pretty golden tress of hair,
And a fine, stylish, shapely girl attached,
With pale, sweet face, and lips that with it matched.
He held her up till strong arms came from shore;
And soon she raised her eyes, and lived once more.

But Sam, poor boy, exhausted, choked, and beaten
With the prodigious dinner he had eaten,
Strangled and sank beneath the river's brim;
And no one seemed to care to dive for him.
Indeed, 'twas hard from the cold waves to win him,
With such a large part of the picnic in him;
And when at last he came out with "a haul,"
The school had one dead pupil, after all.

"POOR DRENCHED, DEAD HERO."

Poor drenched, dead hero!—in his tattered dress
Sam now was a society success.
They crowded round the dead boy as he lay,
And talked about him in a mournful way;
And from the teachers efforts did not lack
To resurrect and bring their scholar back:
They thronged about him, kept from him the air,
Founded him, pumped him, shook him up with care;
But useless was their toil, do all they could:
Sam and his dinner had gone on for good.

Nothing too nice that could be done and said
For this poor fellow—now that he was dead.
His casket was the finest and the best:
He went to his own funeral richly dressed.
They rigged him out in very pretty trim;
A rich, first-class procession followed him,
That reached the farthest distance up and down,
Of any often witnessed in that town;
And all the children, shedding tears half-hid,
Threw evergreens upon Sam's coffin lid.

Now when you're tempted scornfully to smile,
If a poor boy doesn't come up to your style,
Or shrink from him as though perhaps he'll bite you,
Because he has some points that don't delight you,
Or think, because your "set" can do without him,
There's nothing much desirable about him,
Just recollect that squeamishness is sham,
And drop a kind thought on poor Picnic Sam.

LESSON STORIES.

[Written for the Young People's Natural History Society.]

BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.

THE BABY ELEPHANT'S NUT-CRACKER.

I suppose every reader of Harper's Young People has seen an elephant eat pea-nuts. Of course every boy who goes to a show has pea-nuts in his pocket, because pea-nuts seem somehow to be a part of the show. Sometimes I think they are almost a part of the boy, for that matter. Well, having pea-nuts in one's pocket, and being inside the show, it is quite a matter of course to feed pea-nuts to the elephant. The fun lies in the ridiculous difference of size between the pea-nut and the elephant; it seems in a high degree absurd that so huge a creature should care for so small a thing to eat, and the wonder is that the elephant does not lose the nut somewhere in his great mouth. If he could get pea-nuts by the pint, instead of singly, the wonder would be less.

But how many boys and girls ever saw the baby elephant eat pea-nuts? He does it in a way entirely different from that of his father and mother. He does not like the shells, and so he cracks the nuts as carefully as any boy does, and his method of doing this is as curious as anything about him. I found out his trick by accident one day, when the baby elephant was a very little fellow indeed, weighing not more than five hundred pounds or so. I had taken three boys with me to the show, and of course each of us had a pocket full of pea-nuts. When we came to inspect the baby elephant, we offered him a nut. He took it with the fingers at the end of that wonderful trunk of his, but did not place it in his mouth, as his father or mother would have done. He laid it on the ground instead, and raising one of his great clumsy-looking feet, swept it backward so near the ground as to catch the nut between the foot and the hard earth, cracking it very neatly without crushing it. He knew enough not to step on the nut, and he used his foot so dextrously that a single stroke separated the kernel from the shell. Then he picked up the kernel with his trunk, put it in his mouth, and ate it with as keen a relish as if he had been a boy at recess.

This performance was so entertaining that we repeated it again and again. The elephant was willing enough, and before long all the boys and girls in that part of the show had gathered around us to see the strangely intelligent act. We boys (for I am always a boy when I am with boys at a show) fed Master Baby Elephant all the pea-nuts we had—there was a quart of them distributed among us—and when we got through, others took our places.

We had to go through that show without any pea-nuts to eat, but we had found out how the baby elephant manages to use his great clumsy-looking foot for a nut-cracker.

Now there are two or three things that puzzle me about this matter. I want to know how the baby elephant learned to crack his pea-nuts. Instinct? Well, that is a good word with which to pretend that we explain things that we do not understand, but it will scarcely answer in this case. In their wild state elephants have no boys to give them pea-nuts, and as a matter of fact they have no instinct about pea-nuts. The baby elephant did not learn this from the grown-up elephants, for they do not crack their nuts. I wonder if he imitated some boy whom he saw cracking a nut with his heel.

Another thing I am curious about. Will the baby elephant go on cracking his nuts in this way when he becomes a grown-up elephant? The grown-up elephants do nothing of the kind. If he does not continue the practice, and so become an exceptional fellow, but leaves it off after a while, at what age will he make the change, and why will he change? If he prefers cracked to uncracked nuts one day, why should he prefer the uncracked ones the next day? I wish I could work this puzzle out by going to the show every day, and feeding the baby elephant with pea-nuts until he grows up or changes his way of eating them. Perhaps the members of the Young People's Natural History Society through the country will keep up a series of observations until the matter is settled.

A POISONOUS FOOD-PLANT.

There is a shrub called manioc, or manihot, or cassava, which grows in South America, the West Indies, and Africa. It has a great bulbous root, and it is this root which is interesting. In that species of the plant which is most used the root has a bitter, acrid juice, which is deadly poisonous. The strange part of the matter is that both the root and the poisonous juice are used for food, and probably every boy or girl who reads this has eaten both.

The natives of hot countries dry