"IT'S TELLING ME ALL ABOUT THE SEA."
[SICK DOLLY.]
BY J. E. PANTON.
Please step softly, Dolly's sleeping
After such a night of pain;
Neither Maude, nor I, nor Alice,
Thought she'd ever sleep again.
Yes, we sent for Mr. Doctor,
And he gave her heaps of pills,
Big black draughts, and pale magnesia,
Rhubarb red, and oil, and squills.
Said she had a dang'rous fever;
Thought she might have caught a cold,
Or perchance had got the jaundice,
For she looked like yellow gold.
Shook his head, then sighed a little,
As he took an ample fee,
Then remarked that after dinner
We should see—what we should see.
But she sleeps; so tell the Doctor,
When he comes at half past four,
That our darling doesn't want him,
And he needn't come here more;
[THE BOYHOOD OF DANIEL WEBSTER.]
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.
It will be just one hundred years, on the 18th of January, since Daniel Webster, the great statesman, orator, and lawyer, was born, and the time seems a fit one for saying something of his boyhood.
Webster's father lived near the head waters of the Merrimac River, and the only school within reach was a poor affair kept open for a few months every winter. There Webster learned all that the ignorant master could teach him, which was very little; but he acquired a taste which did more for him than the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the school. He learned to like books, and to want knowledge; and when a boy gets really hungry and thirsty for knowledge, it is not easy to keep him ignorant. When some of the neighbors joined in setting up a little circulating library, young Webster read every book in it two or three times, and even committed to memory a large part of the best of them. It was this eagerness for education on his part that led his father afterward to send him to Exeter to school, and later to put him in Dartmouth College.