The cottage door is open wide, And cheerful sounds are heard, The young girl sings at the merry wheel A song like the wilding bird; The creeping child by the old, worn sill Peers out with winking eye, And his ringlets rubs with chubby hand, As the drops come pattering by. With bounding heart beneath the sky, The truant boy is out, And hoop and ball are darting by With many a merry shout. Ay, sport away, ye joyous throng―― For yours is the April day; I love to see your spirits dance In your pure and healthful play. * * * * * FLOWERS. (FROM “THE SINLESS CHILD.”) EACH tiny leaf became a scroll Inscribed with holy truth, A lesson that around the heart Should keep the dew of youth; Bright missals from angelic throngs In every by-way left―― How were the earth of glory shorn, Were it of flowers bereft! They tremble on the Alpine height; The fissured rock they press; The desert wild, with heat and sand, Shares, too, their blessedness: And wheresoe’er the weary heart Turns in its dim despair, The meek-eyed blossom upward looks, Inviting it to prayer. * * * * * EROS AND ANTEROS. TIS said sweet Psyche gazed one night On Cupid’s sleeping face―― Gazed in her fondness on the wight In his unstudied grace: But he, bewildered by the glare Of light at such a time, Fled from the side of Psyche there As from a thing of crime. Ay, weak the fable――false the ground―― Sweet Psyche veiled her face―― Well knowing Love, if ever found, Will never leave his place. Unfound as yet, and weary grown, She had mistook another: ’Twas but Love’s semblance she had found―― Not Eros, but his brother! Illustration: (‡ decoration) LUCY LARCOM. AUTHOR OF “HANNAH BINDING SHOES.” HAD we visited the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, sixty years ago, we perhaps would not have noticed anything peculiar or different from other girls in the busy little body known as Lucy Larcom. She had left school in her early teens to help support the family by serving as an ordinary operative in a cotton factory. Yet this is where Lucy Larcom did her first work; and to the experiences she gained there can be traced the foundation of the literature――both prose and poetry――with which she has delighted and encouraged so many readers.