My mother says that in a year
      The bird that I’ve adored
    Will maybe, lay some eggs and rear
      A callow, cooing horde.

    But father says it’s quite absurd
      To think that bird can lay,
    For though it is a wondrous bird,
      It isn’t built that way.

    Now whether mother tells me true
      Or father, bothers me;
    There’s nothing else for me to do
      But just to wait and see.

    Whate’er befalls this bird of mine,
      I am resolved ’twill please—­
    Far be it from me to repine
      At what the Lord decrees._

Mr. Slason Thompson, compiler of “The Humbler Poets,” could decide this matter for us if he were here now, but unhappily he is out of town just at present.  We have a suspicion that the poem was originally written by Isaac Watts, but that suspicion is impaired somewhat by another suspicion that there were no such things as canary birds in Isaac Watts’s time.

  Yours truly,

  MELISSA MAYFIELD.

We have shown this letter to Evanston’s most distinguished citizen, the Hon. Andrew Shuman, and that sapient poet-critic tells us that as nearly as he can recollect the poem was written, not by Dr. Watts, but by an American girl.  But whether that girl was Lucretia Davidson or Miss Ada C. Sweet he cannot recall.

Mr. Francis F. Browne, of The Dial, thinks it is one of Miss Wheeler’s earlier poems, since it is imbued with that sweet innocence, that childish simplicity, and that meek piety which have ever characterized the work of the famous Wisconsin lyrist.  But as we can learn nothing positive as to the authorship of the poem, we shall have to call upon the public at large to help us out.

It is needless to say that the public at large could throw no light on the composition of this imitation of Dr. Watts with which Field was not already possessed, since both poem and “Melissa Mayfield” were creations of Field’s fancy.

One of the most characteristic examples of the pains he would take to palm off a composition of his own upon some innocent and unsuspecting public man appeared in the Morning News on January 22d, 1887.  It was nothing short of an attempt to father upon the late Judge Thomas M. Cooley the authorship of half a dozen bits of verse of varying styles and degrees of excellence.  He professed to have received from Jasper Eastman, a prominent citizen of Adrian, Mich., twenty-eight poems written by Judge Cooley, “the venerable and learned jurist, recently appointed receiver of the Wabash Railroad.”  These were said to have appeared in the Ann Arbor Daily News when it was conducted by the judge’s most intimate friend, between the years 1853 and 1861.  Field anticipated public incredulity by saying that “people who knew him to be a severe moralist and a profound scholar will laugh you to scorn if you try to make them believe