AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
251 
ROBERT OF LINCOLN. 
BY WILLAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
Merrily swinging on briar and weed, 
Near to the nest of his little dame, 
Over the mountain-side or mead, 
Robert of Lincoln is telling his name ; 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Snug and safe in that nest of our, 
Hidden among the summer flowers. 
Chce, chee, chee. 
Robert of Lincoln is gaily drest, 
Wearing a bright black wedding coat; 
White are his shoulders and white his crest, 
Hear him call in his merry note— 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Look, what a nice new coat is mine, 
Sure there never was a bird so fine. 
Chee, chee, chee. 
Robert of Lincoln's Quaker wife, 
Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings, 
Passing at home a patient life, 
Broods in the grass, while her husband sings 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Brood, kind creature ; you need not fear 
Thieves and robbers while I am here, 
Chee, chee, chee. 
Modest and shy as a nun is she, 
One weak chirp is her only note. 
Braggart and prince of braggarts is he, 
Pouring boasts from his little throat— 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Never was I afraid of man ; 
Catch me, cowardly knaves, if you can. 
Chee, chee, chee. 
Six white eggs on a bed of hay, 
Flecked with purple, a pretty sight! 
There, as the mother sits all day, 
Robert is singing with all his might, 
Bob-o’-link. bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Nice good wife, that never goes out, 
Keeping house while I frolic about. 
Chee, chee, chee. 
Soon as the little ones chip the shell 
Six wide mouths are open for food; 
Robert of Lincoln bestirs him well, 
Gathering seed for the hungry brood, 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link. 
Spink, spank, spink; 
This new life is likely to be 
Hard for a gay young fellow like me. 
Chee, chee, chee. 
Robert of Lincoln at length is made 
Sober with work, and silent with care ; 
Off in his holiday garment laid, 
Half forgotten, that merry air, 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Nobody knows but my mate and I 
Where our nest and our nestlings lie. 
Chee, chee, cite*. 
Summer wanes ; the children are grown ; 
Fun and frolic no more he knows; 
Robert of Lincoln’s a humdrum crone ; 
Off he flies, and we sing as he goes 
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink ; 
When you can pipe that men y old strain 
Robert of Lincoln come back again. 
Chee, chee, chee. 
Putnam's Monthly, for June .] 
Little at a Time. —It is but “ little at a 
time," that the mind can digest; but “ little 
at a time ” that' the mind can absorb ; but 
“ little at a time " that the mind can assimi¬ 
late. The violation of this law is the reason 
why, from all this schooling, scholars learn 
so little—know so little. It is the flax seed 
story over again. They attempt to take in 
so much at once, that all slip through their 
fingers, and lo! their hands are empty! This 
is simple fact. Look about you, all around 
you. You will find, a month or two months 
after term is closed, that the scholars can 
tell you scarcely anything of the things they 
went over in term time, and “ recited ” to the 
teacher. Why ? They undertook so much 
that it went through them undigested ; they 
had not the poiver to assimilate the undigested 
mass, and all was lost. Occasionally here 
and there, an item might have been digested; 
that was assimilated, and was theirs. Now, 
such might have been the history of every day. 
— Crandal. 
A SHILLING STORY. 
Not in yellow paper covers, published by 
Beelzebub & Co., No. so-and-so, Brimstone 
Row, and “sold by booksellers generally 
throughout the United States ”—not a re¬ 
past of tainted morality so covered up and 
disguised by the spices of love and rhetoric 
as to conceal the poisonous nature of the 
dish, so that it may be in this way fed by 
unsuspecting parents to theirchildren—none 
of the modern French style of stories, but a 
real and true history of the adventures of a 
shilling. A story hummed by a coin in my 
vest pocket as it turned itself over into an 
easier position, and communicated with the 
world through me as a medium. There is 
an “ esprit du corps" that we see referred to 
almost daily in some way or another; there 
is spirits of hartshorn, and spirits of wine, 
and spirits of lavender ; there is the spirit of 
’76 ; there are “ black spirits and white; blue 
spirits and gray and why, pray, should not 
the shilling have a spirit too 1 I am satisfied 
that it has, and that the voice I heard came 
from the very substance of the silver. It 
proceeded : “ I am a shilling—a York shil¬ 
ling; a Connecticut ninepence ; half a quar¬ 
ter of a dollar ; twelve and a half cents. At 
least I was that once, but from continual wear 
the image of the old Castillian on my ob¬ 
verse, commonly known as “ head,” and the 
pillars and “ Dei'gratia Rex ” on my reverse, 
that makes the “ tail,” have become so ef¬ 
faced that one can scarcely distinguish be¬ 
tween the two—so that I am literally fulfill¬ 
ing the proverb. As long as I retained the 
original superscription, the dress that I took 
from the mint when stamped, I found no 
difficulty in passing for all that I was worth ; 
indeed, being generally preferred to the pure 
metal, as that was said to be too soft and too 
sensitive to bear the wear of active every¬ 
day-life, and to be improved by a sufficient 
admixture of brass to make it keep its face. 
In this way a kind of factitious value was 
conferred on me by the stamping process, 
and I was allowed privileges such as I had 
not enjoyed before, and such as were not 
conferred on my uneducated, unsophisti¬ 
cated brethren of uncoined bullion. I was 
made money, while they remained only prop¬ 
erty. They were forbidden to assume my 
shape, and yet I must say that after long ex¬ 
perience, I do doubt whether any enactments 
that confer an artificial value on any of us, 
the coin family, can make money any more 
plenty. It was made our business to pass 
daily to and fro among men, to even and equal¬ 
ize their little business transactions. For 
this purpose men have agreed that the use of 
the members of our family, from the gold 
double eagle to the copper cent, is worth so 
much per cent per annum. 
“ The younger and smaller members of 
our family, like the corresponding members 
of the society of men, labor the hardest and 
earn fastest, according to the amount of cap¬ 
ital invested, the rate of annual interest on 
small change being highest, so that they are 
generally at a premium. In this way I came 
to be worn so smooth that it was impossible 
to tell without a close inspection whether I 
had an eagle or pillars on my reverse, wheth¬ 
er, in fact, I was ten cents or a shilling; and 
a grocer in a pet drew two hair lines across 
me at right angles to each other, with his 
penknife, and immediately I fell in value to 
the worth of eight cents. One would sup¬ 
pose a priori that I should have stopped my 
descent at the half-way house of a dime, but 
it is with shillings as it is with many men, 
when they get to going down hill they go 
wonderously fast. 
“ I am of Spanish descent, and when my 
worth came to be designated in Federal cur¬ 
rency, it chanced that it took an odd half cent 
to make me an even fraction of a dollar, and 
from this it occurs that though of good ster¬ 
ling, honest metal, I have unfortunately, from 
a necessity of my form, been a great cheat, 
rarely changing masters in a lifetime with¬ 
out filching half a cent from some one. 
“ The sums that I have thus unintention¬ 
ally transferred, are, for the lifetime of a shil¬ 
ling, very considerable. One business trans¬ 
action of that sort a day would amount to 
one dollar and eighty cents a year, and pre¬ 
suming the odd eighty cents to be honestly 
accounted for in making up “ quarters ” out 
of shillings, we shall still have a dollar a year 
for the sum of a shilling’s annual discrepan¬ 
cies, while the amount that it is legally pre¬ 
sumed to have earned during that time in 
this State, is seven-eights of a cent. I am 
more than a hundred years old, and you will 
see I have been a great sinner. If these 
transgressions were computed at compound 
interest, my own value would be quite inap¬ 
preciable compared with the sum. 
“ It is said that in the earliest periods of 
history, flocks and herds alone were wealth, 
and that in this way the word pecuniary, a 
word of the greatest influence and widest 
range in the English language, w'as derived— 
in other w’ords, that live stock was the sum- 
mum bonum among men, and the enormous 
prices now commanded by all varieties of 
butcher’s meat, would seem to indicate a 
disposition in society to return to first prin¬ 
ciples. However this may be, it is certain 
that gold and silver were very early recog¬ 
nized as of paramount value ; for there is no 
nation under the sun too rude to acknowl¬ 
edge the power of gold. No matter what 
inscription may be stamped on the face of 
our family—no matter in what language any 
of us may speak, we are known and read of 
all men; we speak all tongues. Philoso¬ 
phers have told how we were only of value 
from the difficulty of obtaining us, how in¬ 
herently we were worth less by the pound 
than iron, how when gold should become 
more plenty, silver would become higher, and 
yet the relative values of the principal met¬ 
als have never varied much from what they 
are now. Because we have weight, and yet 
are believed to be in our essence after all 
worthless, men have endeavored to make 
paper effigies of us that should do our work 
as well as we, and save the trouble of mov¬ 
ing us about from place to place. If they 
could only contrive some way to even then- 
transactions without the use of money, it 
would be a great saving. As society grows 
older, it improves in the matter, and less 
specie is moved about to correspond to 
“transactions.” Yet from the imperfect 
nature of human intellect, it results that there 
must be a limit to the complicated character 
that successive bargains may make affairs 
assume ; that there must be settlements, and 
balances must be adjusted with cash. 
“ Strange—isn’t it,” said the crossed shil¬ 
ling, with an attempt at pleasantry, “that I 
should have worn myself out in completing 
calculations that men could not ? I’ve 
cheated you, I’m sorry to own it, for I’m 
worth now only eight cents ; but I’ve passed 
a long life in the company of men and have 
gathered some w’isdom, and, let me tell you, 
a secret worth more than the four cents. 
The men that have trust ed to us to keep their 
accounts have grown rich, while the men 
that have kept their accounts long unsettled 
and trusted to their heads to remember them 
