for years, and you also know that no one has come among us from thence for more than twelve moons. If I tell you what is on any particular spot there, will that be such a proof as will satisfy you?' All assented, and the lover added, 'Yes, for the thing cannot be.' 'Well, then, do some of you name the spot.'

This was declined, as none present had sufficient knowledge of the country.

'Then I must name the place myself. Six paces north from the spot where the second brook crosses the road through the Bois Franc, as you go from the Prairie Aux Fleches, stands a hollow oak tree. Send thither a runner, and in that tree he will find a blanket, a pair of leggins, and' He enumerated several other articles. Dahkinkeeah himself admitted, that if the things were found, as described, it would be sufficient evidence of the Medicine Man's right to ask and have whatever might seem good unto him.

A messenger was despatched with instructions, and in about a month returned with the goods, which he had found as directed. The guests were bidden to the wedding, and the young lady most concerned retired to the woods to weep (according to squaw custom,) and to take leave of her disconsolate lover.

This Medicine Man,' said the damsel, 'must indeed have a spirit for his comrade.'

If he has, replied the young man, it must be an evil spirit. I never heard that it did good to any one. It would be a good deed to

drive it away from our band.'

If it be an evil spirit,' said the lady, it is so much the more to be feared.'

Had my brother been afraid of evil men or spirits,' returned Dahkinkeeah, he would have been alive now. There are no cowards in my family, Wenoona.' They parted.

THE guests were assembled, the feast was spread, and the pipe was smoked. Nothing remained to complete the nuptial rites, but to carry the bride, forcibly, to the bridegroom's tent. This was done, and the Medicine Man followed.

He entered, and found the chief's daughter in darkness, but not in solitude. At her side stood her lover, with a sharp arrow drawn to the head. He remembered his brother's experiment, and would not trust to lead and gunpowder. At the moment the Medicine Man darkened the door, the shaft was buried in his bosom, to the very feather.

A horse stood near, tied to a tree. Dahkinkeeah sprang on, the damsel mounted en croupe, and before the Pezhootah Wechashtah's fate was discovered, they were far beyond the reach of pursuit.

The wounded man survived his wedding but three days, insisting to the last that he had fallen by the hand of the Evil One. According to his own directions, he was buried on horseback, (that is sitting on a living horse, which was ingraved with him,) on the top of a high bluff, commanding a long reach of the Shianne. This was done, that he might start fair in the other world, as became his quality, and that he might have the earliest view of his friends, the traders, coming up the river. No man passes that way, without being made acquainted with one land-mark-THE MEDICINE MAN'S GRAVE.

BY THE REV. FREDERICK BEASLEY, D. D., PROVOST OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

ALL philosophers have remarked, that the difficulty in the proof of a miracle arises out of its contrariety to the laws of nature, as ascertained by our experience and observation. That a dead man should be restored to life, is so contrary to all the facts which we witness in the course of our affairs, that it requires testimony strongly corroborated, to render such an event credible. Thus far is acknowledged by all intelligent men, and the advocates of religion think they meet with this satisfactory proof in reference to the Gospel miracles. At this point M. Hume interposes, and undertakes to show, that no human testimony, however corroborated, can authenticate a miracle. Let us see how he compasses his conclusion. His argument is this: All our knowledge of facts depends upon experience, and this is true, even of that derived from human testimony. An invariable experience amounts to certainty-a variable experience, to different degrees of probability. Our experience of the uniform laws of nature is invariable; that of the truth of testimony is variable, since men may deceive and falsify. In the case of miracles, therefore, which are violations of the laws of nature, there is an invariable experience, amounting to certainty against them, while there is in their favor only that probability which is founded upon our variable experience of the truth of testimony. Here, then, will ever be certainty in knowledge poised against probability, and the argument complete against miracles. This argument is ingenious, and deserves a more satisfactory answer than I have ever seen. The learned divines, who have adverted to it, as appears to me, have not rightly apprehended it, and could of consequence have furnished no complete refutation.

The whole force of this syllogism turns upon this single proposition: that our experience of the truth of human testimony always rests upon a variable experience, because the reports of witnesses are found to be false as well as true. This is an arrant sophism. Because men sometimes tell falsehood, does it follow that there is no testimony which amounts to certainty? M. Hume reasons as falsely as the sons would have done, at the death-bed of their father, in the fable, who was furnishing them an admonition to unity by his bundle of sticks, had they exclaimed, 'Father, behold these sticks may separately be easily broken, and therefore, when united, may also be broken.' The father would have refuted them, by an appeal to fact, and, as he did, have shown them, that when taken separately, they were very frangible, but when united, resisted his utmost strength. Like that of these sons, is M. Hume's reasoning, and it may as readily be refuted. Because the separate or ordinary testimony of men is fallible and deceptive, does it follow that there is no concurrence, or corroboration of testimony, which is irrefragable, and amounts to perfect certainty? When, since the creation of the world, was such a testimony as that of the Apostles and Evangelists found to be false? When this lesson is furnished by experience, it will be time enough to discredit the miracles of the Gospel, upon the ground that their authenticity rests upon a variable experience, or mere probability. As far as the experience of mankind has extended, in reference to a testimony thus corroborated, it may be said to be invariable in its favor,

THE HUMMING-BIRD.

INSECT bird of the glowing plume,
Fairy king of the world of bloom,
That drinkest honey and rich perfume

From thy vassals in bed and bower,
Say, did the rim of the rainbow fling
Those regal hues on thy glowing wing,
That gleam as thou hangest quivering

O'er the cup of yon dew-brimmed flower?

Rays from all gems of the rock and mine
Seem confused in that crest of thine,
As, a moment perched on yon trelliced vine,
Thou stayest thy rapid flight;

Safe support as the proudest tree

Would to the foot of the eagle be,

Doth yon slender tendril yield to thee,
Nor bends with its burthen light.

Thou art gone!thy form I do not see,
But I hear thy soothing minstrelsy,
Sweeter than ever the toiling bee

Out-poured from her mellow horn.'
Perchance thou piercest the jasmine's cell,
Or drawest, as from a golden well,
From the amber depths of the lilly's bell,
Bright tears of the dewy morn.

While kissing the blossoms of gold and blue,
Dost thou not pilfer each glorious hue,
And deeply thy tiny plumes imbue

With the colors from nature won?

But no, for Flora when gayest drest,
Hath not a tint in her varied vest

Like those which flash from thy jewelled breast,
In the blaze of the summer sun.

Lo! thy scented feast is forever spread;
When Northern flowrets are pale and dead,
Thou to a sunnier clime art fled,

Where their beauty forgets to fade.

When roses sleep on the bending stem,
And the diamond dews all their leaves begem,
Thou veilest thy head, and dost dream of them
Till riseth Night's curtain of shade,

Thou hast power from each blossoming thing
Drops of the richest balm to wring,
And thy life, if brief, is a joyous spring, -

A bright lapse 'neath a shadeless sky.
Not so with Man-when he thinks to dip
In the rose of Pleasure his glowing lip,
A viper stings as he stoops to sip,

And he turns away to sigh!

AN ACTOR'S ALLOQUY.

NUMBER FIVE.

FREDERICK REYNOLDS, the dramatist, in the preface to his comedy Begone Dull Care,' complains most bitterly of the difficulties attendant on dramatic composition. Reynolds has no right to complain: his pieces are pointless, vapid, and monotonous, and owe their celebrity solely to the talent employed in their personification. The same characters, plot, and incidents run through all his works; but Lewis, Munden, and Quick gave a current stamp to the crude mass, and made it pass as sterling ore.

But if Reynolds, with such powerful auxiliaries, and such unbounded luck, found the profession of a playwright full of annoyances and disagreeables, how must they effect a young, enthusiastic mind, unfriended and unknown, and with a share of that ill-fortune which generally attends the sons of genius in the onset of their career? Why have we so few first-rate dramatic writers at the present day? Why should not the lights of learning burn their votive lamps before Thalia and Melpomene, in whose trains follow every sister muse? Is it not as proud a thing to rank as classmate with Shakspeare, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Knowles, as with Milton, Cowper, Southey, and Coleridge? The amphibii of the tribes, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Byron, Scott, Moore, etc., are but so many instances in proof, that the drama would attract the attention of men of genius in a greater degree, but for the many distressing annoyances or difficulties,' as Reynolds calls them; and on these difficulties I shall take the liberty discursively to enlarge.

Successful dramatists have generally been as well paid as any other class of authors. Goldsmith made as much money by one of his come dies, She Stoops to Conquer,' as he did by his three Histories of England. Reynolds received from two to three thousand dollars each for the generality of his trashy articles. Knowles, who is so assiduously endeavoring to smother the effect of his fine writing by the badness of his acting, was offered nearly five thousand dollars for any play he chose to put into the hands of the Drury Lane manager. If these instances are now but few and far between, it is because the taste of the public has been vitiated by the stream of French vaudeville, melodrame, and opera, which has been for some years running into and defiling the pure waters of our old delight, even to undermining the banks and soiling the brightness of Avon's wholesome spring. The immense size of the patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, compelled the tragedian to rant and shout, and forced the comedian to buffoonery and caricature. Pieces combining scenery, dancing, and spectacle, were displayed to great advantage on their mammoth stages, and the legitimate drama fell into decay. Driven from these large and dreary buildings, the best actors found a refuge in nearly a score of smaller edifices, termed Minor Theatres, where the audience can both see and hear; and the first artistes of the present day are to be found enlisted under the banners of the enterprising managers of the Adelphi, Surrey, Olympic, and Victoria theatres. Most of these minor houses are licensed by the magistrates for an entertainment of music and dancing only; and when first established, the performances were compelled to be deeply imbued with such delights. The burletta' appeared, an order of petite drama, somewhat resembling the French vaudeville, but written in common-place jingling rhyme. If singing and dancing were not sufficiently frequent in the construction of the piece, a piano was tingled in the orchestra, while the actors were speaking the miserable nonsense the law allowed them to utter. To represent such entertainments, Elliston rented the Surrey Theatre; and to gratify his vanity and fondness for acting, he had Mrs. Centlivre's comedy of The Beaux Stratagem' metamorphosed into a burletta, and degraded himself by playing the character of Archer, one of the finest of his assumptions, in such doggrel as this:

'A footman sure am I,
In a genteel family.'

Shakspeare did not escape, but suffered at the hands of the common hangman, one Mr. Lawler, who executed these enormities. Elliston's Macbeth drew money at the patent theatres, therefore he played it in verse at the Surrey. I recollect the opening of the dagger soliloquy :

'Is this a dagger that I see before me?

My brains are dazzled by a whirlwind stormy:
The handle toward my hand-clutch thee I will;
I have thee not, but yet I see thee still.'

This is the sort of stuff monopoly endeavored to force upon the London public, scarcely twenty years ago. Some few years afterward, Booth played King Richard at the Coburg theatre, according to the text of the Drury Lane prompt-book; an information was laid against