There is no tune that grips my heart, and seems to pull me all apart, like this old Serenade; it seems to breathe of distant lands, and orange groves and silver sands, and troubadour and maid. It's freighted with a gentle woe as old as all the seas that flow, as young as yesterday; as changeless as the stars above, as yearning as a woman's love for true knight far away. It seems a prayer, serene and pure; a tale of love that will endure when they who loved are dust, when earthly songs are heard no more, and bridal wreaths are withered sore, and wedding rings are rust. It's weary with a lover's care; it's wailing with a deep despair, that only lovers learn; and yet through all its sadness grope the singing messengers of hope for joys that will return. O, gentle, soothing Serenade! When I am beaten down and frayed, with all my hopes in pawn, when I've forgotten how to laugh, I wind up my old phonograph, and turn the music on! And then I float away, away, to moonlit castles in Cathay, or Araby or Spain, and underneath the glowing skies I read of love in damsels' eyes, and dream, and dream again! _Mazeppa_ Mazeppa, strapped upon a steed, made sixty miles at frightful speed; through lowland, valley and morass, through verdant strips of garden sass, o'er mountain, brake and flowing stream, he sped, as though propelled by steam. The bear sat up to see him go, the wolves pursued, but had no show; and when at last he reached a town, his dying charger tumbled down. Mazeppa rose, without a scratch, and swiftly wrote a long dispatch, which reached the Sporting Ed. that night: "I've knocked the record flat, all right. No other fellow, anywhere, has traveled on a knee-sprung mare o'er sixty miles of right of way, while trussed up like a bale of hay. Please hire a hall; a statement write, that I will lecture every night, for twenty years--my lecture's fine--the moving picture rights are mine. If any challenger should come, and put up a substantial sum, and say that he'd be glad to ride, upon a raw-boned hearse horse tied, for sixty miles or maybe more, for money, marbles, chalk or gore, just say my last long ride is made, until the lecture graft is played." _Fashion's Devotee_