the meadow-stream chimed in its silvery treble, I ada. Canada and heaven, he said, were the only two deftly singing to the daisies. When every thing was places that the slave sighed for, and he tied up his alive with the rapture of freedom, we thought, clouted shoes to go. He laid his hand on the latch, among other bright and boyish vagaries, that this and his eyes asked if he might go. We knew what land was free-free as the air; otherwise we would was in his heart, and he what was in our own, when never have slid down hill on it, or rolled up a snow- the children came near and asked their parents why fort, or have done any thing of the kind by way of the negro boy might not live in Massachussetts, and sport. And we were told that it was free. Old men why he should go so far to find a home. And we that wore queues and hobbled about on crutches, came looked in each other's faces and said not a word, for and set by our father's fireside, and showed great our hearts were troubled at their questions. scars on their flesh, and told how much it had cost Some one asked for the bond," and it was read; to make this land free. And on a hot summer day and there, among great swelling words about liberty, of every year, the people stuck up a long pole in the we found it written, that there was not an acre nor middle of the village green; and they tied to the an inch of ground within the limits of the great top a large piece of striped cloth; and they rung American Republic which was not mortgaged to the bell in the steeple; and they shot off a hollow slavery. And when the reader came to that passage log of cast iron; and the hills and woods trembled in the bond, his voice fell, lest the children should at the noise, and father said, and every body said, it | hear it, and ask more questions. He passed the inwas because this land was free. It was our boyhood's strument around, and he saw it written,-" too fair. thought, and of all our young fancies, we loved it|ly writ”—that there was not a foot of soil in New best; for there was an element of religion in it. We England-not a spot consecrated to learning, liberhave clung fondly to the patriotic illusion, and should have hugged it to our bosom through life, but for an incident that suddenly broke up the dream. While meditating one Sabbath evening, a few years ago, upon the blessings of this free, gospel land, and with the liberty wherewith God here sets his children free, a neighbour opened the door, and whispered cautiously in our ear, that a young, sable fugitive from Slavery had knocked at his door, and he had given him a place by his fire. "A slave in New England!" exclaimed we as we took down our hat: is it possible that slaves can breathe here and not be free!" 6 ty, or religion-not a square inch on Bunker Hill, or any other hill, nor cleft, or cavern in her mountain sides, nor nook in her dells, or lair in her forests, nor a hearth, nor a cabin door, which did not bear the bloody endorsement in favor of slavery. "It was in the bond"-the bond of our union, ordained to establish justice, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity;" it was in that anomalous instrument, that the slave hunter and his hounds might seize upon his trembling victim on the holiest spot of this land of the free. It was a bright night. The heavens were full of There were many of us that gathered around that eyes looking down upon the earth; and we wished young man; and few of us all had ever seen a slave. that they were closed for an hour; that the clouds There were mothers in the group that had sons of would come over the moon; for the man-hunters had the same age as that of the boy; and tears came into come. They had tracked the young fugitive, and their eyes when he spoke of his widowed slave mo- were lying in wait to seize him even on the hearth ther; and there were young sisters with Sunday- of a freeman. We never shall forget that hour. We school books in their hands, that surrounded him had attired the young slave in a female garb, and put and looked in his face with strange and tearful earn- his hand within the arm of one of our number. A estness, as he spoke of the sister he had left in bond- passing cloud obscured the moon, and the two isage, He had been hunted like a partridge upon the sued into the street. Softly and silently we followmountains,' and his voice trembled as he spoke. His ed them at a distance, and our hearts were heavy pursuers had tracked him from one place to another; within us, that Massachusetts had no law that could they were even now hard at his heels; his feet were extend protection to that young human being, or perbruised and swollen from the chase; he was faint mit him to be protected without law. It was a and weary, and he looked around upon us imploring- strange feeling to walk the streets of Worcester, as ly for protection. Starting at every sound from if treading on enemies' ground; to avoid the houses without, he told with a tremulous voice, the story of and faces of our neighbours and friends, as if they his captivity, and re-capture, for thrice had he fled were all slaveholders, and in pursuit of the fugitive; from slavery, and twice had he been delivered up to as if here, in the heart of the Old Bay State, there his pursuers. He was checkered over with the was something felonious in that deed of mercy that marks of the scourge, for his master had prescribed would obliterate the track of the innocent image of a hundred lashes to cure him of his passion for free- God flying for life and liberty before his relentless dom. A worse fate awaited him if he failed in his pursuer. We passed close by the old Burial Ground, third attempt to be free; and he walked to the where slumbered many a hero of Seventy Six. window and softly asked the nearest way to Can-There, within a stone's throw, was the grave of Captain Peter Slater, one of the "Indians" who threw the taxed tea into Boston harbor. It was a moment of humiliation and indignant grief, when passing by his monument, we compared the taxes on tea and sugar of his day, with that despotic land tax, that slave-breeding incumbrance, that Shylock mortgage which the founders of our Constitution imposed upon every square inch of New England, in the terms of the bond." We have now neither time nor space to tell the story of that young fugitive. We wish he might tell it himself upon every hearthstone of New England. We wish no human heart a needless unpleasant emotion; but we would that every child in this "land of the free" might see a slave,-a being that OWNS A GOD, yet owned, and bound, and beat, and sold by man. We would have the rising genera tion well instructed in the terms of the bond," and a few personal illustrations of the condition which it "secures" might be a service in defining their path of duty. They will soon enter upon this goodly heritage; and shall we give it over into their hands encumbered with this iniquitous entailment in favor of slavery? No! if there be wealth enough in all New England's jewels-in the cabinet of her great deeds of virtue and patriotism-let us lift this bloody mortgage from one square acre of her soil, whereupon the hunted slave may say, "I thank my God that I too am at last a Man !" When trembling and panting, he struck his foot on that consecrated spot, then the chase should cease, though his master and his dogs were at his heels. That English acre in New England should be another Canada for the fugitive bondman. He should carry a handful of its soil in his bosom as a certificate, honored throughout the world, that he was FREE. A CHRISTMAS TALE. BY RICHARD MONKTON MILNES. The windows and the garden door Can watch the snow-flakes white The face of dying light. Draw down the curtains every fold, Words of a distant time and land; That small square book that seems so old In tawny white and faded gold, And which I could not leave to-day, It was on such a night as this, As loaded with the snow, A night when you might start to meet And phantom of the night! It knows not, thinks not, how or where. Beneath a carven porch, before The tempest drives the cowering child, And all the fire.side bliss How can those hands so small and frail, Standing in senseless hardihood Between the warmth and love and mirth, We would not, of our own good will, To suffer without sin, What would be for the worst of us A bitter discipline. Yet now the tiny hands no more Though for those holy words the storm There now are two,-one to the other His eyes came through the thickening night, And from his hair there falls below See what a smile of gentle grace The child looks out into the night, So seems that smile to lure along It casts its arms about his neck, With you barefooted through the snow; Three kisses on its dead-cold cheeks, Within the auriole of mine head; The wind that round you raged and broke So down the mansions slippery stair, The weak and strong together. Softly the carol chant is sung, They bury it, that the flowers of spring. UNWRITTEN MUSIC. BY N. P. WILLIS. TICKLER.-I will accompany you on the poker and tongs. SHEPHERD.-I hae nae objections-for you've not only a sowl for music, sir, but a genius too, and the twa dinna always gang thegither-mony a mon haein' as fine an ear for tunes, as the starnies on a dewy nicht, that listen to the grass growin' roun' the vernal primroses, and yet na able to play on ony instrument-on even the flute-let abee the poker and tangs. NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ. I am not known as a lover of music. I seldom praise the player upon an instrument, or the singer of song. I stand aside if I listen, and I keep the mea. sure in my heart without beating it audibly with my foot, or moving my head visibly in a practised abstraction. There are times when I do not listen at all; and it may be that the mood is not on me, or that the spell is mastered by Beauty, or that I hear a human voice, whose every whisper is sweeter than all. There are some who are said to have a passion for music, and they will turn away at the beginning of a song, though it be only a child's lesson, and leave gazing on an eye that was, perhaps, like shaded water, or the forehead of a beautiful woman, or the lip of a young girl, to listen. I cannot boast that my love of music is so strong. I confess that there are things I know that are often an overcharm, tho' not always; and I would not give up my slavery to their power, if I might be believed to have gone mad at an opera, or have my "bravo" the signal for the applause of a city. There is unwritten Music. The world is full of it. I hear it every hour that I wake, and my waking sense is surpassed sometimes by my sleepingthough that is a mystery. There is no sound of sim. ple nature that is not Music. It is all Heaven's work, and so harmony. You may mingle and divide, and strengthen the passages of its great anthem, and and it is still melody-melody. The winds of summer blow over the waterfalls and the brooks, and bring their voices to your ear as if their sweetness was linked by an accurate finger; yet the wind is but a fitful player; and you may go out when the tempest is up, and hear the strong trees moaning as they lean before it, and the long grass hissing as it sweeps through, and its own solemn monotony over, all-and the dimple of that same brook, and the waterfall's unaltered bass, shall still reach you in the intervals of its power, as much in harmony as before, and as much a part of its perfect and perpetual hymn. There is no accident of Nature's causing which can bring in discord. The loosened rock may fall into the abyss, and the overblown tree rush down through the branches of the wood, and the thunder peal awfully in the sky; and, sudden and violent as these changes seem, their tumult goes up with the sound of wind and water; and the exquisite ear of the musician can detect no jar. I have read somewhere of a custom in the Highlands, which, in connection with the principle it involves, is exceedingly beautiful. It is believed that, to the ear of the dying—which just before death becomes always exquisitely acute-the perfect harmony of the voices of nature is so ravishing as to make him forget his suffering, and die gently, like one in a pleasant trance. And so when the last moment approaches, they take him from the close shieling, and bear him out into the open sky, that he may hear the familiar rushing of the streams. I can believe that it is not superstition. I do not think we know how exquisitely nature's many voices are attuned to harmony, and to each other. The old philosopher we read of might not have been dreaming when he discovered that the order of the sky was a scroll of written music, and that two stars-which are said to Lave appeared centuries after his death in the very places he mentioned-were wanting to complete the harmony. We know how wonderful are the phenomena of color; how strangely like consummate art the strongest dyes are blended in the plumage of birds, and the cups of flowers; so that to the practised eye of the painter the harmony is inimitably perfect. It is natural to suppose every part of the universe equally perfect, and it is a glorious and elevating thought, that the stars of heaven are moving on continually to music, and that the sounds we daily listen to are but a part of a melody that reaches to the very centre of heaven's illimitable spheres. friends comfort me and smile pleasantly on me, and feel willing that I should be released from sorrow, and perplexity, and disease, and go up, now that my race was finished, joyfully to my reward. And if it be allotted to me, as I pray it will, to die in the summer time, I would be borne out into the open sky, and have my pillow lifted that I might see the glory of the setting sun, and pass away, like him, with undiminished light, to another world. It is not mere poetry to talk of the voices of summer." It is the day time of the year, and its myriad influences are audibly at work. Even at night you may lay your ear to the ground, and hear that faintest of murmurs, the sound of growing things. I used to think when I was a child that it was fairy music. If you have been used to rising early, you have not forgotten how the stillness of the night seems increased by the timid note of the first bird. It is the only time when I would lay a finger on the lip of nature-the deep hush is so very solemn. By and by, however, the birds are all up, and the peculiar holiness of the hour declines, but what a world of music does the world shine on! the deep lowing of the cattle blending in with the capricious warble of a thousand of heaven's happy creatures, and the stir of industry coming on the air like the under tones of a choir, and the voice of man; heard in the distance over all, like a singer among instruments, giving them meaning and language! And then, if your ear is delicate, you have minded all these sounds grow softer and sweeter, as the exhalations of the dew floated up, and the vibrations loosened in the thin air. You should go out some morning in June and listen to the notes of the birds. They express far more than our own, the characters of their owners. From the scream of the vulture and the eagle, to the low cooing of the dove, they are all modified by their habits of support, and their consequent dispositions. With the small birds the voice appears to be but an outpouring of gladness, and it is a pleasure to see that without one articulate word it is so sweet a gift to them; it seems a necessary vent to their joy of existence, and I believe in my heart that a dumb bird would die of its imprisoned fulness. Nature seems never so utterly still to me as in the depths of a summer afternoon. The heat has driven in the birds, and the leaves hang motionless on the trees, and no creature has the heart, in that faint sultriness, to utter a sound. The snake sleeps on the rock, and the frog lies breathing in the pool, and even the murmur that is heard at night is inaudible, for the herbage droops beneath the sun, and the seed has no strength to burst its covering. The world is still, and the pulses beat languidly. It is a time for sleep. Pardon me a digression here, reader. Aside from the intention of the custom just alluded to, there is something delightful in the thought of thus dying in the open air. I had always less horror of death than of its ordinary gloomy circumstances. There is something unnatural in the painful and extravagant sympathy with which the dying are surrounded. It is not such a gloomy thing to die. The world has pleasant places, and I would hear in my last hour the voice and the birds, and the chance music I may have loved; but better music, and voices of more ravishing sweetness, and far pleasanter places, are found in heaven, and I cannot feel that it is well or natural to oppress the dying with the distressing But if you would hear one of Nature's most variwretchedness of common sorrow. I would be leted and delicate harmonies, lie down in the edge of go cheerfully from the world. I would have my the wood when the evening breeze begins to stir, and |