Earach and Dougal Dhu, Each with the bonnet o' blue, The knot was tied, the words were said, With slim soft knees, like the knees of a maid, A clean fireside and a merry life!" To his feet, and with "hooch" the chamber rang! "Clear the tables," shrieked out one A leap, a scramble, the thing was done! And then the Pipers all in a row Tuned their pipes and began to blow Sandy of Isla and Earach More, At the wedding of Shon Maclean. At the wedding of Shon Maclean Red-cheek'd with lungs of leather; And every Piper was fu' Twenty Pipers together. Who led the dance? In pomp and pride The Duke himself led out the Bride. Great was the joy of each beholder, For the wee Duke only reach'd her shoulder: And they danced, and turned, when the reel began, Like a giantess and a fairy man! But like an earthquake was the din When Shon himself led the Duchess in! And she took her place before them there, Like a white mouse dancing with a bear. The Duke began it with toe and heel, At the wedding of Shon Maclean They blew with lungs of leather, And blithesome was the strain Those Pipers played together! Moist with the mountain dew, Mighty of bone and thew, Each with a bonnet o' blue, Tartan, and blackcock feather; And every piper was fu' Twenty Pipers together! Oh for a magic tongue to tell Of all the wonders that bofell! Of how the Duke, when the first stave died, Reached up on tiptoe to kiss the Bride, While Sandy's pipes, as their mouths were meeting, Skirl'd and set every heart abeating. Then Shon took the pipes! and all was still, As silently he the bags did fill, With flaming cheeks and round bright eyes, Till the first faint music began to rise. Like a thousand laverocks singing in tune, Like countless corn-craiks under the moon, Like the smack of kisses, like sweet bells ringing, Like a mermaid's harp, or a kelpie singing, All the Pipers around replied, And swelled the glorious strain; The hearts of all were proud and light, To hear the music, to see the sight, And the Duke's own eyes were dim that night, So to honor the Clan Maclean "Blue bonnets across the heather! They stamp'd, they strutted, they blew ; They shriek'd; like cocks they crew; Blowing the notes out true, With wonderful lungs of leather: When the Duke and Duchess went away The dance grew mad and the fun grew gay; Man and Maiden, face to face, Leapt and footed and scream'd apace! To soothe their struggle with words of love, And blowing madly, with flourish and squeak, Each with a different strain, At the wedding of Shon Maclean, Thro' wonderful lungs of leather: They strutted, they scream'd, they crew! Twenty wild strains they blew, Holding the heart in tether; And every piper was fu,' Twenty Pipers together. A storm of music! Like wild sleuth-hounds At last a bevy of Eve's bright daughters Embraced like brothers and kindred spirita, From the wedding of Shon Maclean! ROBERT BUCHANAN. A DISCOURSE OF TREES. HENRY WARD BEECHER, an American pulpit orator and versatile writer, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813, has been pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., since 1847. As the zealous and eloquent advocate of political reforms, a copious contributor to the press, and a platform lecturer constantly in demand, Mr. Beecher has acquired the widest popularity. His style is vigorous, effervescent, and frequently poetic and imaginative. His published volumes, excepting "A Life of Christ," and ". Norwood," a novel of New England life, are reproductions of his sermons, lectures, and voluminous contributions to periodicals. To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them, or around them-"the whole leaf and root tribe. Not alone where they are in their glory, but in whatever state they are-in leaf, or ruined with frost, or powdered with snow, or crystal sheathed in ice, or in severe outline stripped and bare against a November sky-we love them. Our heart warms at the sight of even a board or a log. A lumber-yard is better than nothing. The smell of wood, at least, is there, the savory fragrance of resin, as sweet as myrrh and frankincense ever was to a Jew. If we can get nothing better, we love to read over the names of trees in a catalogue. Many an hour have we sat at night, when after exciting work, we needed to be quieted, and read nurserymen's catalogues, and Loudon's Encyclopedias, and Arboretum, until the smell of the woods exhaled from the page, and the sound of leaves was in our ears, and sylvan glades opened to our eyes that would have made old Chaucer laugh and indite a rapturous rush of lines. growing things, but enshrined in a thousand rich associations of history and literature. Who ever sees a hawthorn or a sweet brier (the eglantine), that his thoughts do not, like a bolt of light, burst through ranks of poets, and ranges of sparkling conceits which have been born since England had a written language, and of which the rose, the willow, the eglantine, the hawthorn, and other scores of vines or trees, have been the cause, as they are now and forevermore the suggestors and remembrancers? Who ever looks upon an oak, and does not think of navies, of storms, of battles on the ocean, of the noble lyrics of the sea, of English glades, of the fugitive Charles, the tree-mounted monarch, of the Herne oak, of parks and forests, of Robin Hood and his merry men; Friar Tuck not excepted, of old baronial halls with mellow But how much more do we love trees in all their summer pomp and plenitude. Not for their names and affinities, not for their secret physiology, and as material for science; not for any reason that we can give, except that when with them we are happy. The eye is full, the ear is full, the whole sense and all the tastes solaced, and our whole nature re-light streaming through diamond-shaped joices with that various and full happiness which one has when the soul is suspended in the midst of Beethoven's symphonies and is lifted hither and thither, as if blown by sweet sounds through the airy passage of a full heavenly dream. Our first excursion in Lenox was one of salutation to our notable trees. We had a nervous anxiety to see that the axe had not hewn, nor the lightning struck them; that no worm had gnawed at the root, or cattle at the trunk; that their branches were not broken, nor their leaves failing from drought. We found them all standing in their uprightness. They lifted up their heads towards heaven, and sent down to us from all their boughs a leafy whisper of recognition and affection. Blessed be the dew that cools their evening leaves, and the rains that quench their daily thirst! May the storm be as merciful to them when in winter it roars through their branches, as is a harper to his harp! Let the snow lie lightly on their boughs, and long hence be the summer that shall find no leaves to clothe these nobles of the pasture! First in our regard, as it is in the whole nobility of trees, stands the white elm, no less esteemed because it is an American tree, known abroad only by importation, and never seen in all its magnificence, except in our own valleys. The old oaks of England are very excellent in their way, gnarled and rugged. The elm has strength as significant as they, and a grace, a royalty, that leaves the oak like a boor in comparison. Had the elm been an English tree, and had Chaucer seen and loved and sung it; had Shakespeare and every English poet hung some garlands upon it, it would have lifted up its head now, not only the noblest of all panes upon oaken floors, and of carved oaken wainscotings. And who that has ever traveled in English second-class cushionless cars has not other and less genial remembrances of the enduring solidity of the impervious unelastic oak? One stalwart oak I have, and only one, yet discovered. On my west line is a fringe of forest, through which rushes, in Spring, trickles in early summer, and dies out entirely in August, the issues of a noble spring from the near hillside. On the eastern edge of this belt of trees stands the monarchical oak, wide-branching on the east toward the open pasture and the free light, but on its western side lean and branchless from the pressure of neighboring trees; for trees, like men, can not grow to the real nature that is in them when crowded by too much society. Both need to be touched on every side by sun and air, and by nothing else, if they are to be rounded out into full symmetry. Growing right up by its side, and through its branches is a long wifely elm-beauty and grace imbosomed by strength. Their leaves come and go together, and all the summer long they mingle their rustling harmonies. Their roots pasture in the same soil, nor could either of them be hewn down without tearing away the branches and marring the beauty of the other. And a tree, when thoroughly disbranched, may, by time and care, regain its health again, but never its beauty. Under this oak I love to sit and hear all the things which its leaves have to tell. No printed leaves have more treasures of history or of literature to those who know how to listen. But, if clouds kindly shield us from the sun, we love as well to couch down on the grass some thirty yards off, and amidst the fragrant smell of crushed herbs, to watch | root and plump down into its bosom! In the fancies of the trees and clouds. The such nooks could trout lie. Unless ye would roguish winds will never be done teasing the become mermaids, keep far from such places, leaves, that run away and come back, with all innocent grasshoppers, and all ebony nimble playfulness. Now and then a strong- crickets! Do not believe in appearances. er puff dashes up the leaves, showing the You peer over and know that there is no downy under surfaces that flash white all danger. You can see the radiant gravel. along the up-blown and tremulous forest- You know that no enemy lurks in that fairy edge. Now the wind draws back his breath, pool. You can see every nook and corner of and all the woods are still. Then some sin- it, and it is as sweet a bathing pool as ever gle leaf is tickled, and quivers all alone. I was swam by long-legged grasshoppers. Over am sure there is no wind. The other leaves the root comes a butterfly with both sails a about it are still. Where it gets its motion I little drabbled, and quicker than light, he can not tell, but there it goes fanning itself is plucked down, leaving three or four buband restless among its sober fellows. By bles behind him, fit emblems of a butterfly's and by one or two others catch the impulse. life. There! did I not tell you? Now go The rest hold out a moment, but soon catch- | away all maiden crickets and grasshoppers! ing the contagious merriment, away goes the These fair surfaces, so pure, so crystaline, so whole tree and all its neighbors, the leaves surely safe, have a trout somewhere in them running in ripples all down the forest side. lying in wait for you! I expect almost to hear them laugh out loud. A stroke of wind upon the forest, indolently swelling and subsiding, is like a stroke upon a hive of bees, for sound; and like stirring a fire full of sparks for upspringing thoughts and ideal suggestions. The melodious whirl draws out a flittering swarm of sweet images that play before the eye like those evening troops of gauzy insects that hang in the air between you and the sun, and pipe their own music, and flit in airy rounds of mingled dance as if the whole errand of their lives was to swing in mazes of sweet music. Different species of trees move their leaves very differently, so that one may sometimes tell by the motion of shadows on the ground, if he be too indolent to look up, under what kind of tree he is dozing. On the tulip-tree, (which has the finest name that ever tree had, making the very pronouncing of its name almost like the utterance of a strain of music -liriodendron tulipifera)—on the tulip-tree, the aspen, and on all native poplars, the leaves are apparently Anglo-Saxon or Germanic, having an intense individualism. Each one moves to suit itself. Under the same wind one is trilling up and down, another is whirling, another slowly vibrating right and left, and others still, quieting themselves to sleep, as a mother gently pats her slumbering child; and each one intent upon a motion of its own. Sometimes other trees have single frisky leaves, but, usually, the oaks, maples, beeches, have community of motion. They are all acting together, or all are alike still. What is sweeter than a murmur of leaves, unless it be the musical gurgling of water that runs secretly and cuts under the roots of these trees, and makes little bubbling pools that laugh to see the drops stumble over the But what if one sits between both kinds of music, leaves above and water below? What if birds are among the leaves, sending out random calls, far piercing and sweet, as if they were lovers saying, "My dear, are you there?" If you are half reclining upon a cushion of fresh new moss, that swells up between the many-plied and twisted roots of a huge beech tree, and if you have been there a half an hour without moving, and if you will still keep motionless, you may see what they who only walk through forests never see. * * * Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no indolent birds care to seek you; and only those of nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher.-Aspiration! so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to be only Ambition! It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow, that we had indeed become owners of the soil! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said "I may not call thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty tem ple where birds praise God. Thou belongest | sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the axe from thy trunk." For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the axe and the saw! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: "A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees." times among young mythologies, we should I like best a forest of mingled trees, ash, maple, oak, beech, hickory, and evergreens, with birches growing along the edges of the brook that carries itself through the roots and Thus famous, or rather infamous was the stones, toward the willows that grow in yonlast owner but one, before me, of this farm. der meadow. It should be deep and sombre Upon the crown of the hill, just where an in some directions, running off into shadowy .artist would have planted them, had he wish- recesses and coverts beyond all footsteps. In ed to have them exactly in the right place, such a wood there is endless variety. It will grew some two hundred stalwart and an- breathe as many voices to your fancy as cient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a nar- might be brought from any organ beneath the row belt-like forest, forming a screen from pressure of some Handel's hands. By the the northern and western winds in winter, way, Handel and Beethoven always remind and a harp of endless music for the summer. me of forests. So do some poets, whose numThe wretched owner of this farm tempted of bers are various as the infinity of vegetation, the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band fine as the choicest cut leaves, strong and and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill rugged in places as the unbarked trunk and his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for gnarled roots at the ground's surface. Is the wood! Well, his pocket was the best there any other place, except the sea-side, part of him. The iron furnaces have devour-where hours are so short and moments so ed my grove, and their huge stumps, that swift as in a forest? Where else except in stood like gravestones, have been cleared the rare communion of those friends much away, that a grove may be planted in the loved, do we awake from pleasure, whose same spot, for the next hundred years to calm flow is without a ripple, into surprise nourish into the stature and glory of that that whole hours are gone which we thought which is gone. but just begun-blossomed and dropped, which we thought but just budding! In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge doubletrunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nutladen top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of looped-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a shiver in his fingers every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails! To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the HENRY WARD BEECHER. THE SUICIDE BANKER. I have said that in 1854 the tide had turned with John Sadleir. Alas! throughout that year, and all the weary days of 1855, unknown to even his nearest and dearest friends, he was suffering tortures indescribable! Some of his colossal speculations had turned out adversely; and he had misappropriated the last shilling of the Tipperary Bank. Another venture, he thinks, may recoup all: it only leads to deeper ruin! He must go on: he cannot turn back now. But where are the funds to be reached for further wild endeavors? All calmly as ever he had trod the lobby of the House of Commons. No eye could detect on that impassive countenance of his that there was aught but the satisfaction of success within. His political associates joked with him over Gavan Duffy's "political |