in the recurrence of noble traits, which are too pleasing ever to be viewed with indifference; like the regular features which we sometimes find in the face of a lovely woman, their charm consists in their own intrinsic gracefulness, rather than in the variety of their expressions.  The Ohio has not the sprightly, fanciful wildness of the Niagara, the St. Lawrence, or the Susquehanna, whose impetuous torrents, rushing over beds of rocks, or dashing against the jutting cliffs, arrest the ear by their murmurs, and delight the eye with their eccentric wanderings.  Neither is it like the Hudson, margined at one spot by the meadow and the village, and overhung at another by threatening precipices and stupendous mountains.  It has a wild, solemn, silent sweetness, peculiar to itself.  The noble stream, clear, smooth, and unruffled, swept onward with regular majestic force.  Continually changing its course, as it rolls from vale to vale, it always winds with dignity, and avoiding those acute angles, which are observable in less powerful streams, sweeps round in graceful bends, as if disdaining the opposition to which nature forces it to submit.  On each side rise the romantic hills, piled on each other to a tremendous height; and between them are deep, abrupt, silent glens, which at a distance seem inaccessible to the human foot; while the whole is covered with timber of a gigantic size, and a luxuriant foliage of the deepest hues.  Throughout this scene there is a pleasing solitariness, that speaks peace to the mind, and invites the fancy to soar abroad, among the tranquil haunts of meditation.  Sometimes the splashing of the oar is heard, and the boatman’s song awakens the surrounding echoes; but the most usual music is that of the native songsters, whose melody steals pleasingly on the ear, with every modulation, at all hours, and in every change of situation.—­Hon. Judge Hall’s Letters from the West.

* * * * *

SNOW-WOMAN’S STORY.

By Miss Edgeworth.

“Yes, madam, I bees an Englishwoman, though so low now and untidy like—­it’s a shame to think of it—­a Manchester woman, ma’am—­and my people was once in a bettermost sort of way—­but sore pinched latterly.”  She sighed, and paused.

“I married an Irishman, madam,” continued she, and sighed again.

“I hope he gave you no reason to sigh,” said Gerald’s father.

“Ah, no, sir, never!” answered the Englishwoman, with a faint sweet smile.  “Brian Dermody is a good man, and was always a koind husband to me, as far and as long as ever he could, I will say that—­but my friends misliked him—­no help for it.  He is a soldier, sir,—­of the forty-fifth.  So I followed my husband’s fortins, as nat’ral, through the world, till he was ordered to Ireland.  Then he brought the children over, and settled us down there at Bogafin in a little shop with his mother—­a widow.  She was very koind too.  But no need to tire you with telling all.  She married again, ma’am, a man young enough to be her son—­a nice man he was to look at too—­a gentleman’s servant he had been.  Then they set up in a public-house.  Then the whiskey, ma’am, that they bees all so fond of—­he took to drinking it in the morning even, ma’am—­and that was bad, to my thinking.”