twilight, to the little clerk's absence, to the good humour of the happy lads and lasses, who are passing and re-passing on all sides--or rather, perhaps, in a happy oblivion of the cross uncle, the kind villagers, the squinting lover, and the whole world. On they trip, linked arm-in-arm, he trying to catch a glimpse of her glowing face under her bonnet, and she hanging down her head and avoiding his gaze with a mixture of modesty and coquetry, which well becomes the rural beauty. On they go, with a reality and intensity of affection, which must overcome all obstacles; and poor Olive follows with art evident sympathy in their happiness, which makes her almost as enviable as they; and we pursue our walk amidst the moonshine and the nightingales, with Jacob Frost's cart looming in the distance, and the merry sounds of Whitsuntide, the shout, the laugh, and the song echoing all around us, like "noises of the air."--_Monthly Magazine._ * * * * * SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS. * * * * * THE LETTER-WRITER. Fortune surely shifted me from my birth, or first looked on me in a mood as splenetic as that of nature, when she produced that most sombre and unpleasing of trees, the olive; to pursue the simile; I may have conduced to the comfort of others, nay, even to their convenience and luxury, but it never availed aught to my own appearance or circumstances; I went on, like that unhappy-looking tree, decaying in the trunk and blighting in the branches, and yielding up the produce of a liberal education and an active nature to the public, but reaping for my own portion only misfortune and disappointment; I had sprung up in the wilderness of the world, and I was left to grow or wither as I might; every one was ready to profit by me when a fruitful season rendered me available to them, but none cared to toil to give me space for growth, or to enrich the perishing earth at my unlucky root!