The happy winter evenings, we love their social mirth, For many pleasant tales are told beside our lighted hearth; A welcome face sometimes looks in upon our circle here, And brings to us the happiest hour in all the glad New Year. It is an old man’s face, with clustering gray hair, And a wrinkled forehead wearing, though furrowed not by care; Old Robert Merry, with his smiles, his tales of other climes, His Museum of curious things, new stories and old rhymes. We knew him by another name in years that are gone by, And loved good Peter Parley with his kind brow and eye; Each month unto our mountain home, came “Parley’s Magazine,” ’Till “Merry’s Museum” took the place where it so long had been. We love our guest far better because our own young hands Have labored for the pleasure he brings from other lands; When autumn leaves fell round us, the autumn nuts grew brown, We and the squirrels gathered them as they came rattling down. O, merry was our harvest time――we made the woods ring out, Through all the long, bright autumn day, with our gay, careless shout; And then we sold our nuts, and thus have the pleasure still, Of seeing Robert Merry in our home upon the hill. M. T. B. _Lowell, Jan. 4._ ―――― THE LITTLE SOLDIER. We insert the following, with thanks to the writer, and should be glad to receive the remainder of the story: MR. MERRY: I am one of your “blue-eyed friends,” and although not a “little” one, I have been much interested in the articles which have appeared in the Museum, connected with the war of our Revolution. I know many of the warm advocates for _peace_, query how far it is judicious to interest the minds of the rising generation, in the details of _war_; still, I must believe that many of the blessings we enjoy, peculiar to our own country, were purchased by the self-sacrifices of our fathers, and their “children’s children,” should not overlook this fact.