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"Tinant with all eternity can give;

With all that els smile

Who murders time, he crushes in the birth

A power ethereal"

YOUNG

A year had passed away "How paradoxical is the signification of the term!" How vast, e consider that each hour hastens the end of our pilgrile drop in the boundless deep of eternity! Oh Tireatest of all anomalies! Friend yet foe, "preserver and yet destroyer!" Whence art thou, great immemorial? When shall thy wondrous mechanism be dissolved? When shall the "pall of obscurity" descend on thy Herculean net-work? Voices of the past echo through thy deserted te thy bulwarks--Never, no never!

Season had followed season in rapid succession, and the last rays of an August sun illu for the pencil of a Claude Lorraine It was a far-off town, in a far-off state, yet who has gazed on thy loveliness, oh, San Antonio, can e'er forget thee! Thine was the sweetness of nature; no ed, with artistic skill, a statue here, a fountain there

The river wound like an azure girdle round the town; not confined by precipitous banks, but gliding along the surface, as it were, and reflecting, in its deep blue waters, the rustling tule which fringed thea majestic shadoart its azure bosohed low in the evening breeze

Far away to the north stretched a e, blue in the distance; to the south, the luxuriant valley of the streaard of the points of the coer have been placed blindfold in one of theht appearance of most of the houses would have forced him to declare that he had entered a tropical town of the far east

Many of the buildings were of ether with strips of hide, and thatched with the tule before mentioned There were scarce three plank-floors in the town; by far the greater nu composed of layers of pebbles, lime, and sand, rolled with a heavy piece of ti was found necessary, however, to keep down the dust, produced by constant friction

The wealthy inhabitants built of sun-dried bricks, overcast with a kind of stucco Yet, unfortunately, the plastering art died with the Montezuination failed to convert this rough coating into the "silver sheen" which so dazzled Cortes's little band The reader will exclaim, "I can fancy no beauty from so prosy a description Thatched roofs and dirt floors, how absurd!"