The water, as the wind passed o’er,
      Shot upward many a glancing beam,
    Dimpled and quivered more and more,
      And tripped along a livelier stream,—­
      The flattered stream, the simpering stream,
      The fond, delighted, silly stream.

    Away the airy wanderer flew
      To where the fields with blossoms teem,
    To sparkling springs and rivers blue,
      And left alone that little stream,—­
      The flattered stream, the cheated stream,
      The sad, forsaken, lonely stream.

    That careless wind no more came back;
      He wanders yet the fields, I deem;
    But on its melancholy track
      Complaining went that little stream,—­
      The cheated stream, the hopeless stream,
      The ever murmuring, moaning stream.

TURKEY TRACKS.

Don’t open your eyes, Polder!  You think I am going to tell you about some of my Minnesota experiences; how I used to scamper over the prairies on my Indian pony, and lie in wait for wild turkeys on the edge of an oak opening.  That is pretty sport, too, to creep under an oak with low-hanging boughs, and in the silence of a glowing autumn-day linger by the hour together in a trance of warm stillness, watching the light tracery of shadow and sun on that smooth sward, only now and then roused by the fleet rush of a deer through the wood, or the brisk chatter of a plume-tailed squirrel, till one hears a distant, sharp, clucking chuckle, and in an instant more pulls the trigger, and upsets a grand old cock, every bronzed feather glittering in the sunshine, and now splashed with scarlet blood, the delicate underwing ground into down as he rolls and flutters; for the first shot rarely kills at once with an amateur; there’s too much excitement.  Splendid sport, that! but I’m not going into it second-hand.  I promised to tell you a story, now the skipper’s fast, and the night is too warm to think of sleep down in that wretched bunk;—­what another torture Dante might have lavished on his Inferno, if he’d ever slept in a fishing-smack!  No.  The moonlight makes me sentimental!  Did I ever tell you about a month I spent up in Centreville, the year I came home from Germany?  That was turkey-hunting with a vengeance!

You see, my pretty cousin Peggy married Peter Smith, who owns paper-mills in Centreville, and has exiled herself into deep country for life; a circumstance I disapprove, because I like Peggy, and manufacturers always bore me, though Peter is a clever fellow enough; but madam was an old flame of mine, and I have a lingering tenderness for her yet.  I wish she was nearer town.  Just that year Peggy had been very ill indeed, and Kate, her sister, had gone up to nurse her.  When I came home Peggy was getting better, and sent for me to come up and make a visitation there in June.  I hadn’t seen Kate for seven years,—­not since she was thirteen; our education intervened.