We hadn't a friend in England-we'd only ourselves to please

And we jumped at the chance of trying our fortune across

the seas.

We went on a sailing vessel, and the journey was long and rough:

We hadn't been out a fortnight before we had had enough.

But use is a second nature, and we'd got not to mind a storm,
When misery came upon us,-came in a hideous form.
My poor little wife fell ailing, grew worse, and at last so bad
That the doctor said she was dying,-I thought 'twould have
sent me mad,-

Dying where leagues of billows seemed to shriek for their prey, And the nearest land was hundreds-aye, thousands-of miles away.

She raved one night in a fever, and the next lay still as death,

So still I'd to bend and listen for the faintest sign of breath. She seemed in a sleep, and sleeping, with a smile on her thin, wan face,

She passed away one morning, while I prayed to the throne of grace.

I knelt in the little cabin, and prayer after prayer I said, Till the surgeon came and told me it was useless-my wife was dead!

Dead! I wouldn't believe it. They forced me away that night, For I raved in my wild despairing, the shock sent me mad outright.

I was shut in the farthest cabin, and I beat my head on the side,

And all day long in my madness, "They've murdered her!"

I cried.

They locked me away from my fellows,-put me in cruel

chains,

It seems I had seized a weapon to beat out the surgeon's

brains.

I cried in my wild, mad fury, that he was a devil sent

To gloat o'er the frenzied anguish with which my heart was

rent.

I spent that night with the irons heavy upon my wrists, And my wife lay dead quite near me. I beat with my fettered fists,

Beat at my prison panels, and then-O God!-and then

I heard the shrieks of women and the tramp of hurrying

men.

I heard the cry, "Ship a-fire!" caught up by a hundred

throats,

And over the roar the captain shouting to lower the boats; Then cry upon cry, and curses, and the crackle of burning wood,

And the place grew hot as a furnace, I could feel it where I stood.

I beat at the door and shouted, but never a sound came back,

And the timbers above me started, till right through a yawning crack

I could see the flames shoot upward, seizing on mast and sail,

Fanned in their burning fury by the breath of the howling gale.

I dashed at the door in fury, shrieking, "I will not die!
Die in this burning prison !"-but I caught no answering cry.
Then, suddenly, right upon me, the flames crept up with a

roar,

And their fiery tongues shot forward, cracking my prison door.

I was free-with the heavy iron door dragging me down to death;

I fought my way to the cabin, choked with the burning

breath

Of the flames that danced around me like man-mocking fiends at play,

And then-O God! I can see it, and shall to my dying day.

There lay my Nell as they'd left her, dead in her berth that night;

The flames flung a smile on her features,—a horrible, lurid light.

God knows how I reached and touched her, but I found myself by her side;

I thought she was living a moment, I forgot that my Nell had died.

In the shock of those awful seconds reason came back to my brain;

I heard a sound as of breathing, and then a low cry of pain; Oh, was there mercy in heaven? Was there a God in the

skies?

The dead woman's lips were moving, the dead woman opened her eyes.

I cursed like a madman raving-I cried to her, "Nell! my Nell!"

They had left us alone and helpless, alone in that burning hell,

They had left us alone to perish-forgotten me living-and she

Had been left for the fire to bear her to heaven, instead of the sea.

I clutched at her, roused her shrieking, the stupor was on her still;

I seized her in spite of my fetters,-fear gave a giant's will. God knows how I did it, but blindly I fought through the flames and the wreck

Up-up to the air, and brought her safe to the untouched deck.

We'd a moment of life together, a moment of life, the time For one last word to each other,-'twas a moment supreme, sublime.

From the trance we'd for death mistaken, the heat had brought her to life,

And I was fettered and helpless, so we lay there, husband and wife!

It was but a moment, but ages seemed to have passed

away,

When a shout came over the water, and I looked, and lo, there lay,

Right away from the vessel, a boat that was standing by; They had seen our forms on the vessel, as the flames lit up the sky.

I shouted a prayer to Heaven, then called to my wife, and she

Tore with new strength at my fetters-God helped her, and I was free;

Then over the burning bulwarks we leaped for one chance

of life.

Did they save us? Well, here I am, sir, and yonder's my dear old wife.

We were out in the boat till daylight, when a great ship passing by

Took us on board, and at Melbourne landed us by and by. We've played many parts in dramas since we went on that famous trip,

But ne'er such a scene together as we had on the burning ship!

DOMESTIC ECONOMY.

A Munson-street man, being told that there were several pieces of tin which needed mending, conceived the idea of getting the iron and solder and doing the mending himself. His wife, filled with vague forebodings perhaps, said that the expense was such a trifle that it would hardly pay to do it one's self, to which he responded: "I'll admit that, in this one instance, it would not pay, but there is something in want of repair every little while, and if I have the tools here for fixing it we are saved just so much expense right along. It may not be much in the course of a year, but every little helps, and in time the total amounts to a nice little lump. We don't want the Astors lugging off all the money in the country."

He got the iron, one dollar and fifty cents' worth of solder and ten cents' worth of rosin. He came home with these things and went into the kitchen, looking so proud and happy that his wife would have been glad he got them were it not for an overpowering dread of an impending muss. He called for the articles needing repair. His wife brought out a pan.

"Where's the rest? Bring 'em all out, an' let me make one job of 'em while I'm about it."

He got them all and seemed to be disappointed that there were no more of them. He pushed the iron into the fire, got a milk pan inverted on his knees, and with the solder in his hand, waited for the right heat.

"That iron only cost a dollar, and it'll never wear out, and there's enough solder in this piece to do twenty-five dollars' worth of mending," he explained to his wife.

Pretty soon the iron was at right heat, he judged. He rubbed the rosin about the hole which was to be repaired, and held the stick of solder over it, and carefully applied the iron. It was an intensely interesting moment. His wife watched him with feverish interest. He said, speaking laboriously, as he applied the iron:

"The only-thing-I-regret-about-it-is-that-I-didn't-think

of-getting-this-before-we"

Then ascended through that ceiling, and up into the very vault of heaven, the awfullest yell that woman ever heard, and the same instant the soldering iron flew across the stove, the pan went clattering across the floor, and the bar of solder struck the wall with such force as to smash through both the plaster and lath. And before her horrified gaze danced her husband in an ecstasy of agony, sobbing, screaming and holding on to his left leg as desperately as if it were made of gold and studded with diamonds.

"Get the camphor, why don't you?" he yelled. "Send for the doctor. Oh, oh, I'm a dead man," he shouted. Just then his gaze rested on the soldering iron. In an instant he caught it up and hurled it through the window, without the preliminary of raising the sash.

It was some little time before the thoroughly frightened and confused woman learned that some of the molten solder had run through the hole in the pan and on his leg, although she knew from the first that something of an unusual nature had occurred. She didn't send for the doctor. She made and applied the poultices herself to save expense. She said:

66

'We don't want the Astors lugging off all the money in the country."

-Danbury News.

PRINCE'S FEATHER.-MARY E. BRADLEY.

I sat at work one summer day,

It was breezy August weather,

And my little boy ran in from his play,
With a bright red prince's feather.
"Make me a cocked-hat, mother dear,"
He cried, "and put this in it;

Dick and Charlie are coming here,
And I want it done in a minute!"