to a play before, and being, as I said, quite a novice at these kind of entertainments?  At last she spoke plain out, and begged that I would buy some of “those oranges,” pointing to a particular barrow.  But when I came to examine the fruit, I did not think that the quality of it was answerable to the price.  In this way I handled several baskets of them; but something in them all displeased me.  Some had thin rinds, and some were plainly over-ripe, which is as great a fault as not being ripe enough; and I could not (what they call) make a bargain.  While I stood haggling with the women, secretly determining to put off my purchase till I should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better choice, the young man, the cousin, (who, it seems, had left us without my missing him,) came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with oranges, inside and out, as they say.  It seems, not liking the look of the barrow-fruit any more than myself, he had slipped away to an eminent fruiterer’s, about three doors distant, which I never had the sense to think of, and had laid out a matter of two shillings in some of the best St. Michael’s, I think, I ever tasted.  What a little hinge, as I said before, the most important affairs in life may turn upon!  The mere inadvertence to the fact that there was an eminent fruiterer’s within three doors of us, though we had just passed it without the thought once occurring to me, which he had taken advantage of, lost me the affections of my Cleora.  From that time she visibly cooled towards me, and her partiality was as visibly transferred to this cousin.  I was long unable to account for this change in her behavior; when one day, accidentally discoursing of oranges to my mother, alone, she let drop a sort of reproach to me, as if I had offended Cleora by my nearness, as she called it, that evening.  Even now, when Cleora has been wedded some years to that same officious relation, as I may call him, I can hardly be persuaded that such a trifle could have been the motive to her inconstancy; for could she suppose that I would sacrifice my dearest hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was going to treat her to the play, and her mother too, (an expense of more than four times that amount,) if the young man had not interfered to pay for the latter, as I mentioned?  But the caprices of the sex are past finding out:  and I begin to think my mother was in the right; for doubtless women know women better than we can pretend to know them.

* * * * *

WORKS AND DAYS.

                 —­“Ritorna a tua scienza! 
    Che vuol, quanto la cosa e piu perfetta,
    Piu senta il bene, e cosi la doglienza.”—­DANTE.

Record, O Muse! and let the record stand,
That, when Bellona ravaged half the land,
When even these groves, from bloody fields afar,
Oft shook and shuddered at the sounds of war,
When the drum drowned the music of the flail,
And midnight marches broke the peace of Yale,
Then gathered here amid these vacant bowers
A band of scholars, men of various powers,
Various in motion, but with one desire,
Through wreck and war to watch the sacred fire,
The authentic fire that great forethoughted Mind
Stole from the gods for good of humankind.