where he condenses them in the Index. Better pamphlet-fighting has not been seen since Bentley. The hardship of the matter is, that people commonly are more ready to believe slander than to trouble themselves with reading a refutation of it.

It gave us particular satisfaction to see that the American Association for the Advancement of Science had shown its sense of the merits of the quarrel by electing Dr. Gould vice-president of their body.

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Modern Philology; its Discoveries, History, and Influence, Tabular Views, and an Index. By Benjamin W. Dwight. New York. A. S. Barnes & Burr. 8vo. pp. 354. $1.75.

The Mississippi Bubble; a Memoir of John Law. By Adolphe Thiers, Author of "The Consulate and Empire." To which are added Authentic Accounts of the Darien Expedition and the South Sea Scheme. Translated and edited by Frank S. Fiske. New York. W. A. Townsend & Co. 12mo. pp. 338. $1.00. The Use and Abuse of Tobacco. By John Lizar. From the Eighth Edinburgh Edition. Philadelphia. Lindsay & Blakiston. pp. 136. 50 cts.

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My Third Book. A Collection of Tales. By Louise Chandler Moulton. New York. Harper & Brothers. 12mo. pp. 434. $1.00.

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A Dictionary of Love; containing a Definition of all the Terms used in the History of the Tender Passion. By Theocritus, Junior. New York. Dick & Fitzgerald. 12mo. pp. 275. $1.00.

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The Rectory of Moreland; or, My Duty. Boston. J. E. Tilton & Co. 12mo. pp. 339. $1.00.

British Novelists and their Styles; being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction. By David Masson, M. A., Professor of English Literature, University College, London. Author of "The Life and Times of John Milton." Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 312. 75 cts.

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Out of the Depths; the Story of a Woman's Life. New York. W. A. Townsend & Co. 12mo. pp. 370. $1.00.

A Commentary, Explanatory, Doctrinal, and Practical, on the Epistle to the Ephesians. By R. E. Pattison, D. D., late President of Waterville College. Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 244. Rhymes of Twenty Years. By Henry Morford. New York. H. Dexter & Co. 12mo. pp. 214. $1.00.

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Essays, Lectures, etc., upon Select Topics in Revealed Theology. By Nathaniel W. Taylor, D. D., late Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology in Yale College. New York.

Clark, Austin, & Smith. 8vo. pp. 425.

$1.50.

The Character and Portraits of Washington. By H. T. Tuckerman. Illustrated with all the Prominent Portraits, Proofs on India Paper, and a Fine Plate of the Washington Monument, by Crawford, at Richmond, Va., from a Photograph of a Drawing, by Ehninger. New York. G. P. Putnam. 4to. $6.00.

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The Poetical Works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. New and enlarged Edition. 2 vols. New York. Redfield. 12mo. pp. 310, 304. $2.00.

IN the winter of 1856, the outlook of the present writer, known somewhere as Samuel Absalom, became exceedingly troubled, and indeed scarcely respectable. As gold-digger in California, Fortune had looked upon him unkindly, and he was grown to be one of the indifferent, ragged children of the earth. Those who came behind him might read as they ran, stamped on canvas once white, "Stockton Mills. Self-Rising Flour!"— the well-known label in California, at that day, of greatest embarrassment.

One morning, after sleeping out the night in the streets of Oroville, he got up, and read these words, or some like them, in the village newspaper:-"The heavy frost which fell last night brings with it at least one source of congratulation for our citizens. Soon the crowd of vagrant street-sleepers, which infests our town, will be forced to go forth and work for warmer quarters. It has throughout this summer been the ever-present nuisance and eyesore of our otherwise beautiful and romantic moonlit nights." "Listen to this scoundrel!" said he;" how he can insult an unfortunate man! Makes his own living braying, lying, and flinging dirt, and spits upon us sad devils who fail to do it in an honest manner! Ah, the VOL. IV. 41

times are changing in California! Once, no one knew but this battered hat I sit under might partially cover the head of a nobleman or man of honor; but men begin to show their quality by the outside, as they do elsewhere in the world, and are judged and spoken to accordingly. I will shake California dust from my feet, and be gone!"

In this mood, I thought of General Walker, down there in Nicaragua, striving to regenerate the God-forsaken Spanish Americans. "I will go down and assist General Walker," said I. So next morning found me on my way to San Francisco, with a roll of blankets on my shoulder and some small pieces of money in my pocket. Arrived in the city, I sought out General Walker's agent, one Crittenden by name, a respectable, honest-looking man, and obtained from him the promise of two hundred and fifty acres of Nicaraguan land and twentyfive dollars per month for service in the army of General Walker, and also a steerage-ticket of free passage to the port of San Juan del Norte by one of the steamers of the Nicaragua Transit Line. Of my voyage down I do not intend to speak; several unpublished sensations might have been picked up in that steerage crowd of

bog Irish, low Dutch, New Yorkers, and California savages of every tribe, returning home in red flannel shirts and boots of cowhide large; but my business is not with them, and I say only that after a brief and prosperous voyage we anchored early one morning in the harbor of San Juan del Sur, at that time part of the dominions of General Walker.

Whilst the great crowd of home-bound passengers, with infinite din and shouting, are bustling down the gangways toward the shore, our little party of twenty or thirty Central American regenerators assemble on the ship's bow, and answer to our names as read out by a small, mild-featured man, whom at a glance I should have thought no filibuster. It seems he was our captain pro tem., and bore recommendations from the agent at San Francisco to a commission in the Nicaraguan service. He had made the voyage on the cabin side of the ship, and I saw him now for the first time. His looks betokened no fire-eating soul; but your brave man has not necessarily a truculent countenance; and I was, indeed, thankful for the prospect of fighting under an honest man and no cutthroat outwardly.

We followed this our chief down the vessel's side to the shore, catching a glimpse of Fate as we passed over the old hulk in our course. It was one of Walker's soldiers in the last stage of fe

ver.

His skin was as yellow and glazed as parchment, and seemed drawn over a mere fleshless skeleton. Poor man! he lay there watching the noisy passengers descend from the ship. "His eyes are with his heart, and that is far away," carried back by the bustling scene to another shore, the goal of that passing crowd, never more to gladden his dim eye. The unrelenting grasp of death was on him; and even now, perhaps, the waves are rolling his bleaching bones to and fro on that distant beach. I say that this dismal omen damped the spirit of us all. But nothing in this world can long dishearten the brave; we soon grow lighter, and, marching along in the

crowd, blackguard effectively the witty or witless dogs that crack jokes at us and forebode hard fate ahead of us.

When we came into the town of San Juan, we found there a general and colonel of the filibuster army, and reported ourselves forthwith as a party of recruits just arrived and at their service. The general was altogether absorbed hobnobbing with the old friends whom he had discovered in the passenger crowd, and would not listen to us; but the colonel pointed out an empty building, and told us to drop our luggage there, and amuse ourselves until we heard further from him.

This town of San Juan del Sur is entirely the creation of the Nicaragua Transit Company, and is the Pacific terminus of the Isthmus portage-road. It consisted of half a dozen board hotels, and a litter of native grass-thatched huts, and lay at the foot of a high, woody spur, which curves out into the sea and forms the southern rim of a beautiful little harbor, completed by another less elevated point jutting out on the north. The country inland is entirely shut out by a dense forest, into which the Transit road plunges and is immediately lost. Whilst I was walking about this sequestered place, now all alive with the California passengers, a party of Walker's cavalry came riding in from the interior, and at once drew all eyes upon them. They were mounted on horses or mules of every color, shape, and size,― themselves yellow-faced, ragged, and dirty; nevertheless, their deadly garniture, rifles, revolvers, and bowieknives, and their fierce and shaggy looks, kept them from being laughed at. They dismounted and tied their beasts in front of one of the hotels, and then dispersed about the town in search of whatever was refreshing.

From these men we learned that General Walker's prospects were never so fair as now. His enemies, they said, worn out and ready to despair, had drawn off to Granada, where they now lay irresolute and quarrelling amongst themselves. General Walker held the Transit route

from ocean to ocean, and a single filibuster might walk all through the country without danger. This news was not satisfactory to all of us. A small, bright-eyed youth, from the California theatre, who had been noted on the voyage down for his loud talking, declared that for his part he had come to Nicaragua to fight, and, now that there was no more fighting to be done, he would pass through and take ship for the United States. The filibusters smiled at each other grimly, and told him, if that was the difficulty, he had better not go, for Walker intended driving the enemy out of Granada shortly, and he would there find all that he wanted. And well it was that they satisfied him to stay; for on that day this youth went without his dinner because he had no cent in his pocket to buy it, and ship-captains refuse to assist all such as lie under that unhappy cloud. Oh, thou light-bodied son of Thespis! Where art thou now? I saw thee last, with heavy musket on thy shoulder, marching wearily to the assault of San Jorge. Did the vultures tear thee there? Or art thou still somewhere amongst men, blowing the great deeds wrought by thy feathery arm that day? I hope thou wast not left on that dismal shore!

Late in the afternoon, when the Californians had departed for Virgin Bay, where they were to embark on Lake Nicaragua, our party of recruits took the road for the same place, on our way to Rivas, the head-quarters of the filibuster army. A short distance from the Pacific, we began the ascent of the Cordillera chain, not very formidable here, but broken into spurs and irregular ridges, with deep umbrageous hollows, and little streams of clear water winding noisily among them. Coming down from this rugged high ground, we entered a wide plain, stretching away to Lake Nicaragua, out of whose waters we saw the blue cones of Ometepec and Madeira lifting their heads up above all, and capped with clouds. Before we had crossed the twelve miles between ocean and lake, and entered Virgin Bay, it was dark, and

the Californians were already hurrying aboard a little steamer, which puffed and whistled at the wharf. In half an hour afterwards they were steaming across the lake for the entrance or head of the Rio San Juan.

It was here that we ate our first meal at the expense of General Walker, or, rather, at the expense of an innkeeper of Virgin Bay; for he, our entertainer, looked upon us as little better than sorners, declaring he had already fed filibusters to the value of six thousand dollars, without other return than General Walker's promise to pay, which he professed to esteem but slightly or not at all. These hotel-keepers of Virgin Bay and San Juan, who came in the wake of the Transit Company, and made their money by the California passengers, seemed to be a good deal worried by General Walker. Their business was no longer profitable, and their families lived in a state of continual alarm between the combatants; yet they were not allowed the alternative of flight; for it was General Walker's policy, wise or unwise, when he had got a man into Nicaragua who was useful to him, to keep him there; and the last Transit Company, being entirely in his interest, carried no emigrant out of the Isthmus unfurnished with a passport from President Walker himself.

That night we slept in an empty building, and were aroused next morning at daybreak, and ordered to continue our march to Rivas, which was said to lie nine miles to the north of us. We set forward, grumbling sorely for lack of breakfast, and stiff from our twelve-miles' march of the evening before. Our path led us sometimes under the deep shades of a tangled forest, sometimes along the open lake-beach, on which the waves rolled with almost the swell of an ocean surf. A few miles short of Rivas we emerged from the ragged forest, and entered a beautiful, cultivated country, through which we passed along green lanes fringed with broad-leaved plantains, bending oranges, tufted palms, and all tropical fruit-trees,-a very Nicaraguan