DEAR ME!

BY MARGARET EYTINGE.

A grasshopper lay in the garden one day,
Near a cabbage—I mean cabbage-rose—
And his eyes had no snap, and his legs they were stiff,
And turned very much up were his toes—
Dear me!
His funny, incurvated toes.

Along came a bird—Mrs. Sparrow her name—
And she paused and shook sadly her head,
And said, "Once at hops none could beat you, but now
Even I could—because you are dead—
Dear me!
Alas! you're doornailedly dead.

"But you shall not lie there unburied, for oft
Through the night have you sang loud and shrill,
And watched while I slept; so if nobody else
Will bury you, G. H., I will—
Dear me!
'Tis a sad thing to do, but I will."

Wide she opened her mouth—he was gone in a trice—
Then she quietly hopped out of sight;
And the cabbage-rose laughed till half its leaves dropped,
As I think with good reason it might—
Dear me!
With the very best reason it might.

GEORGE STEPHENSON.—THE RAILROAD.

Swift as is the steamer, the rail-car is doubly and trebly swift. Some trains in England run at the rate of seventy miles an hour. This is as fast as a balloon moves through the air, or a storm wind. It is the most rapid means of travel ever known among men, and it is only within the past thirty or forty years that the railroad has reached this rapid rate of speed. The engine used on the rail-car is smaller and more compact than the machinery of the steamer. Its piston, crank, and boiler must all be confined within a very limited space. It is the most wonderful and elegant of all the labors of the mechanic. Small, low, almost insignificant, it possesses a giant's strength, and may often be seen rushing with its long train of cars along the banks of the Hudson or over the New Jersey flats, swift as the wind.

Its inventor was Oliver Evans, an American, born at Newport, Delaware, in 1775. In 1804, he built a steam-engine that ran on the road a mile and a half to the Schuylkill River, where it was placed on a scow, and made to work its own passage to Philadelphia. But the man who first placed the locomotive on rails, and showed how it could be made to draw a train of cars, was George Stephenson, an Englishman, born in 1781. His father worked as fireman in a colliery. The son was brought up in poverty, destined to a life of labor. He was a tall, stout, healthy boy, industrious and sober. He had no education but what he gained at a night school. Rough, scanty fare and constant toil were the companions of his youth. But his mind was always active, and he was always inventing some rare machine. He was a fireman at fifteen; he learned to make shoes; he became a brakeman, and at last an engineer. He married at nineteen, but was so poor that when his father fell into distress, and he had paid his debts, he thought of emigrating to America, but was prevented by his want of money. Had he succeeded we might have had no railroads and engines for another century. He staid in England making clocks, engines, and various machines, and found employment in James Watt's factory. There he began to study the steam-engine. He lost no opportunity of study and improvement. His remarkable intellect was eager to get knowledge, and he became, when he was about forty, a well-known engineer, and the maker of steam-engines. As early as 1812 he had planned a railroad, and even built an imperfect locomotive, but many a