Perhaps it is, but never,
  Say I, should we dissever
    Old places and old names;
  Guard the old landmarks truly,
  On the old altars duly
    Keep bright the ancient flames. 
  For me the face of Nature,
  No luckless nomenclature
    Of grace or beauty robs;
  No, when of town I weary,
  I’ll make a strike in Erie,
    And buy a place at DOBBS!

—­Poems.

JOHN WILLIAM DE FOREST.

(BORN, 1826.)

* * * * *

FATHER HIGGINS’S PREFERMENT.

Father Higgins was not the kind of divine who easily finds preferment in the Catholic Church, or who would be apt to make a shining mark in any other.

Fat and red-faced and pudding-headed was Father Higgins; uncommonly in the way of good eating, and now and then disposed for good drinking; as lazy as he dared be, ignorant enough for a hermit, and simple enough for a monk.  His chief excellence lay in his kindliness of heart, which would doubtless have made him very serviceable and comfortable to his fellow-men, had it not been for his indolence, his spare intellectual gifts, and perhaps a little leaven of selfishness.

Such as he was, however, Father Higgins had no small “consate” of himself, and sometimes thought that even a bishopric would not be “beyant his desarts.”  He pleased himself with imagining how finely he would fill an episcopal chair, what apostolic labors he would accomplish in his diocese, what swarms of heretics or pagans he would convert, what a self-sacrificing and heroic life he would lead, and what a saintly name he would leave.  One day, or to speak with a precision worthy of this true history, one evening, he became a bishop.

It happened on this wise.  Father Higgins had ventured to treat himself to a spectacle.  He had attended, for the first time in his life, an exhibition of legerdemain; this one being given by that celebrated master of the black-art, Professor Heller.  He had seen the professor change turnips into gold watches, draw a dozen live pigeons in succession out of an empty box, send rings into ladies’ handkerchiefs at the other end of the hall, catch a bullet out of an exploded pistol in his hand, and perform other marvels equally irrational and disturbing.  From this raree-show Father Higgins had gone home feeling that he had witnessed something about as unearthly as he was likely to be confronted with in the next world.

For an hour or more he sat in his elbow-chair, puzzling over the professor’s “diviltries,” and crossing himself at the remembrance of each one of them.  It was black midnight, and stormy at that; there was such an uproar in the elm branches over his house as if all the Salem witches were holding Sabbath there; the whole village of Sableburg swarmed with windy rushings and shriekings and slammings.  It was one of those midnights when the devil evidently “has business on his hand.”