Even the willow leaves
    Brooding silence keep;
  All the great, good world is hushed—­
    Hushed that you may sleep! 
  But in heaven two wee, wee stars
    Dance and whirl and glow
To the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of the rivulet below.

EVELYN M. WORTHLEY.
Mount Holyoke.

The Wood Orchid.

A butterfly, wing-weary, came to find
A sweet seclusion from the amorous wind,
Deep in the pine woods, where the dusky trees
Shut in the forest’s sounding silences
With close-twined boughs from which the breeze has blown
The fragrance-breathing fragments of the cone. 
Deeply she drank the nectar of repose. 
Spreading her downy wings all veined with rose,
Upon the gray-green mosses, cool and dank,
Languished the sprite, and in a swoon she sank,
While a delicious numbness born of death
Stilled the soft wings that stirred with each faint breath. 
One summer morning, while the languid breeze
Strayed with a languid murmur thro’ the trees,
It breathed a kiss upon a folded pair
Of pink flushed wings—­and found them rooted there.

College Folio.

A Song.

Oh, the hopper grass is clattering and flying all the day
  Round the tawny, trembling tassels of the corn,
While the dreamy, drowsy bumblebee goes bumbling on his way,
  And the locust in the woodland sounds his horn.

Above the rattling cottonwoods that line the lisping stream,
  The crow is proudly calling to the sun,
And the beetles in the bushes make the summer day a dream,
  For they hum and cheep until the day is done.

When the lotus-flower closes, and the stars are in the sky,
  Then the owl awakes and sings a plaintive song,
While the crickets in the thickets sing the soothing lullaby,
And the katydid is chirping all night long.

S.P.
Kansas University Weekly.

The Skaters.

Above the frozen floods
Gay feet keep time,
Steel-shod, their measures beat
Insistent rhyme. 
No cares oppress the hearts
Glad youth makes light;
The winter skies and happy eyes
Alike are bright.

Shores where the summer waves
Have whispered low,
Echo the skaters’ song,
As to and fro
Glide flitting forms,
And watch-fire’s glow
Leaps into frosty air
And crimsons snow.

Fly, skaters, with wing’d feet! 
The night wears on;
Be your stroke ne’er so fleet,
Night soon is gone.

With morning’s dawn, the fires
In ashes lie,
And mountains keep their ward
Silently by.

GRACE W. LEACH
Madisonensis.

By the Roadside.

Shy violets among the tangled grass;
Red robin, to thine own mate blithely singing,
Among the elm-tree boughs so gayly swinging;
My love, my true love, down this way will pass.