Under the bleak sky of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twenty or more grown men, graduates of our common schools, and liable, every mother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general court members, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the march of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozen earth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and crowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore only answered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl.

The snows of December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation still remains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary upon the age of progress.
Still later, in one of our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made, partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose of digging for money in one of the desolate sand-keys of the West Indies.
It appears that some mesmerized "subject," in the course of one of those somnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, like Satan in chaos,-- "O'er bog, o'er steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies,"-- while peering curiously into the earth's mysteries, chanced to have his eyes gladdened by the sight of a huge chest packed with Spanish coins, the spoil, doubtless, of some rich-freighted argosy, or Carthagena galleon, in the rare days of Queen Elizabeth's Christian buccaneers.
During the last quarter of a century, a colored woman in one of the villages on the southern border of New Hampshire has been consulted by hundreds of anxious inquirers into the future.

Long experience in her profession has given her something of that ready estimate of character, that quick and keen appreciation of the capacity, habits, and wishes of her visitors, which so remarkably distinguished the late famous Madame Le Normand, of Paris; and if that old squalid sorceress, in her cramped Parisian attic, redolent of garlic and bestrewn with the greasy implements of sorry housewifery, was, as has been affirmed, consulted by such personages as the fair Josephine Beauharnois, and the "man of destiny," Napoleon himself, is it strange that the desire to lift the veil of the great mystery before us should overcome in some degree our peculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile us to the disagreeable necessity of looking at futurity through a black medium?
Some forty years ago, on the banks of the pleasant little creek separating Berwick, in Maine, from Somersworth, in New Hampshire, within sight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of the society of Friends, named Bantum.

He passed throughout a circle of several miles as a conjurer and skilful adept in the art of magic.

To him resorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose household gear, silver spoons, and table-linen had been stolen, or young maidens whose lovers were absent; and the quiet, meek-spirited old man received them all kindly, put on his huge iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his "conjuring book," which my mother describes as a large clasped volume in strange language and black-letter type, and after due reflection and consideration gave the required answers without money and without price.
The curious old volume is still in the possession of the conjurer's family.