At the still twilight’s dewy hour, Their varied tones I hear, As when I ranged these pastures o’er In childhood’s sunny year. On the evening air a lay is borne, Soft wandering up the vale, Where smoky wreaths o’er cottage brood, Quiet as yon bright sail. The hamlet has its voices yet— I hear them where I stand, And I love to fancy them still the lays Of the olden minstrel band. The time is like those fairy hours When life had no regret— I seem to feel its vernal breeze Fanning these temples yet. Nature is ever beautiful, Her form the youth of old; These limbs are tending to their earth— Mind triumphs o’er the mould. F. G. * * * * * =MY FIRST INKLING OF A ROYAL TIGER.= =BY AN OLD INDIAN OFFICER.= A change came o’er the spirit of my dream— The boy was sprung to manhood: in the wilds Of fiery climes, he made himself a home, And his soul drank their sunbeams: he was girt With strange and dusky aspects: by his sleeping side Stood camels grazing; and some goodly steeds Were fastened near a fountain—— Byron. Many years have elapsed since the occurrence took place which I am now about to relate; but the period is yet fresh in my mind, when, shortly after arriving at Madras, I was dispatched on a march of several hundred miles to join my regiment, then stationed in the Deccan. No sooner had our detachment crossed the rocky bed of the Kishnah, and ascended the table-land beyond, than we found ourselves in quite a different climate from the Carnatic. We now inhaled a dry and bracing atmosphere; the mornings and evenings were deliciously cool, and a blanket proved, under canvas, a not superfluous covering at night—for it happened to be at that delightful period of the year when Nature, in these sunny regions of the East, is still arrayed in all her gayest holyday garb—the verdant garlands with which she is then decked out not being yet faded by the withering influence of that simoom-like blast, which, periodically sweeping across the desert, soon licks up with fiery breath every sign of verdure and vegetation, leaving—except where patches of hardy jungle intervene—naught over which the eye can rest save a brown, arid, and burnt-up soil, here and there dotted with still more bare, brown, and desolate-looking masses of stone and rock.