It was really so. Her form, her face, her eyes worked so harmoniously in the scene she had got up to cover what was below the surface, that she did present, to any one whose senses were arbiters, a most beautiful display. 'You are laughing at me, papa--I see very plainly you are laughing at me! I will not endure it! I--' 'Belle,' interrupted her father, 'you little goose, what do you think I care for the scribbling of any fool that chooses to disgrace himself? What should you, my daughter, care? To be sure, I can understand why you may suddenly give way to your feelings; but there is reason in all things. Don't you think the miserable fellow who penned that scrawl (by-the-way, you have very foolishly destroyed it, provided you did wish to trace it out)--I say, don't you think the fellow who perpetrated the ridiculous joke would be pleased enough to see how you take it?' He took his daughter by the arm--a very beautiful arm--and gave her a little shake--a playful, pleasant shake. Looking her in the face, he said: 'Answer me, Belle--am I not right? Have you not sense enough to see that I am right?' 'Oh, I suppose so, papa. You are always right. That is, I never can answer your arguments; but--' 'That will do, Belle. Run off to your room, and come down quite yourself for dinner.' Belle gave her father an arch smile, to show how obedient she was, and bounded away. Hiram watched his daughter with delight as she ran up the staircase, and his heart exulted in the possession of a child so charming and attractive. THE ANDES. The Andes, like a vast wall, extend along the western coast of South America. Woods cluster, like billows of foliage, around the feet of the mountains. A vast network of intersecting streams is woven by the gigantic warp and woof of these mountains. Many brooks, stealing along, scarcely heard, over the table-lands, and many fierce torrents, dashing wildly through rocky crevices, fill the great streams that roll, some into the Caribbean Sea, some into the near Pacific; while one, the mighty Amazon, stretches across the continent for more than three thousand miles, and swells the Atlantic with the torrents of the Andes. The keel of a vessel entering the Amazon from the Atlantic, may cut through waters that once fell as flakes of snow on the most western ridges of the Andes, and glistened with the last rays of the sun as he sank in the Pacific. A spell of fascination hangs about the Amazon. Its wonders, known and unknown, have a marvellous attraction; and the perils encountered in its exploration give a throb of interest to its very name.