But, turning to take leave of my stately and blooming Western beauty, I see that she is both a blonde and a brunette.  She has all the dreamy, languid grace of the South combined with the verve and force of the North.  She is dark and she is fair, with blushing cheeks and dewy lips, sound-hearted, strong, lofty, self-reliant, a true queen of the woods, more stately than Diana, and more vigorous than Maid Marian.

     MAURICE THOMPSON.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

Daniel Webster’s “Moods.”

A late magazine-article treating of one of America’s illustrious dead—­Daniel Webster—­alluded to his well-known sombre moods, and the gentle suasion by which his accomplished wife was enabled to shorten their duration or dispel them entirely.

On an occasion well remembered, though the “chiel takin’ notes” was but a simple child, I myself was present when the grim, moody reticence of the great orator converted fully twoscore ardent admirers into personal foes.

During the summer of 1837, Mr. Webster, in pursuit of a Presidential nomination, executed his famous tour through the Great West, at that time embracing only the States of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.  The first infant railway of the continent being yet in swaddling-clothes, the journey was accomplished by private conveyance, and the bumps and bruises stoically endured in probing bottomless pits of prairie-mud, diversified by joltings over rude log-ways and intrusive stumps, were but a part of the cruel price paid for a glittering prize which in the end vanished before the aspirant like fairy gold.  At stations within reach of their personal influence, local politicians flew to the side of the brilliant statesman with the beautiful fidelity of steel to magnet:  hence he was environed by a self-appointed escort of obsequious men, constantly changing as he progressed.

“Our member” spared neither whip nor spur, and joined the triumphal march at Chicago.  Mr. Webster was then on the home-stretch, and it was shortly after this date that the incident I describe occurred.  It was a time of wild Western speculation; towns and cities sprung into being as buoyantly as soap-bubbles, and often proved as perishing.  Major Morse was president of a company which, perceiving a promising site for harbor and town on the shore of Michigan, where yet the Indian charmed the deer, secured a tract of land and proceeded to lay out an inviting town of—­corner-lots.  The major’s family occupied temporarily a wide log house, with a rough “lean-to” of bright pine boards freshly cut at the mill below.  Outside, the dwelling was merely a hut of primitive pattern nestling under the shade of a tall tree; inside, it presented a large room divided by curtains into cooking-and sleeping-apartments, surmounted by a stifling loft reached by the rungs of a permanent perpendicular ladder.  Savory odors of wild fowl and venison daily drifted up the charred