staircase one of their papa’s enemies was sitting month after month in mouldy midnight!  But Ludlow Castle has brighter associations than these, the chief of which I should have mentioned at the outset.  It was for a long period the official residence of the governors—­the “lords presidents” they were called—­of the Marches of Wales, and it was in the days of its presidential splendor that Milton’s Comus was acted in the great hall.  Wandering about in shady corners of the ruin, it is the echo of that enchanting verse that we should try to catch, and not the faint groans of some encaverned malefactor.  Other verse was also produced at Ludlow—­verse, however, of a less sonorous quality.  A portion of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras was composed there.  Let me add that the traveller who spends a morning at Ludlow will naturally have come thither from Shrewsbury, of which place I have left myself no space to speak, though it is worth, and well worth, an allusion.  Shrewsbury is a museum of beautiful old gabled, cross-timbered house-fronts.

H. JAMES, JR.

LITTLE LIZAY.

Alston was a Virginia slave—­a tall, well-built half-breed, in whom the white blood dominated the black.  When about thirty-seven years of age he was sold to a Mississippi plantation, in the north-western part of the State and on the river.  The farm was managed by an overseer, the master—­Horton by name—­being a practising physician in Memphis, Tenn.  Alston had been on the plantation a few weeks when, toward the last of September, the cotton-picking season opened.  The year had been, for the river-plantations, exceptionally favorable for cotton-growing.  On the Horton place especially “the stand” had been pronounced perfect, there being scarcely a gap, scarcely a stalk missing from the mile-long rows of the broad fields.  Then, the rainfall had not been so profuse as to develop foliage at the bolls’ expense, as was too frequently the case on the river.  Yet it had been plenteous enough to keep off the “rust,” from which the dryer upland plantations were now suffering.  Neither the “boll-worm” nor the dreaded “army-worm” had molested the river-fields; so the tall pyramidal plants were thickly set with “squares” and green egg-shaped bolls, smooth and shining as with varnish.  On a single stalk might be seen all stages of development—­from the ripe, brown boll, parted starlike, with the long white fleece depending, to the bean-sized embryo from which the crimson flower had but just fallen.  Indeed, among the wide-open bolls there was an occasional flower, cream-hued or crimson according to its age, for the cotton-bloom at opening resembles in color the magnolia-blossom, but this changes quickly to a deep crimson.