"Bless my heart," said Mr. Pickwick, "what a dreadful thing! I beg your pardon, sir. Go on."

"Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time, he had got through the necklace-five-andtwenty beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl, and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her eyes out, at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn't say, didn't find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner-baked shoulder of mutton, and potatoes under it--the child, who wasn't hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was heard a noise like a small hail-storm. 'Don't do that, my boy,' said the father. I ain't a doin' nothing,' said the child. Well, don't do it again,' said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise began again, worse than ever. 'If you don't mind what I say, my boy,' said the father, 'you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper. He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. Why, it's in the child!' said the father, 'he's got the croup in the wrong place!' 'No, I haven't, father,' said the child beginning to cry, it's the necklace; I swallowed it, father.' The father caught the child up, and ran with him to the hospital: the beads in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. He's in the hospital now, and he makes so much noise when he walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for fear he should wake the patients."

"That's the most extraordinary case I ever heard of," said Mr. Pickwick, with an emphatic blow on the table. "Very singular things occur in our profession, I can assure you, sir," said Jack Hopkins.

"So I should imagine," replied Mr. Pickwick.

THE YEAR'S TWELVE CHILDREN.

JANUARY, wan and gray,

Like an old pilgrim by the way,

Watches the snow, and shivering sighs
As the wild curlew round him flies,
Or, huddled underneath a thorn,
Sits praying for the lingering morn.

FEBRUARY, bluff and cold,

O'er furrows striding scorns the cold,
And with his horses two abreast
Makes the keen plough do his behest.

Rough MARCH comes blustering down the road,
In his wrathy hand the oxen goad;
Or, with a rough and angry haste,
Scatters the seeds o'er the dark waste.

APRIL, a child, half tears, half smiles,
Trips full of little playful wiles;
And laughing, 'neath her rainbow hood,
Seeks the wild violets in the wood.
MAY, the bright maiden, singing goes,
To where the snowy hawthorn blows,
Watching the lambs leap in the dells,
List'ning the simple village bells.

JUNE, with the mower's scarlet face,
Moves o'er the clover field apace,
And fast his crescent scythe sweeps on
O'er spots from whence the lark has flown.

JULY, the farmer, happy fellow,
Laughs to see the corn grow yellow;

The heavy grain he tosses up

From his right hand as from a cup.

AUGUST, the reaper, cleaves his way,
Through golden waves at break of day;
Or in his wagon, piled with corn,
At sunset home is proudly borne.
SEPTEMBER, with his baying hound,
Leaps fence and pale at every bound,
And casts into the wind in scorn,
All cares and dangers from his born.

OCTOBER Comes, a woodman old,

Fenced with tough leather from the cold;
Round swings his sturdy axe, and lo!
A fir branch falls at every blow.
NOVEMBER COwers before the flame,
Blear crone, forgetting her own name!
Watching the blue smoke curling rise,
And broods upon old memories.

DECEMBER, fat and rosy, strides,

His old heart warm, well clothed his sides;
With kindly word for young and old,
The cheerier for the bracing cold,
Laughing a welcome, open flings
His doors, and as he goes he sings.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.-N. M. BASKETT, M. D.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is related by the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid.

Orpheus, a musician and poet of Grecian mythology, possessed the divine gift of moving animate and inanimate objects by the power of his song. Crazed by the loss of Eurydice he obtains permission to seek her in Pluto's realm, the God of the infernal regions, and brother of Jupiter and Saturn.

Here he witnesses the sufferings of the condemned. Sisyphus rolling a great stone up an endless height; Ixion bound to the wheel; Tantalus eternally cursed with hunger and thirst; the Furies; Cerberus, the great three-headed watchdog of hell; the Belides striving to carry water in leaky urns;-all types of the imaginary beings who suffer in the Grecian hell.

The result of Orpheus' mission is given in the following lines;

When gathering night

Shuts out the light

And hides the landscape from my sight,

Fond memory

Brings back to me

Legends of Greece and Italy.

I read once more

The stories o'er

That thrilled my heart in days of yore

Along my brain

They creep and chain

My mind, and thrill my heart again,—

That ancient time

Of love and crime,

When blood was hot as the summer's clime;

His plaintive cry

Pierces the sky

And thrills the hearts of gods on high.
And o'er his head

These words are shed,

"Go, seek her mid the shadowy dead;

Where horrors creep

Pluto doth keep

The souls of those who fall asleep."

He did not wait;

He passed the gate

Dividing men from future state;

Unawed by fear,

Through regions drear,

He passed, in love's fond search for her,

The one beloved,

So late removed

From scenes where they together roved.

Through regions vast

He boldly passed

Where death rode on each chilling blast;

Forms fierce and grim,

Though vague and dim,

Along his path frowned down on him.

Through these he came

Till light and flame

Revealed the misery and shame

Of Pluto's land.

On every hand

Stern shapes in awful grandeur stand;

To whom are given

The spirits driven

By judgment from the fields of heaven;
Those who, unblessed,

Find not their rest

Amid the "Islands of the Blessed."

Before him shone

Great Pluto's throne

Circled with fire,-a mount of stone.

There frowned the chief,

Nor pain, nor grief

Through him had ever known relief.
And filling air

Were spirits there

Who through all space his mandates bear.

A hateful brood

The Furies stood

Laughing in hellish solitude.

Hell's hideous hound

Bayed, and around

Through caves of night echoed the sound. Through all that drear

Vague vast, the ear

The sigh, the groan, the moan could hear. Faces of woe

Earth cannot show

And ne'er has shown, toiled there below. Tantalus there