CHAPTER IJACK HARDING GETS A JOB"Look here, boy, can you hold my horse a few minutes?" asked a gentleman, as he jumped from his carriage in one of the lower streets in New York. The boy addressed was apparently about twelve, with a bright face and laughing eyes, but dressed in clothes of coarse material. This was Jack Harding, who is to be our hero. "Yes, sir," said Jack, with alacrity,... more...

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS.BY JNO. B. DUFFEY.( ) As, wandering forth at rosy dawn,When sparkling dew-drops deck the lawn,From glen and glade, and river-side,We bring young flowers—the morning's pride. And, bound in wreaths, or posies sweet,With flowers our favored ones we greet;For flowers a silent language own,That makes our maiden wishes known. A language that by love was wrought,And by fond love... more...

CHAPTER I A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR "Boys! B-o-y-s!" There was no response to the imperative summons. Professor Zepplin sat up in his cot, listening intently. Something had awakened him suddenly, but just what he was unable to decide. "Be quiet over there, young men," he admonished, adding in a lower tone, "I'm sure I heard some one moving about." The camp of the Pony Rider Boys... more...

There is a room upstairs in the old house at Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts, where the visitors pause and look about them with a softening glance and often with visible emotion, as though they felt a sudden nearness to something infinitely intimate and personal. They have come to see the place where Bronson Alcott and the group of transcendentalists cut themselves off from the world in the spring... more...

BIRDS OF THE SNOW No fact of natural history is more interesting, or more significant of the poetry of evolution, than the distribution of birds over the entire surface of the world. They have overcome countless obstacles, and adapted themselves to all conditions. The last faltering glance which the Arctic explorer sends toward his coveted goal, ere he admits defeat, shows flocks of snow buntings... more...

ATHENS AN ODEEre from under earth again like fire the violet kindle,[Str. 1. Ere the holy buds and hoar on olive-branches bloom,Ere the crescent of the last pale month of winter dwindle,Shrink, and fall as falls a dead leaf on the dead month's tomb,Round the hills whose heights the first-born olive-blossom brightened,Round the city brow-bound once with violets like a bride,Up from under earth... more...

MODERN TYPES. (By Mr. Punch's Own Type Writer.) No. XXIII.—THE TOLERATED HUSBAND. It is customary for the self-righteous moralists who puff themselves into a state of Jingo complacency over the failings of foreign nations, to declare with considerable unction that the domestic hearth, which every Frenchman habitually tramples upon, is maintained in unviolated purity in every British household.... more...

Berryman Livingstone was a successful man, a very successful man, and as he sat in his cushioned chair in his inner private office (in the best office-building in the city) on a particularly snowy evening in December, he looked it every inch. It spoke in every line of his clean-cut, self-contained face, with its straight, thin nose, closely drawn mouth, strong chin and clear gray eyes; in every... more...

CHAPTER I. WARWICK HALL Warwick Hall looked more like an old English castle than a modern boarding-school for girls. Gazing at its high towers and massive portal, one almost expected to see some velvet-clad page or lady-in-waiting come down the many flights of marble steps leading between stately terraces to the river. Even a knight with a gerfalcon on his wrist would not have seemed out of place, and... more...

CHAPTER I. ROYAL PROGRESSES TO BURGHLEY, STOWE, AND STRATHFIELDSAYE. On the 29th of November the Queen went on one of her visits to her nobility. We are told, and we can easily believe, these visits were very popular and eagerly contested for. In her Majesty's choice of localities it would seem as if she loved sometimes to retrace her early footsteps by going again with her husband to the places... more...