Now on the board with eager look, Where kings and queens, in mimic war, But Fate was there with mystic spell, And the maid's bright hair as it waving fell, To her mesh, whose woof was love. "Checkmate!" he cried, "you've lost at last;" Was smiling at Fate, who, with wise forecast, COLUMBUS, April, 1870. MRS. S. E. MAYNARD. AH ELIZABETH HILLYER is a native of Eatonton, Putnam Co., Georgia. Was born in 1841, daughter of Rev. John F. Hillyer, a Baptist minister. When she was six years old, her family removed to the "Lone Star" State. From a very early age, Sarah was given to rhymes; exciting the fear that "she would become a poet, and be utterly worthless." At the age of fifteen, Miss Hillyer was married to Mr. J. J. Ballard, of Halletsville, Texas. After her marriage, Mrs. Ballard published poems in various papers, under the signature of "Kaloolah." Her husband died five years after the marriage. During her widowhood she published under her name, Sallie E. Ballard, her articles meeting with much favor. She has nearly ready for publication a novel, entitled "The Two Heroines; or, Freaks of Fortune." She has recently married Mr. Maynard, and they reside near Bastrop, Texas. CLEOPATRA TO MARC ANTONY.* Oh! my Antony, look on me! Oh! my Antony, look on me! Raise thy worshipped eyes to mine; Through those crystal doors with thine; Till the icy clasp of death Stops that music-waking breath. Thou art dying, my proud Roman! Monarch of a world, but gave it For a smile from Egypt's queen. Egypt's queen is throneless, fallen; One more lingering, fond embrace. He is dead! But died Triumvir. Back to Rome, steel-hearted victor, Tell them there what thou hast seen; Tell the fair and chaste Octavia Antony has scorned a crown; Tell her how, for him, and with him, Egypt's royal star went down. Written after reading Lyttle's "I am dying, Egypt, dying!" MRS. MAUD J. YOUNG. RS. M. J. YOUNG, daughter of Col. N. Fuller, Houston, Texas, descendant of John Rolf and his wife, Pocahontas, and blood kindred of the Randolphs of "Turkey Island" and "Roanoke," and of the Bollings, of Virginia. Her great-grandfather, Michael Pacquenett, a Huguenot from Bordeaux, France, came to this country after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and is mentioned in Hawkes's History of North Carolina as a freeholder in that State in 1723. On her mother's side she is descended from the Dunbars, Braggs, and Braxtons, of Maryland and Virginia; and the Marshalls, of Marsh Place, Essex, England. Her grandfather, Dr. John Marshall, a man of vast erudition and finished accomplishments of mind and manner, was educated at Eton and Oxford; Trinity College, Oxford, conferring upon him two degrees. After completing his education, during a travelling tour in this country, he met Miss Mary Bragg, (aunt of General Bragg, of the Confederate Army,) and became so enamored of the fair American that he did not return to England until he had wooed and won her for his wife. Their youngest daughter is the mother of the subject of this sketch. Miss Fuller was married in her twentieth year to Dr. S. O. Young, of South Carolina, a man of superior mind, thorough cultivation, and elegant address. His family are connected by ties of blood and fre quent intermarriage with the Bonners, Lees, Pressleys, Calhouns, and Bonhams, families whose names are interwoven with the literary, political, judicial, religious, and military history of South Carolina since the first Revolution. He died the first year of their marriage, leaving an only son, to whose education and training Mrs. Young's life has been devoted. This son is now, after having completed his college studies under General Lee at Lexington, pursuing the study of his profession at the Medical School in New Orleans, and bids fair to be a worthy representative of his family name and honors. After showing Mrs. Young to be so truly a daughter of the South, it need scarcely be added that she was true to the traditions of her race in the late struggle. During the war, her pen, guided by the thrilling impulses of her soul, dropped words of comfort and songs of fire that soothed the souls and inspired the hearts of her countrymen from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The 5th Regiment of Hood's Texas Brigade sent their worn and bloody flag home to her, after it had been covered with glory on a hundred battle-fields. She was enshrined in thousands of stern, true hearis, under the title of "The Confederate Lady" and "The Soldier's Friend." The commanding general of the Trans-Mississippi Department caused her appeals to be published by thousands and distributed through the army during the dark days after Lee's surrender, when it was still hoped that Texas would constitute herself the refuge and bulwark of that cause which none could deem then "lost." General Kirby Smith, General Magruder, General Joseph Shelby, and "The Confederate Lady" came out in a paper addressed to the "Soldiers and Citizens of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona." This sheet, whose thrilling and soul-stirring appeals were enough to have created heroic resolutions under the very ribs of death, was printed by military command, and posted in the towns and served broadcast over camps and country. Since the war, Mrs. Young has in all her writings made more or less practical application of her subjects to the times; comforting, consoling, and encouraging her people-yet never bating one jot or tittle of her convictions concerning the past. To fail is not to be wrong, we can acknowledge defeat without believing ourselves in error, is her maxim. A distinguished officer of General "Stonewall" Jackson's regiment, after a visit to Texas, writes of her as "the vestal matron, guarding with religious and patriotic devotion the home-altars of her beloved State." In an essay entitled "Weimar," she exclaims: "Shall any young Southron fall into despair, or feel that he can never achieve greatness or distinction, now that his patrimonial acres and slaves are gone, when he reads the great Schiller congratulating himself upon the possession of an income of one hundred and twenty dollars? Go to your libraries, my young countrymen, and read the splendid thoughts that God sent Schiller in his poverty, and see how, in his humble cottage, in the capital of a duchy whose entire territory is scarcely larger than your plantation, he made a glorious fame, and crowned the brow of his native land with wreaths as immortal as her mountains, and beautiful and bright as the sparkling waves of her broad, blue Rhine!" Again she writes: "To contemplate Weimar, her insignificant territory, her poverty, her weakness, her dependence, and to see her become the nursing mother of the whole German Empire, and that too, not by wealth, or arms, or diplomacy, but simply through the mental powers of her children, we are constrained to admit that the grandest possibilities of humanity lie within the grasp of every condition; and that the watchword of youth should be that terse but comprehensive command of the Bible, 'Despise not the day of small things.' The best things of this world have owed nothing to extraneous circumstances -the power has been from within-fashioning, elevating, and purifying the individual, then the masses. No thought of failure should weaken your energies. 'Heart within, and God overhead.' You have not only a right to the brightest hopes, but a solemn duty to make those hopes verities.' " Mrs. Young has written under several noms de plume. Her two works of greatest length are "Cordova," a religious novel, and a work on botany, soon to be issued, illustrative principally of the flora of Texas. Essays, short poems, and stories for magazines and newspaper publications, make up the bulk of her writings. Simms, in his volume of Southern poems, has her "Song of the Texas Ranger." It was published originally without her name, as the most of her war poems were. She has embodied in stories several of the legends of her Stateamong them, one of the famous watering-place, Sour Lake. Under the garb of a fairy story, she relates the story of secession, and the downfall of the Confederacy, pointing, in conclusion, to the only hope of happiness left us - labor, and an unselfish devotion to the welfare of each other. A leading paper, in speaking of this, says: "The Legend of Sour Lake,' by M. J. Y., is really one of the finest prose poems we have read for many a day. Though not in verse, it is genuine poetry from beginning to end. Would that all the wild and beautiful legends of our wide field of poetic treasures-Texas-could be put in enduring form by the literary artist. This romantic Indian tradition, so beautifully rendered, and whose glorious symbolisms are so happily applied to the instruction of the Southern people, will not die." Rev. Mr. Carnes, himself one of the purest and most talented of writers, says that the "Legend of Sour Lake' is a tale worthy the H |