Excerpt from Every Saturday, Vol. 2: A Journal of Choice Reading, Selected From Foreign Current Literature; July to December, 1866

Then the utter silence of cool and peaceful night reigns undisturbed until about four o'clock, when the first sound is some matutinal cock, who crows first because he is proud of being first awake. After he has asserted his priority thus once or twice, anoth er deeper-toned rooster replies, and presently a doz en cocks are all in full song, and in different keys. In half an hour, you hear a man's voice; next, some feminine voluble remarks; then a latch is moved and clicks, the dog ives a morning bark, and a horse stamps his foot in the stable because the flies have aroused to breakfast on his tender skin. At length a pig grunts his gastric juice is fairly awake, the day is begun. And so the stream of life, thawed from its sleep, flows gently on again, and at length the full tide of village business 18 soon in agitation, with men's faces and women's quite as full of import as if the little place were the capital of the world. There is genuine poetry, it will be seen, in the com position of our captain, nautical though he be; he brings an eye for all he sees he tells us of the state ly herons and the burnished wild-fowl that haunt his 11 uid highway; he paints the kingfisher, often the so e fellow-creature that his eye encounters, perched on a twig within two inches of the water, and shaded from the summer sun by a single brier-leaf, so still and steady on his watch for fish, that a less close ob server might easily miss his back of azure and his breast of red. Nay, once, on the Moselle, when gaz ing down in the clear stream at some trout, our cap tain's keen eye marked a large stone, the upper part of a fine column at least ten feet from the surface. The capital showed it to be Ionic, and near it was an other broken pediment of huge dimensions, and a lit tle further on a pedestal of w ite marble; to account for the presence of which in such a place, no story could he glean.

It was on the Moselle that our recable voyager met with that one specimen of t e fair sex upon whom his address and manner failed to produce their favorable impression. He had left his boat, urged by the pangs of hunger, at a place where some la borers were at work on a milldam, and knocking at a cottage-door, saluted its aged occupant with the remark: Madame, I am hungry, and you are pre cisely the lady who can make me an omelette.

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