have the whole premises quietly to himself. His attachment does not take a personal hue, but is rather to locality. His acquaintanceship with you is never so intimate as that of the catbird, who soon recognizes your step, your dress and the peculiar touch and cadence of your hoe, even as a college oarsman will identify the stroke of a chum or a rival a quarter of a mile off. If the robin does fix your individuality in his mind, he deigns to make no sign thereof. At most he accepts you as part of the mechanism of creation. You make no draft upon his bump of reverence. He does not set you on his Olympus. This mark of the spirit which makes him, on the whole, a more respectable and dignified character than his less gayly-dressed cousin tends in some sense to commend him the less to you, since we all like the homage of the "inferior animals," birds or voters. You half dislike the independence of the robin, who is equally at home in the parterre or the forest, on the gravel-walk or in the upper air. On the other you have more hold. He is rarely seen higher than twenty feet above ground, and is strictly an appendage of the shrubbery and the orchard. Even in his unhappy voice there is a domestic tone, closely imitated as it is from Grimalkin. Imitated, we say, for we have never been able fully to believe that this mew is the bird's original note. We shall ever incline to the impression that it is an acquired dialect, picked up in the mere wantonness born of a conscious and exceptional power of mimicry. E. C. B. A NEW AND INDIGNANT ITALIAN POET. Mrs. Leo Hunter's selection of an "Expiring Frog" as a subject for poetical composition has lately been surpassed by a new Italian poet. The latter, Signer Giovanni Rizzi, has just published at Milan a small volume of sonnets, chiefly ironical in character, in which he gives vent to his disgust at the positive and materialistic tendencies of the present day. The theme of the three most remarkable among these productions is that useful but not very aesthetic animal, the hog.