The angel of the flowers, one day, Beneath a rose-tree sleeping lay,-- That spirit to whose charge 'tis given To bathe young buds in dews of heaven. Awaking from his light repose, The angel whispered to the rose: "O fondest object of my care, Still fairest found, where all are fair; For the sweet shade thou giv'st to me Ask what thou wilt, 'tis granted thee." "Then," said the rose, with deepened glow, "On me another grace bestow." The spirit paused, in silent thought,-- What grace was there that flower had not? 'Twas but a moment,--o'er the rose A veil of moss the angel throws, And, robed in nature's simplest weed, Could there a flower that rose exceed? FOUR DUCKS ON A POND _By_ WILLIAM ALLINGHAM Four ducks on a pond, A grass bank beyond, A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing; What a little thing To remember for years, To remember with tears. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS _By_ JOHN BROWN, M. D. Four and thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary street from the high school, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how or why. When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron-church. "A dog fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we got up! And is not this boy nature! and human nature too? and don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage, endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making gain by their pluck. A boy--be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked, interest that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action. Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye at a glance announced a dog fight to his brain? He did not, he could not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting, is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus.