young Astyanax at sight of his father's flashing crest. As if in this wind storm of March a certain electricity were passing from earth to heaven through the pines and calling them to life.
We are interested in the phenomena of nature mainly as children are, or as we are in games of chance. They are more or less exciting. Our appetite for novelty is insatiable. We do not attend to ordinary things, though they are most important, but to extraordinary ones. While it is only moderately hot, or cold, or wet or dry, nobody attends to it, but when nature goes to an extreme in any of these directions we are all on the alert with excitement.Not that we care about the philosophy or the effects of the phenomenon. E. g., when I went to Boston in the early train the coldest morning of last winter, two topics seemingly occupied the attention of the passengers, Morphy's chess victories, and nature's victorious cold that morning. The inhabitants of various towns were comparing notes, and that one whose door opened upon a greater degree of cold than any of his neighbors' doors, chuckled not a little. Nearly every one I met asked me almost before the salutations were over "How the glass stood" at my house or in my town, the Librarian of the college, the Register of Deeds at
