“Is that he picking up the fallen fan? My dear! he’s such an awkward, ugly man! You must be certain, pet, to answer ‘No.’ He’s not worth loving.”—“And I love him so.” _IV. Her brother’s._ “By Jove! were I girl!—through a horrid hap— I wouldn’t have a milk-and-water chap. The man has not a single spark or ‘go.’ He’s not worth loving.”—“Yet I love him so.” _V. Her own._ “And were he everything to which I’ve listened; Though he were ugly, awkward (and he isn’t), Poor, lowly-born, and destitute of ‘go,’ He is worth loving, for I love him so.” —_Chambers’ Journal._ DON’T WAIT. If you have gentle words and looks, my friends, To spare for me—if you have tears to shed That I have suffered—keep them not, I pray, Until I hear not, see not, being dead. For loving looks, though fraught with tenderness, And kindly tears, though they fall thick and fast, And words of praise, alas! can naught avail To lift the shadows from a life that’s past? And rarest blossoms, what can they suffice, Offered to one who can no longer gaze Upon their beauty! Flow’rs in coffins laid Impart no sweetness to departed days. THE CURFEW HEROINE. The story that is the basis of the well-known poem, “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night,” told in prose is as follows: It lacked quite half an hour of curfew toll. The old bell-ringer came from under the wattled roof of his cottage stoop and stood with uncovered head in the clear sweet-scented air. He had grown blind and deaf in the service, but his arm was as muscular as ever, and he who listened this day marked no faltering in the heavy metallic throbs of the cathedral bell. Old Jasper had lived through many changes. He had tolled out the notes of mourning for good Queen Bess, and with tears scarcely dry he had rung the glad tidings of the coronation of James. Charles I. had been crowned, reigned, and expiated his weakness before all England in Jasper’s time, and now he who under army held all the common wealth in the hollow of his hand, ruled as more than monarch, and still the old man with the habit of a long life upon him rang his matin and sorrow. Jasper stood alone now, lifting his dimmed eyes up to the softly dappled sky. The wall of his memory seemed so written over—so crossed and recrossed by the annals of the years that had gone before, that there seemed little room for anything in the present. Little recked he that Cromwell’s spearsmen were camped on the moor beyond the village—that Cromwell himself rode with his guardsmen a league away; he only knew that the bell had been rung in the tower when William the Conqueror made curfew a law, had been spared by Puritan and Roundhead, and that his arm for sixty years had never failed him at even-tide.