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Sea-sickness is pleasure to it. Should I hereafter describe this class, I fear I shall give them a Rembrandt coloring for I am confident, from the wrongs they have done me, that I could not speak of them with my customary coolness and impartiality.

BY-THE-BY, that word impartiality reminds me of a legal biped, who possessed this quality to a degree.' Reader, you don't know the Hon. Abednego Babcock, do you? Taking it for granted that you do not, I will describe him to you. Like Wouter Van Twiller, he is about five feet six inches high, and six feet five inches in circumference. He potates considerably, and in that way has nursed for himself a nasal organ of most scarlet rubicundity. It is a sign, as I call it, of 'grog manifest in the flesh.' He is a man of many friends among pot-house lawyers and small politicians. He has never been known, I believe, to give a decided opinion on any subject. I once heard him charge a jury something after this fashion :

Gentlemen: This is an action brought by the plaintiff against the defendant. You have heard the evidence on both sides, and the court know of no points of law that you may not be supposed to understand already. The case is a very plain one; and if, upon a careful review of the testimony, you should think the plaintiff entitled to a verdict, the decision must be in his favor; but if, on the contrary, it should appear that the defendant ought to be the plaintiff in this suit, you will please bring in a bill to that effect. I believe that is about all to be said in the matter. If you can think of any thing else that I ought to say, I have no objection to mention it. It is now my dinner hour. Swear a constable.'

This was the usual impartiality of Abednego Babcock, Esq. He would sit for hours on the bench, feeling the customary blossoms on his nose with his affectionate fingers an employment which evidently gave him great satisfaction. They do say that whenever a flatulent attorney speaks before him, he drops right to sleep. He says a hundred yards of gab, as he classically calls it, could not change his mind, when he has it made up. He despises every thing high-flown, or, as he sometimes terms it, hypherflutenated; and thinks that, in nine cases out of ten, a cause can be best decided by hearing only one side.

APROPOS of the bar. What a deal of bad oratory there is about, it! I have one or two good friends among the lawyers in Gotham who could depict these grandiloquent attorneys to the life. How much verbose pomposity of language, too, do you find in the pulpit, where, of all other places, it is most out of place. A few days ago, I heard an unhewn Ambassador from the court of Heaven,' as he credentialized himself who had taken the far west in his route to the church where I heard him use the following burst. He was speaking of Judas, and Benedict Arnold-worthies whom he compared together. 'Arnold,' said he, was a traitor, of whom you may have heard, who

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tried for to sell his keď'ntry. It was the ruination of him, and for what he done, he will be rewarded with infamy; for his name will sertingly go down to the most remotest posterity, kivered all over with Hell's arsenic!' Here he looked round upon his audience with an air of pride, as if he would say There's a touch for you!'

SPEAKING of clerical oratory, bids me think of an event I witnessed lately in an Episcopal conventicle. The morning service had been said—the rich tones of the organ were mellowing away into silence— when the speaker arose, and named his text, in these simple words: 'Jesus wept.' He spoke in a strain of touching simplicity; he painted the sorrows of the Saviour at the death of Lazarus and he described in beautiful language the propriety of his grief, by enlarging upon that inevitable condition of mortality which causes all to grieve. By and by I heard a faint moan. A young and tender-hearted mother, who had but a few weeks before buried a blooming daughter, the darling of her love, overcome by her feelings, had fainted away. But it was no boisterous or harrowing language, that thus stirred within her the holy fountain of a mother's affection. It was the words of simplicity that fell upon her ear, and trembled in her bosom. The circumstance revived in my mind the memory of a sermon the offspring of untutored genius-which I heard in early youth. The preacher was an unlettered woodsman, but he spoke with correctness with eloquence. The occasion was the funeral of a child. The boy, a lad of four or five years old, lay on the bier before him; his fair cheeks had not lost their rosy red, and his little form, so decently composed in the white garments of the grave, looked far too dainty for the earth to cover. The speaker took his text from the touching story of Gehazi and the Shumamite. I forget the place where it is to be found. mother, Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy with thy child? And she answered, It is well.' his hearers, that in the case before them, it was and beautifully did he prove it. My heart swells yet, at the mere remembrance of that sermon. Mother,' he said, 'do you mourn for the child that has fallen like a blossom from your arms? Weep not, for it is well. He has escaped the darkness of earthly sorrow the clouds that day by day would have rolled gradually over his spiritthe crosses of existence the gloom that follows after that golden age, ere the life of life begins to fail and fade he has missed all these, and in that 'better country,' where his Father and our Father smiles upon him, his innocent spirit is at rest. Fond mother! distrust not thy God. Lift thy heart-warm prayer to him in the night-watches; and as thou implorest consolation, thou mayest ask thy God Is it well with my child?' and soft as heavenly numbers, sweet as the music of an angel's lyre, he will answer,' It is well.'

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'And he said to the husband? Is it well He went on to show well with the child :'

I HAVE remembered this sermon, fondly and long. The preacher was such a man as William Wirt once described - only he was not

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blind. He was tall, and of goodly presence, with a venerable snowy head, and an eye that beamed with benignity and good will to men. Upon returning home, with my heart full of the discourse I had heard, I wrote thus:

THE EARLY DEAD.

'WHY mourn for the Young? Better that the light cloud should fade away in the morning's breath, than travel through the weary day, to gather in darkness, and end in storm.' BULWER.

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CHILDREN are queer subjects to write about. I know several little friends of mine, that I can never believe will be grown up, wrinkled men and women. Will that little beauty become an old woman? I'll not believe it. Will that boy, now shooting his marble, or drawing his sled in winter, will he become a portly-looking man, with a stern temper, a fat abdomen, and a big bunch of watch keys hanging just beneath his waistcoat? Will he wear spectacles, and a cane? It seems impossible but it must be. There must be an end to every thing youth, to its tastes, and its associations. And bless me! reader, now I think of it, it is time that there should be an end to the present number of the lucubrations of your honest friend,

--

- to

OLLAPOD.

SONGS OF THE CRUSADES.

NUMBER TWO.

THE RECREANT EARL.

STEPHEN, Earl of Chartres and Blois, deserted the Christian princes before Antioch, in the first Crusade, and returned to France. His countess, Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, received him with bitter reproaches: shamed by her taunts, he returned to Palestine, and fell in a battle with a body of Ethiop cavalry, near Ramula.

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O'er the warderless walls no longer streams
The badge of a noble line,

For the haughty count, in Christ's holy name,
Hath assumed the crimson sign,

And his banner follows the oriflamme

O'er the deserts of Palestine.

The countess paces the rampart wall
With a quick step to and fro;

Her proud eyes flash with unwonted light,
And her blushes come and go:

'Twas the palmer, who sought her bower last night,

With his tidings moved her so.

What sound was that? 'T was the tramp of steeds-
The dust by their hoofs up-ploughed,

With a squadron wrapped in its choking fold,
Comes on like a flying cloud;

And bright in the sunlight, like gleams of gold,
Spears flash o'er its curling shroud.

Onward it sweeps! - 't is dissolving-gone!
For each knight hath slacked his rein;
By the fortress moat, till the draw-bridge fall,
Waits a mailed and bannered train;

"T is the laurelled earl, to his bride and hall,
Returned from the wars again.

The draw-bridge drops, and a knight sweeps o'er,
As his palfrey's hoofs were wings;

He threads the arch, while the bugles peal,
And his rein to a vassal flings;

But a moment more, and his arméd heel
On the step of the turret rings.

Lightly he leaps up the winding stair-
He hath sprung to his lady's side:
'Now thanks to God, and the Virgin's grace,
I behold thee again, my bride!

But the lady turns from his warm embrace
With gesture of queenly pride.

Her red lip curls with imperial scorn,
And her glance is dark and grand:

"Thou bringest,' she cries, 'late news, I trow,

From the wars of the Holy Land:

'Neath the feet of a craven the grass ne'er grew

When he fled from a lifted brand!'

'Nay, Adela, blame not the cause is lost; 'Tis no human foe I dread,

But Pestilence waveth his flag of gloom

O'er Famine's unburied dead:

With flesh, uptorn from the noisome tomb,
Are the Christian warriors fed.

"The beleaguring lines round Antioch
Are by human spectres trod -
No longer the dogs of Mahound flee
At the fierce crusader's nod,
For Christendom's wanton chivalry
Are forsaken of their God!'

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