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Five fair-browed, innocent young faces circling about the idolized wife, and baby Annie nestling in her cradle beside the hearth, playing with her waxen fingers and crowing softly. Death had stolen his household jewels; but recollection robbed the grave, and music's magic touch unsealed "memory's golden urn." "Oh! death in life, the days that are no more!"

The child was having its morning bath, and the two women were on their knees at either side of the tub, cackling and crowing like two old hens over one egg. "Aw, did you ever, now, Nancy? 'Deed, no; you never did see such a lil angel. Up-a-daisy!" "Cry I must, Grannie, when I see it looking so beautiful. Warm towels, you say?

Most of my watch were on the forecastle, sitting or lying in the sun, which shone very warm upon the decks; the hens under the long-boat were chattering briskly, and the cocks crowing, and the pigs grunting, with the comfort of the warmth. Suddenly, as the ship rose, I distinctly beheld something black out away upon the horizon, showing just under the foot of the foresail.

Seba Smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight"; or as "the spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby," where she sits "nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from its cage"; or as Margaret Fuller, "her large, gray eyes Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness"?

The expulsion of the devils is followed by a general massacre of all the cocks in the village or town, lest by their unseasonable crowing they should betray to the banished demons the direction they must take to return to their old homes.

Now who would have imagined that, with all the powers that were bestirring themselves to come to Flossy's education, it would have been a rosy, crowing baby, in the unconsciousness of a morning nap, that should have given her her first lesson in unselfishness? Yet he was the very one. It flashed over Flossy in an instant from some source.

The wind had blown down the plank, but the storm had passed over. "What do you think of that crowing?" the Yard Cock inquired of his hens and chickens. "It was a little rough the elegance was wanting." And hens and chickens stepped upon the muck-heap, and the Cock strutted to and fro on it like a knight.

Yet neither father nor mother thought him hard-hearted because he crowed and laughed in the middle of their troubles. On the contrary, his crowing and laughing were infectious. His little heart was so full of merriment that it could not hold it all, and it ran over into theirs.

Other sounds of rising day were coming through the mist that still hung over the land, shutting out the brightness which was marching from the eastward. The crowing of cocks, the neighing of horses, and the lowing of cattle resounded from hill to hill across the wide bottom-lands and up and down the river upon either hand.

A little before dawn the cocks roosting beneath the house awaken the household by their crowing and the flapping of their wings. The pigs begin to grunt and squeal, and the dogs begin to trot to and fro in the gallery.