Alas, alas for Hamelin! 
    There came into many a burgher’s pate
    A text which says that heaven’s gate
    Opes to the rich at as easy rate
    As the needle’s eye takes a camel in! 
    The Mayor sent East, West, North and South,
    To offer the Piper, by word of mouth,
    Wherever it was man’s lot to find him,
    Silver and gold to his heart’s content,
    If he’d only return the way he went,
    And bring the children behind him. 
    But when they saw ’twas a lost endeavor,
    And Piper and dancers were gone forever,
    They made a decree that lawyers never
    Should think their records dated duly
    If, after the day of the month and year,
    These words did not as well appear: 
    “And so long after what happened here
    On the twenty-second of July,
    Thirteen hundred and seventy-six:” 
    And the better in memory to fix
    The place of the children’s last retreat,
    They called it the Pied Piper’s Street—­
    Where any one playing on pipe or tabor
    Was sure for the future to lose his labor. 
    Nor suffered they hostelry or tavern
    To shock with mirth a street so solemn;
    But opposite the place of the cavern
    They wrote the story on a column,
    And on the great church-window painted
    The same, to make the world acquainted
    How their children were stolen away,
    And there it stands to this very day. 
    And I must not omit to say
    That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
    Of alien people that ascribe
    The outlandish ways and dress
    On which their neighbors lay such stress,
    To their fathers and mothers having risen
    Out of some subterraneous prison
    Into which they were trepanned
    Long time ago in a mighty band
    Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
    But how or why, they don’t understand.

    XV.

    So, Willy, let me and you be wipers
    Of scores out with all men—­especially pipers! 
    And, whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice,
    If we’ve promised them aught, let us keep our promise!

A Girl Graduate.

BY CYNTHIA BARNARD.

I.

It was examination week at Mount Seward College, but most of the work was over, and the students were waiting in the usual fever of anxiety to learn the verdict on their papers, representing so much toil and pains.  Some of the girls were nearly as much concerned about their graduating gowns as about their diplomas, but as independence was in the air at Mount Seward, these rather frivolous girls were in the minority.  During term time most of the students wore the regulation cap and gown, and partly owing to the fact that Mount Seward was a college with traditions of plain living and high thinking behind it, and partly because the youngest and best-loved professor was a woman of rare and noble characteristics, a woman who had set her own stamp on her pupils, and furnished them an ideal, dress and fashion were secondary considerations here.  There were no low emulations at Mount Seward.