When we look back a space of just two hundred years and compare our present situation, surrounded by all the beauty of civilization and intelligence, with the cheerless prospect which awaited the European settler, whose voice first startled the stillness of the forest; or if we look back but one hundred years to the humble beginnings of the second race of settlers, who undertook the task of reviving the waste places of this wilderness, and suffered all the privations and hardships which the pioneers in the march of civilization are called upon to endure; or if we take a nearer point for comparison, and view the blackened ruin of our village at the close of the revolutionary war, and estimate the proud pre-eminence over all those periods which we now enjoy, in our civil relations and in the means of social happiness, our hearts should swell with gratitude to the Author of all good that these high privileges are granted to us; and we should resolve that we will individually and as a community sustain the purity and moral tone of our institutions, and leave them unimpaired to posterity. THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT. By N. P. Willis. At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt of the fashionable suburb of New-Haven, stood a rambling old Dutch house, built, probably, when the cattle of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town. It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony, to use an expressive gallicism, _gave_ upon the bay. Long Island Sound, the great highway from the northern Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate is divine) between the curving lip of the bay, and the interminable and sandy shore of the island some six leagues distant, the procession of ships and steamers stole past with an imperceptible progress, the ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened through the trees from behind, and (the day being one of golden Autumn, and myself and St. John waiting while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun-steeped precipice of East Rock with its tiara of blood-red maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light, drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a holiday.