RALPH KEELER.

THE HUMMING-BIRD.

Poised in a sheeny mist
Of the dust of bloom,
Clasped to the poppy’s breast and kissed,
Baptized in pools of violet perfume
From foot to plume!

Zephyr loves thy wings
Above all lovable things,
And brings them gifts with rapturous murmurings: 
Thine is the golden reach of blooming hours,
Spirit of flowers!

Music follows thee,
And, continually,
Thy life is changed and sweetened happily,
Having no more than rose-leaf shade of gloom,
O bird of Bloom!

Thou art a winged thought
Of tropical hours,
With all the tropic’s rare bloom-splendor fraught,
Surcharged with Beauty’s indefinable powers,
Angel of flowers!

JAMES MAURICE THOMPSON.

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

By William Black, Author of “THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON.”

CHAPTER X.

FAIRY—­LAND.

“Welcome to London—!”

He was about to add “Sheila,” but suddenly stopped.  The girl, who had hastily come forward to meet him with a glad look in her eyes and with both hands outstretched, doubtless perceived the brief embarrassment of the moment, and was perhaps a little amused by it.  But she took no notice of it:  she merely advanced to him and caught both his hands, and said, “And are you very well?”

It was the old and familiar salutation, uttered in the same odd, gentle, insinuating fashion, and in the same low and sweet voice.  Sheila’s stay in Oban and the few days she had already spent in London had not taught her the difference between “very” and “ferry.”

“It is so strange to hear you speak in London—­Mrs. Lavender,” he said, with rather a wry face as he pronounced her full and proper title.

And now it was Sheila’s turn to look a bit embarrassed and color, and appear uncertain whether to be vexed or pleased, when her husband himself broke in in his usual impetuous fashion:  “I say, Ingram, don’t be a fool!  Of course you must call her Sheila—­unless when there are people here, and then you must please yourself.  Why, the poor girl has enough of strange things and names about her already.  I don’t know how she keeps her head.  It would bewilder me, I know; but I can see that, after she has stood at the window for a time, and begun to get dazed by all the wonderful sights and sounds outside, she suddenly withdraws and fixes all her attention on some little domestic duty, just as if she were hanging on to the practical things of life to assure herself it isn’t all a dream.  Isn’t that so, Sheila?” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder.

“You ought not to watch me like that,” she said with a smile.  “But it is the noise that is most bewildering.  There are many places I will know already when I see them, many places and things I have known in pictures; but now the size of them, and the noise of carriages, and the people always passing, and always different, always strangers, so that you never see the same people any more—­But I am getting very much accustomed to it.”