Before the Curtain.

BEHIND the footlights hangs the rusty baize,
A trifle shabby in the upturned blaze
Of flaring gas and curious eyes that gaze.

The stage, methinks, perhaps is none too wide,
And hardly fit for royal Richard's stride,
Or Falstaff's bulk, or Denmark's youthful pride.

Ah, well no passion walks its humble boards;
O'er it no king nor valiant Hector lords:
The simplest skill is all its space affords.

The song and jest, the dance and trifling play, The local hit at follies of the day,

The trick to pass an idle hour away,

For these no trumpets that announce the Moor, No blast that makes the hero's welcome sure,A single fiddle in the overture!

To the Pliocene Skull.

(A GEOLOGICAL ADDRESS.)

"SPEAK, O man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil! Primal pioneer of pliocene formation,

Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum

Of volcanic tufa!

"Older than the beasts, the oldest Palæotherium;
Older than the trees, the oldest Cryptogami ;
Older than the hills, those infantile eruptions
Of earth's epidermis !

"Eo-Mio-Plio-whatsoe'er the 'cene' was

That those vacant sockets filled with awe and wonder,— Whether shores Devonian or Silurian beaches,

Tell us thy strange story!

"Or has the professor slightly antedated

By some thousand years thy advent on this planet,
Giving thee an air that's somewhat better fitted
For cold-blooded creatures?

"Wert thou true spectator of that mighty forest When above thy head the stately Sigillaria

Reared its columned trunks in that remote and distant Carboniferous epoch?

"Tell us of that scene,-the dim and watery woodland, Songless, silent, hushed, with never bird or insect, Veiled with spreading fronds and screened with tall club

mosses,

Lycopodiacea,

"When beside thee walked the solemn Plesiosaurus,
And around thee crept the festive Ichthyosaurus,
While from time to time above thee flew and circled
Cheerful Pterodactyls.

"Tell us of thy food,-those half-marine refections,
Crinoids on the shell and Brachipods au natural,-
Cuttlefish to which the pieuvre of Victor Hugo
Seems a periwinkle.

"Speak, thou awful vestige of the earth's creation,-
Solitary fragment of remains organic!

Tell the wondrous secret of thy past existence,—
Speak! thou oldest primate !"

Even as I gazed, a thrill of the maxilla,

And a lateral movement of the condyloid process,
With post-pliocene sounds of healthy mastication,
Ground the teeth together.

And, from that imperfect dental exhibition,

Stained with express juices of the weed Nicotian, Came these hollow accents, blent with softer murmurs Of expectoration:

"Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County,

But I'd take it kindly if you'd send the pieces

Home to old Missouri!"

VOL. I.

R

The Ballad of Mr. Cooke.

(A LEGEND OF THE CLIFF HOUSE, SAN FRANCISCO.)

WHERE the sturdy ocean breeze
Drives the spray of roaring seas,
That the Cliff-House balconies

Overlook:

There, in spite of rain that balked,
With his sandals duly chalked,
Once upon a tight-rope walked

Mr. Cooke.

But the jester's lightsome mien,
And his spangles and his sheen,
All had vanished when the scene
He forsook.

Yet in some delusive hope,
In some vague desire to cope,
One still came to view the rope

Walked by Cooke.

Amid Beauty's bright array,
On that strange eventful day,
Partly hidden from the spray,

In a nook,