A blue-eyed child that sits amid the noon, O’erhung with a laburnum’s drooping sprays, Singing her little songs, while softly round Along the grass the chequered sunshine plays. All beauty that is throned in womanhood, Pacing a summer garden’s fountained walks, That stoops to smooth a glossy spaniel down, To hide her flushing cheek from one who talks. A happy mother with her fair-faced girls, In whose sweet spring again her youth she sees, With shout and dance and laugh and bound and song, Stripping an autumn orchard’s laden trees. An aged woman in a wintry room; Frost on the pane,—without, the whirling snow; Reading old letters of her far-off youth, Of pleasures past and joys of long ago. SHORT CUTS ACROSS THE GLOBE. To a person who wishes to sail to California an inspection of the map of the world reveals a provoking peculiarity. The Atlantic Ocean—the highway of the globe—being separated from the Pacific by the great western continent, it is impossible to sail to the opposite coasts without going thousands of miles out of his way; for he must double Cape Horn. Yet a closer inspection of the map will discover that but for one little barrier of land, which is in size but as a grain of sand to the bed of an ocean, the passage would be direct. Were it not for that small neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama (which narrows in one place to twenty-eight miles) he might save a voyage of from six to eight thousand miles, and pass at once into the Pacific Ocean. Again, if his desires tend towards the East, he perceives that but for the Isthmus of Suez, he would not be obliged to double the Cape of Good Hope. The Eastern difficulty has been partially obviated by the overland route opened up by the ill-rewarded Waghorn. The western barrier has yet to be broken through. Now that we can shake hands with Brother Jonathan in twelve days by means of weekly steamers; travel from one end of Great Britain to another, or from the Hudson to the Ohio, as fast as the wind, and make our words dance to distant friends upon the magic tight wire a great deal faster—now that the European and Columbian Saxon is spreading his children more or less over all the known habitable world: it seems extraordinary that the simple expedient of opening a twenty-eight mile passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, to save a dangerous voyage of some eight thousand miles, has not been already achieved. In this age of enterprise that so simple a remedy for so great an evil should not have been applied appears astonishing. Nay, we ought to feel some shame when we reflect that evidences in the neighbourhood of both Isthmuses exist of such junctions having existed, in what we are pleased to designate ‘barbarous’ ages.