Nature is waking!  From a wreath of snow,
    Close by the garden walls, the snowdrop springs;
  And the air rings with tender melodies,
    Where thro’ the dark firs flash the bluebird’s wings.

  A few days hence, and o’er the distant hills
    A tender robe of verdure shall be spread,
  And life in myriad forms be manifest,
    Where all seemed desolate, and dark, and dead.

  E’en now, upon the sunny woodland slopes,
    The fair vanessa flits with downy wing;
  And in the marshes, with the night’s approach,
    The merry hylas in full chorus sing.

  Patience and faith, all will be bright again. 
    Take from the present, for the future hours,
  The tendered promise.  In the storm and rain,
    Remember suns shine brighter for the showers.

  To us, my countrymen, the lesson comes;
    Our night of winter dawns in brightest day;
  The storm is passing, and the rising sun
    Dispels our doubts, drives cloudy fears away.

  The sun of freedom, veiled in clouds too long,
    Sheds o’er our land its rays of quickening life;
  And liberty, our starry banner, waves,
    Proclaiming freedom mid the battle’s strife.

* * * * *

STRIKING TURPENTINE.

Not a bad story that of the physician, who, vaccinating several medical students, ‘performed the ceremony’ for a North Carolinian from the pitch, tar and turpentine districts.  The lancet entering the latter’s arm a little too deep, owing to the Corn-cracker jerking his arm through nervousness, one of the medical students called out,—­

’Take care there, doctor, if you don’t look out you’ll strike turpentine.’

The Corn-cracker—­full of spirit—­wanted to fight.

We should have handed this anecdote over to X., who travels through the Pines, that he might pronounce on its authenticity.  The following, however, we know to be true—­on the word of a very spirituelle dame, long resident in the Old North State.  When the present war first sent its murmurs over the South, an old bushman earnestly denied that it ‘would ruin everything.’  ‘Kin it stop the turpentime from running?’ he triumphantly cried.  ’In course not.  Then what difference kin it make to the country?’

* * * * *

The following sketch, ‘Hiving the Bees and what came of it,’ from a valued friend and correspondent in New Haven, is a humorous and truthful picture of the old-fashioned rural ‘discipline’ once so general and now so rapidly becoming a thing of the past:—­

    HIVING BEES AND WHAT CAME OF IT.