RELIEVING GUARD.

T. S. K. OBIIT MARCH 4, 1864.

CAME the Relief. "What, Sentry, ho!

How passed the night through thy long waking?"

"Cold, cheerless, dark,-as may befit

The hour before the dawn is breaking."

"No sight? no sound ?" "No; nothing save

The plover from the marshes calling,

And in yon Western sky, about

An hour ago, a Star was falling."

"A star? There's nothing strange in that."

"No, nothing; but, above the thicket,

Somehow it seemed to me that God

Somewhere had just relieved a picket."

PARODIES.

A GEOLOGICAL MADRIGAL.

AFTER HERRICK.

I HAVE found out a gift for my fair;
I know where the fossils abound,

Where the footprints of Aves declare

The birds that once walked on the ground;

O, come, and--in technical speech

We'll walk this Devonian shore,

Or on some Silurian beach

We'll wander, my love, evermore.

I will show thee the sinuous track

By the slow-moving annelid made,

Or the Trilobite that, farther back,

In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid.

Thou shalt see, in his Jurassic tomb,

The Plesiosaurus embalmed;

In his Oolitic prime and his bloom,

Iguanodon safe and unharmed!

You wished-I remember it well,

And I loved you the more for that wish

For a perfect cystedian shell

And a whole holocephalic fish.

And O, if Earth's strata contains

In its lowest Silurian drift,

Or Palæozoic remains

The same, 'tis your lover's free gift!

Then come, love, and never say nay,

But calm all your maidenly fears,
We'll note, love, in one summer's day
The record of millions of years;

And though the Darwinian plan
Your sensitive feelings may shock,

We'll find the beginning of man,

Our fossil ancestors in rock!