the king's palace and the tent of the warrior. We remember the consternation created at a performance of Industrious Fleas, at a royal palace, on the Continent. The king and his infirm queen were present, and a small circle of courtiers and ladies crowded round the white marble table, on which the poor little creatures were performing their waltz. A miniature arena had been formed of cardboard on the top of a musical box; at one end sat the orchestra, composed of fleas, each tied to his seat, and having a paper in the shape and color of some musical instrument attached to his feet. Two little creatures were fastened to opposite ends of a short piece of gold-paper, so as to turn their backs to each other, and set down in the middle of the arena. The box was wound up, and commenced to play; the performers, feeling the jarring of the box, or, if you would believe the owner, hearing the music, waved their hands wildly about, as if engaged in an elaborate piece of music, and the two dancers began to whirl round and round as fast as their legs would carry them. The king, a man of great humor, laughed heartily, and asked for a repetition; but behold! when all was arranged again, one of the waltzers had escaped. Thereupon was great consternation and horror; the fugitive must be recaptured, both to enable the performer to obey the royal mandate, and to relieve the unlucky victim. The trainer bares his arm, and sure enough, the fugitive cannot resist the temptation of an early meal. Before he has well commenced, however, he is seized and put into his place. New laughter and universal amusement! All crowd around to see the waltz once more; when suddenly the little rebel kicks, and performs the wildest antics, and the embarrassed trainer has to confess that the captive is not his old pupil-but a new-comer! The king laughed louder than ever, but the performance was ended, and the fee, upon which the unlucky owner had counted, fell far below his expectations: The animal is not generally so easily captured; his marvellous agility, his

almost magic power of disappearance at the critical moment, are no doubt known to all our readers-from books-and his skill in escaping is graphically expressed in the definition of the Frenchman, who heard a flea mentioned, and exclaimed: "Ah, ze flea, ze leetle animal; you catch him, you put ze finger upon him, and he is not zere!" No wonder that the incessant persecution which he has to endure should, at the end of so many generations, have developed these faculties in the highest degree. If Mr. Darwin's theory is true, that the crane acquired its long neck and long legs by persevering search after fish, the flea may well claim his magnificent legs as the result of the work of ages. It is true, they are lean, and we cannot help admiring the marvellous skill of the tailor whom Goethe has immortalized in his famous song:

"There was once a king
Who had a big flea,
He loved him not a little,
As much as his son.

Then called he his tailor,

The tailor came in ;

There, measure him for a suit,

And measure him for breeches!"

Those happy days, we fear, are gone; and although he continues, as in the poem, to plague high and low, he no longer can boast that

"In velvet and in silk
He was dressed superbly,
Had ribbons on his coat,
Had crosses in plenty,
Was minister at once,
And had a diamond star,
Then all his brothers also

Were great and high at court."

Now he is, like Cain, a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and every one that findeth him slayeth him. And why? Simply, because he does not allow his sword to become rusty, and makes good use of the weapon which he has received from Nature for his support and his defence. Fortunately, there is at least one nation upon eartha branch of the coming masters of the earth, the Lithuanians-who seem to have a fairer appreciation of the little gentleman in black than other nations boasting of a higher civilization. Their favorite national ballad sings thus:

• "The wolf, the little wolf, The son of the forest, Steps from the forest, Out on the meadow, Tears the young calf, Tears the little foalThat is his labor.

"The fox, the little fox, The son of the forest, Glides from the forest Out to the farm-yard, Seizes the gosling, Murders the pulletThat is his labor.

"The dog, the little dog,
The guardian of the house,
Barks, and bites

The heel of the robber,
Frightens the thieves,
Drives away vagrants-
That is his labor.

"The flea, the little flea,
The thirsty, lusting flea,
Drinks the sweet blood;
At break of day,

He wakes the maid-servants
To milk the rich cows-
That is his labor.

"The bee, the little bee,
The child of the meadow,
Hums in the heather,
Stingeth the finger,
The ear, and the face,
Gives us sweet honey-
That is her labor.

"Oh man, oh little man!
Look at the bee!

Do you sting like her
The heart, the little heart?
Give then sweet comfort

To the sore, wounded heart-
That is thy labor."

Nor is this the only race of men who value his services and honorably place him by the side of the faithful dog and the industrious bee; for it is well known that pious Hindoos believe him to hold the soul of great and good men, and build him large hospitals, where he is nursed throughout life.

The interesting family of our little gentleman has its distinct branches in various parts of the globe, each with its peculiar characteristics. The friend of our blood is, of course, found in all zones and in all portions of the earth; for wherever man has penetrated, there his faithful companion has followed him, unmindful of climate and danger.

ease.

Our own particular friend, however, is strictly limited to the lands above the thirty-first degree of northern latitude; his cousins living beyond are rude, uncivilized barbarians. They increase in size as they approach the tropics; and even Italy can already boast, if we may believe the well-known fresco on the white-washed inn of Bellinzona, of a race, four of whom are strong enough to carry away a stout Englishman bodily, in order to suck his blood at their Farther south they boast of perfect hosts, and the observing travellers who may have looked down the streets of Rome or Naples on a hot day in July, when they glow and gleam in the steaming heat, will have noticed, with mixed feelings of wonder and terror, how the very dust seems to be enlivened, and everywhere bold leaps of glistening grains of black announce the perpetual carnival held there by an excitable race. As they come still nearer to the equator, they not only grow to gigantic proportions, but are filled with true southern passion. While the ordinary flea is called only the Irritating in catalogues of science, the chica of Surinam is justly named the Piercing. Her sword is almost as long as her body, and yet she wields it only to provide a home for her diminutive children. Lurking in cotton plantations, in the hot sands, she prepares herself for the dread sacrifice, by which alone she can hope to rear a fainily: espying a careless, barefooted traveller, she pounces upon him, digs her weapons deep into his skin, and without stopping to enjoy the blood of her victim, she gives birth to a number of young. But in giving life she devotes herself to death; her children feed first upon her own substance, and then begin to attack the surrounding walls of flesh and blood. It is now only that the unlucky victim becomes aware of the strange guests he has unwittingly received; and quickly a native woman is called in, who, with dainty finger and a pointed needle, removes the intruders; then she puts some tobacco-ashes on the wound, and it heals quickly, “more quickly, often," says a quaint traveller,

"than the wound caused by the coalblack eyes of the fair surgeon."

Another cousin lives high up amid the eternal snows of Alpine regions, and bears the name of the great naturalist, not unknown in our country, who first discovered him in his researchesDessor. If the little gentleman of the tropics is insatiable in his bloodthirstiness, his icy kinsman, on the contrary, is the most abstemious of his race, for he lives where human life is impossible, and perhaps never tastes blood. The invisible remains of organic substances, which the waters of glaciers bring down from mysterious sources, or receive at times through the agency of winds and storms, are all the provision Nature makes for his support; and yet he thrives on the frugal diet so well, that all the crevices of the great blocks of ice are black with the myriads there assembled. If his table is poorly provided, he enjoys, on the other hand, the advantages of a powerful spring, which he alone boasts of among all his kindred, and by means of which he surpasses in his leaps the greatest achievements of his less-favored relations. Thus he lives, happy and contented, on the very confines of animal life, where deadly cold prevents all other existences. Often and often he is frozen up in masses of ice, and careful observers have noticed that he may remain thus frozen for a number of days, and still revives under the influence of slowlyreturning warmth, to begin his merry life anew. Favored with an iron constitution, he endures with like philosophy the intense heat of the summer-sun, reflected from the dazzling snow and ice, and thus proves once more the high capacity and rare endowments of the nearest friend of man.

That he has such talents he proves by his docility and the readiness with which he submits to good training. The elephant, giant of brutes, is not more willing to work nor more intelligent in doing his duty than the dwarf of dwarfs, the little gentleman in black. He is no sooner found to be strong enough to do service, than he begins

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his course of training and discipline, and although he knows full well that, once entered, he is doomed to hard labor for life, he determines to make the best of it, and to learn to do his duty. The hardest lesson seems to be to him, as to many among us, that what he thinks he can do better than others, is the very first thing he must learn to forget. Nature has made him a leaper like no other on earth; man binds him to a chain, golden though it be, and teaches him, like a child, to walk and not to spring. Poor little fellow! Behold him fastened to a bit of card-board, which works on a pin like a pivot; he gives a tremendous spring forward, but all that he achieves is to advance in a circle, hampered and hurt, moreover, by the weight of the card. Like a wise man, he gives it up after a few frantic efforts; and soon he walks as steadily and as demurely as the old horse in the mill, who also once loved to kick up his heels in a fragrant meadow. short fortnight generally suffices to teach him this lesson, and then he is ready to engage in other pursuits. Some are put into harness to draw Queen Mab's gilt coach, and soon they learn to pull the heavy, lumbering structure at a pretty good pace: no garden-snail could hope to overtake them. Their virtue is strength, for they are only four to drag the weight along, and yet every pane in the coach weighs more than a hundred of the tiny black horses. Others are drilled into fair soldiers, and although the double-quick is apt to lead to an occasional pirouette or entrechat, well known to the stage, but a horror in the eyes of the drill-sergeant, they march along pretty well, and would make no unfair Chasseur's d'Afrique. Still others join the artillery. The bravest among them is tightly secured to a tiny post before a tiny cannon, and to his foot is fastened the end of a feather tipped with detonating powder. At the proper time the exhibitor presses this end, with his wand, upon the touch-hole of the cannon, and off it goes with a sharp report, which makes the lookers-on jump

EARLY in the month of June, 1866, near the termination of a dreary and trying winter's sojourn, the writer of this article stood in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, on the route which was soon to be traversed by that great connecting chain of the two oceans-the Pacific Railroad. As yet there was no vestige of civilization observable, except here and there a few cross-sticks nailed rudely together, to mark the "Dutch Flat wagon-road;" not a stone was turned nor a tree hewn for the purpose of forwarding the great work. I had come to a halt, after some fifteen miles of snow-shoe travel in a fierce, driving snow-storm. As I halted, the storm ceased, and the sun came out warm, bright, and refreshing, while from the great deep valleys about me rolled out the heavy clouds, revealing some of Nature's grandest handiwork, and opening out, as the misty curtain melted away, some of that sublime scenery of our own land which can only be found in the far Western borders. After a deal of surmising as to my precise locality, I found myself close at the foot of Red Mountain. Before me lay the yawning valley, to which I had just descended, hemmed in on either side by its thousands of feet of solid mountain-wall, whose ragged sides frowned darkly upon the little brook which struggled its way among the rocks and snow at their feet. Peering up in the distance, their snowy tops shining in the clear spring sunlight, stood, like two grand sentinels, Fremont's Peak and Castle Mountain, their steep sides mottled here and there with clumps of pine-trees, like black patches on their surface. Over ten thousand feet these two magnificent peaks urge their heads toward heaven; and here, in this very valley, might be placed our boasted White Mountains of New England, and their presence would be as that of cob

bles among great boulders. Mount Washington itself would scarcely fill one of these great valleys.

The point at which I then stood was about six thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea, or seven hundred feet below the highest point to be reached by the railroad.

To gain some idea of the magnitude of this but partially known mountain-range, let us return to the point from which I set out a place where for four dismal, lonely months I had taken up my habitation-and there take a most extended and thorough observation; for in this stronghold of Nature there is much to be seen, and it seems as though all grandeur were here congregated.

With this intention we will take our position on the ledge of rocks which crowns Prospect Mountain-located in latitude 39° 30' north, and about twenty miles to the westward of the heart of the Sierra.

We are now twelve miles from the nearest point of the railroad routewhich lies to the south of us--but still have an extended view of the portion which it traverses, our elevation being nearly nine thousand feet above the sealevel.

Looking southward, we see a grand conglomeration of small and great summits, whose bald tops tire the eye with their brilliant snowy whiteness. To the left stands out boldly Donner Peak, memorable in the history of these mountains as being the sad winterhome of those from whom it derives its name. At its foot rests one of the most beautiful of lakes, the shores of which are now associated with a tragic tale, almost too horrible for belief. In the winter of 1849, the Donner family, led thither by the tempting reports of fabu lous fortunes to be won by little labor, encamped by the lake, and were there snow-bound by one of the fierce storms which frequent the region.