of innumerable sighs; and now sobs interrupt it, and low wails of single sorrow that have no comparison with other woe, and that will not be appeased by any sympathies. But while I listened to the wind in the pine trees, the gloom had increased, and a ripple came stealing over the water. There was a flapping of one of the lily pads as the first waves struck them; and then, as the breeze passed over us, I threw two flies on the black ripple. There was a swift rush-a sharp dash and plunge in the water. Both were struck at the instant, and then I had work before me that forbade my listening to the voices of the pines. It took five minutes to kill my fish -two splendid specimens, weighing each a little less than two pounds. Meantime the rip had increased, and the breeze came fresh and steady. It was too dark now to see the opposite shore, and the fish rose at every cast; and when I had a half dozen of the same sort, and one that lacked only an ounce of being full four pounds, we pulled up the killeck and paddled homeward around the wooded point. The moon rose, and the scene on the lake now became magically beautiful. The mocking laugh of the loon was the only cause of complaint in that evening of splendor. Who can sit in the forest in such a night, when earth and air are full of glory-when the soul of the veriest blockhead must be elevated, and when a man begins to feel as if there were some doubt whether he is even a little lower than the angels-who, I say, can sit in such a scene, and hear that fiendish laugh of the loon, and fail to remember Eden and the Tempter? Did you ever hear that laugh? If so, you know what I mean. That mocking laugh was in my ears as I reeled in my line, and, lying back in the bottom of the canoe, looked up at the still and glorious sky. "Oh that I could live just here forever," I said, "in this still forest home, by this calm lake, in this undisturbed companionship of earth and sky. Oh that I could leave the life of labor among men, and rest serenely here as my sun goes down the sky." "Ho! ho! ha! ha!" laughed the loon across the lake, under the great rock of the old Indian. Well, the loon was right; and I was, like a great many other men, mistaken in fancying a hermit's life-or, what I rather desired, a life in the country with a few friends-as preferable to life among crowds of There is a certain amount of truth, however, in the idea that man made cities and God made the country. men. Doubtless we human creatures were intended to live upon the prod ucts of the soil, and the animal food which our strength or sagacity would enable us to procure. It was intended that each man should, for himself and those dependent on him, receive from the soil of the earth such sustenance and clothing as he could compel it to yield. But we have invented a system of covering miles square of ground with large flat stones, or piles of brick and mortar, so as to forbid the product of any article of nourishment, forbidding grass or grain or flower to spring up, since we need the space for our intercommunication with each other, in the ways of traffic and accumulating wealth, while we buy for money, in what we call markets, the food and clothing we should have procured for ourselves from our common mother earth. Doubtless all this is a perversion of the original designs of Providence. The perversion is one that sprang from the accumulation of wealth by a few, to the exclusion of the many, which, in time, resulted in the purchase of the land by the few, and the supply of food in return for articles of luxury manufactured by artisans who were not cultivators of the soil. But who would listen now to an argument in favor of a return to the nomadic style of life? I am not going to give you one, and I am not at all inclined to think it advisable for every one; but in a still, delicious evening like that, I might be pardoned for a sigh when I remembered the workman that I was, and bethought me of the lounger that I might be. Bayard Taylor. BORN in Kennett Square, Chester Co., Penn., 1825. DIED in Berlin, Germany, 1878. A WOMAN. [The Poet's Journal. 1862.-Poetical Works. Household Edition. 1883.] The steady candor of her gentle eyes Strikes dead deceit, laughs vanity away; Where Faith and Love divide their tender sway. Of either sex she owns the nobler part; Man's honest brow and woman's faithful heart. She is a woman, who, if Love were guide, Would climb to power, or in obscure content |