CANTO III.

      “JACK and GILL went up the bill
      To fetch a pail of water;
      JACK fell down and broke his crown,
      And GILL came tumbling after.”

How many persons there are who read those lines without giving one moment’s thought to their hidden beauty.  Love, obedience, and devotion unto death, are here portrayed; and yet people will repeat the lines of the melancholy muse with a smile on their faces, and even teach it to their young children as a sort of joyful lyric.

My own infant-mind was tampered with in the same manner; and after I had committed the poem to memory I was proudly called up by my fond and doting parents to display my infantile acquirements before admiring visitors.  The result might have been foreknown.  All my infancy and youth passed away, and I never once perceived the hidden worth of these lines till I had tumbled down a hill myself, cracked my crown, and was laid up with it a week or more.  During that time I had leisure to muse on the fate of poor JACK.  When my mind expanded so as to take in all the sublimity of his devotion and death, my heart was filled with admiration and astonishment, and I resolved I would make one effort to rescue the memory of poor JACK and loving GILL from the oblivion it seemed to be falling into, in the greater admiration people gave to the musical style of the writer.

      “JACK and GILL went up the hill.”

Here you see the obedient, loving, long-suffering, put-upon drudge of his brothers and sisters-we will take the liberty of giving him a few of each as we are a little more generous than the author—­who was compelled (not the author, but JACK,) to do all the chores, fetch and carry, ’tend and wait, bear the heat and burden of the day, and be the JACK for all of them.  He was not dignified by the respectable title of JOHN, or JONATHAN, but was poor simple JACK.

Virtue will always be rewarded, however, and even freckle-faced, red-headed JACK had one friend, blue-eyed, tender-hearted GILL, who, seeing the unhesitating obedience he rendered to all, forthwith concluded that one so lone and sad could appreciate true friendship and understand the motives that prompted her to give, unsolicited, her gushing love.  So, when the good JACK started up the hill, loving GILL generously offered to accompany him.  Probably the other children looked out of the windows after them, and laughed, and jeered, and wondered whither they were going; but, observing the pail, concluded they were going

      “To fetch a pail of water,”

which they were willing JACK should do, as it would save them the possibility of being ordered to do it; not that there was a probability of such a command being given, but there was a slight danger that the thing might happen in case JACK was occupied otherwise when the water was needed.  But now that he had gone for it, they were all right, and rejoiced exceedingly thereat.