At breakfast we have no time to spare, for the duties of the day are clamoring for attention; at the noon-day dining hour some of the family are absent; but at six o'clock in the evening we all come to the tea-table for chit-chat and the recital of adventures. We take our friends in with us—the more friends, the merrier. You may imagine that the following chapters are things said or conversations indulged in, or papers read, or paragraphs, made up from that interview. We now open the doors very wide and invite all to come in and be seated around the tea-table.

T. DEW. T.

AROUND THE TEA-TABLE.

THE TABLE-CLOTH IS SPREAD.

Our theory has always been, "Eat lightly in the evening." While, therefore, morning and noon there is bountifulness, we do not have much on our tea-table but dishes and talk. The most of the world's work ought to be finished by six o'clock p.m. The children are home from school. The wife is done mending or shopping. The merchant has got through with dry-goods or hardware. Let the ring of the tea-bell be sharp and musical. Walk into the room fragrant with Oolong or Young Hyson. Seat yourself at the tea-table wide enough apart to have room to take out your pocket-handkerchief if you want to cry at any pitiful story of the day, or to spread yourself in laughter if some one propound an irresistible conundrum.

But on our tea-table we will have first-rate Ningyong, or Pouchong, or Souchong, or Oolong, so that the conversation may be pure and healthy.

There are men and women who occasionally meet at our tea-table whose portraits are worth taking. There are Dr. Butterfield, Mr. Givemfits, Dr. Heavyasbricks, Miss Smiley and Miss Stinger, who come to see us. We expect to invite them all to tea very soon; and as you will in future hear of their talk, it is better that I tell you now some of their characteristics.

We generally place opposite him at the tea-table Mr. Givemfits. He is the very antipodes of Dr. Butterfield; and when the two talk, you get both sides of a subject. I have to laugh to hear them talk; and my little girl, at the controversial collisions, gets into such hysterics that we have to send her with her mouth full into the next room, to be pounded on the back to stop her from choking. My friend Givemfits is "down on" almost everything but tea, and I think one reason of his nervous, sharp, petulant way is that he takes too much of this beverage. He thinks the world is very soon coming to an end, and says, "The sooner the better, confound it!" He is a literary man, a newspaper writer, a book critic, and so on; but if he were a minister, he would preach a course of fifty-one sermons on "future punishment," proposing to preach the fifty-second and last Sabbath on "future rewards;" but the last Sabbath, coming in December, he would say to his audience, "Really, it is too cold to preach. We will close with the doxology and omit the benediction, as I must go down by the stove to warm."

But we have many others who come to our tea-table: Miss Smiley, who often runs in about six o'clock. All sweetness is Miss Smiley. She seems to like everybody, and everybody seems to like her. Also Miss Stinger, sharp as a hornet, prides herself on saying things that cut; dislikes men; cannot bear the sight of a pair of boots; loathes a shaving apparatus; thinks Eve would have shown better capacity for housekeeping if she had, the first time she used her broom, swept Adam out of Paradise. Besides these ladies, many good, bright, useful and sensible people of all kinds. In a few days we shall invite a group of them to tea, and you shall hear some of their discussions of men and books and things. We shall order a canister of the best Young Hyson, pull out the extension-table, hang on the kettle, stir the blaze, and with chamois and silver-powder scour up the tea-set that we never use save when we have company.

MR. GIVEMFITS AND DR. BUTTERFIELD.

The tea-kettle never sang a sweeter song than on the evening I speak of. It evidently knew that company was coming. At the appointed time our two friends, Dr. Butterfield and Mr. Givemfits, arrived. As already intimated, they were opposite in temperament—the former mild, mellow, fat, good-natured and of fine digestion, always seeing the bright side of anything; the other, splenetic, harsh, and when he swallowed anything was not sure whether he would be the death of it, or it would be the death of him.

This sudden jerk in the conversation snapped it off, and for a moment there was quiet. I knew not how to get conversation started again. Our usual way is to talk about the weather; but that subject had been already exhausted.

Suddenly I saw the color for the first time in years come into the face of Mr. Givemfits. The fact was that, in biting a hard crust of bread, he had struck a sore tooth which had been troubling him, and he broke out with the exclamation, "Dr. Butterfield, the physical and moral world is degenerating. Things get worse and worse. Look, for instance, at the tone of many of the newspapers; gossip, abuse, lies, blackmail, make up the chief part of them, and useful intelligence is the exception. The public have more interest in murders and steamboat explosions than in the items of mental and spiritual progress. Church and State are covered up with newspaper mud."

"Stop!" said Dr. Butterfield. "Don't you ever buy newspapers?"

A GROWLER SOOTHED.

Givemfits said to Dr. Butterfield, "You asked me last evening if I ever bought newspapers. I reply, Yes, and write for them too.

As Dr. Butterfield concluded this sentence his face shone like a harvest moon. We had all dropped our knives, and were looking at him. The Young Hyson tea was having its mollifying effect on the whole company. Mr. Givemfits had made way with his fourth cup (they were small cups, the set we use for company), and he was entirely soothed and moderated in his opinions about everything, and actually clapped his hands at Dr. Butterfield's peroration. Even Miss Stinger was in a glow, for she had drank large quantities of the fragrant beverage while piping hot, and in her delight she took Givemfits' arm, and asked him if he ever meant to get married. Miss Smiley smiled. Then Dr. Butterfield lifted his cup, and proposed a toast which we all drank standing: "The mission of the printing-press! The salubrity of the climate! The prospects ahead! The wonders of Oolong and Young Hyson!"

CARLO AND THE FREEZER.

We had a jolly time at our tea-table this evening. We had not seen our old friend for ten years. When I heard his voice in the hall, it seemed like a snatch of "Auld Lang Syne." He came from Belleville, where was the first home we ever set up for ourselves. It was a stormy evening, and we did not expect company, but we soon made way for him at the table. Jennie was very willing to stand up at the corner; and after a fair napkin had been thrown over the place where she had dropped a speck of jelly, our friend and I began the rehearsal of other days. While I was alluding to a circumstance that occurred between me and one of my Belleville neighbors the children cried out with stentorian voice, "Tell us about Carlo and the freezer;" and they kicked the leg of the table, and beat with both hands, and clattered the knives on the plate, until I was compelled to shout, "Silence! You act like a band of Arabs! Frank, you had better swallow what you have in your mouth before you attempt to talk." Order having been gained, I began:

On the wintry morning of which we speak our neighbor had been making ice-cream; but there being some defect in the machinery, the cream had not sufficiently congealed, and so she set the can of the freezer containing the luxury on her back steps, expecting the cold air would completely harden it. What was our dismay to see that our dog Carlo, on whose early education we were expending great care, had taken upon himself the office of ice-cream inspector, and was actually busy with the freezer! We hoisted the window and shouted at him, but his mind was so absorbed in his undertaking he did not stop to listen. Carlo was a greyhound, thin, gaunt and long-nosed, and he was already making his way on down toward the bottom of the can. His eyes and all his head had disappeared in the depths of the freezer. Indeed, he was so far submerged that when he heard us, with quick and infuriate pace, coming up close behind him, he could not get his head out, and so started with the encumbrance on his head, in what direction he knew not. No dog was ever in a more embarrassing position—freezer to the right of him, freezer to the left of him, freezer on the top of him, freezer under him.

A feeling of mirthfulness, which sometimes takes me on most inappropriate occasions, seized me, and I sat down on the ground, powerless at the moment when Carlo most needed help. If I only could have got near enough, I would have put my foot on the freezer, and, taking hold of the dog's tail, dislodged him instantly; but this I was not permitted to do. At this stage of the disaster my neighbor appeared with a look of consternation, her cap-strings flying in the cold wind. I tried to explain, but the aforesaid untimely hilarity hindered me. All I could do was to point at the flying freezer and the adjoining dog and ask her to call off her freezer, and, with assumed indignation, demand what she meant by trying to kill my greyhound.

The poor dog's every attempt at escape only wedged himself more thoroughly fast. But after a while, in time to save the dog, though not to save the ice-cream, my neighbor and myself effected a rescue. Edwin Landseer, the great painter of dogs and their friends, missed his best chance by not being there when the parishioner took hold of the freezer and the pastor seized the dog's tail, and, pulling mightily in opposite directions, they each got possession of their own property.

Carlo was cured of his love for luxuries, and the sight of the freezer on the back steps till the day of his death would send him howling away.

Lesson for dogs and men! "Come in!" says the gray spider to the house-fly; "I have entertained a great many flies. I have plenty of room, fine meals and a gay life. Walk on this suspension bridge. Give me your hand. Come in, my sweet lady fly. These walls are covered with silk, and the tapestry is gobelin. I am a wonderful creature. I have eight eyes, and of course can see your best interest. Philosophers have written volumes about my antennae and cephalothorax." House-fly walks gently in. The web rocks like a cradle in the breeze. The house-fly feels honored to be the guest of such a big spider. We all have regard for big bugs. "But what is this?" cries the fly, pointing to a broken wing, "and this fragment of an insect's foot. There must have been a murder here! Let me go back!" "Ha! ha!" says the spider, "the gate is locked, the drawbridge is up. I only contracted to bring you in. I cannot afford to let you out. Take a drop of this poison, and it will quiet your nerves. I throw this hook of a fang over your neck to keep you from falling off." Word went back to the house-fly's family, and a choir of great green-bottled insects sang this psalm at the funeral:

Let flies and dogs and men keep out of mischief. It is smooth all the way there, and rough all the way back. It is ice-cream for Carlo clear down to the bottom of the can, but afterward it is blinded eyes and sore neck and great fright. It is only eighteen inches to go into the freezer; it is three miles out. For Robert Burns it is rich wine and clapping hands and carnival all the way going to Edinburgh; but going back, it is worn-out body, and lost estate, and stinging conscience, and broken heart, and a drunkard's grave.

Better moderate our desires. Carlo had that morning as good a breakfast as any dog need to have. It was a law of the household that he should be well fed. Had he been satisfied with bread and meat, all would have been well. But he sauntered out for luxuries. He wanted ice-cream. He got it, but brought upon his head the perils and damages of which I have written. As long as we have reasonable wants we get on comfortably, but it is the struggle after luxuries that fills society with distress, and populates prisons, and sends hundreds of people stark mad. Dissatisfied with a plain house, and ordinary apparel, and respectable surroundings, they plunge their head into enterprises and speculations from which they have to sneak out in disgrace. Thousands of men have sacrificed honor and religion for luxuries, and died with the freezer about their ears.

Our poor old Carlo is dead now. We all cried when we found that he would never frisk again at our coming, nor put up his paw against us. But he lived long enough to preach the sermon about caution and contentment of which I have been the stenographer.

OLD GAMES REPEATED.

We tarried longer in the dining-room this evening than usual, and the children, losing their interest in what we were saying got to playing all about us in a very boisterous way, but we said nothing, for it is the evening hour, and I think it keeps one fresh to have these things going on around us. Indeed, we never get over being boys and girls. The good, healthy man sixty years of age is only a boy with added experience. A woman is only an old girl. Summer is but an older spring. August is May in its teens. We shall be useful in proportion as we keep young in our feelings. There is no use for fossils except in museums and on the shelf. I like young old folks.

Indeed, we all keep doing over what we did in childhood. You thought that long ago you got through with "blind-man's-buff," and "hide-and-seek," and "puss in the corner," and "tick-tack-to," and "leap-frog," but all our lives are passed in playing those old games over again.

You say, "Jenny and Harry, go to bed. It seems so silly for you to sit there making two parallel lines perpendicular, and two parallel lines horizontal, and filling up the blanks with crosses and o's, and then crying out 'tick-tack-to.'" My dear man, you are doing every day in business just what your children are doing in the nursery. You find it hard to get things into a line. You have started out for worldly success. You get one or two things fixed but that is not what you want. After a while you have had two fine successes. You say, "If I can have a third success, I will come out ahead." But somebody is busy on the same slate, trying to hinder you getting the game. You mark; he marks. I think you will win. To the first and second success which you have already gained you add the third, for which you have long been seeking. The game is yours, and you clap your hands, and hunch your opponent in the side, and shout,

THE FULL-BLOODED COW.

We never had any one drop in about six o'clock p.m. whom we were more glad to see than Fielding, the Orange County farmer. In the first place, he always had a good appetite, and it did not make much difference what we had to eat. He would not nibble about the end of a piece of bread, undecided as to whether he had better take it, nor sit sipping his tea as though the doctor had ordered him to take only ten drops at a time, mixed with a little sugar and hot water. Perpetual contact with fresh air and the fields and the mountains gave him a healthy body, while the religion that he learned in the little church down by the mill-dam kept him in healthy spirits. Fielding keeps a great drove of cattle and has an overflowing dairy. As we handed him the cheese he said, "I really believe this is of my own making." "Fielding," I inquired, "how does your dairy thrive, and have you any new stock on your farm? Come give us a little touch of the country." He gave me a mischievous look and said, "I will not tell you a word until you let me know all about that full-blooded cow, of which I have heard something. You need not try to hide that story any longer." So we yielded to his coaxing. It was about like this:

We hired two boys to drive her home while we rode in a carriage. No sooner had we started than the cow showed what turned out to be one of her peculiarities, great speed of hoof. She left the boys, outran my horse, jumped the fence, frightened nearly to death a group of schoolchildren, and by the time we got home we all felt as if we had all day been put on a fox-chase.

We never had any peace with that cow. She knew more tricks than a juggler. She could let down any bars, open any gate, outrun any dog and ruin the patience of any minister. We had her a year, and yet she never got over wanting to go to the vendue. Once started out of the yard, she was bound to see the sheriff. We coaxed her with carrots, and apples, and cabbage, and sweetest stalks, and the richest beverage of slops, but without avail.

She had, among other bad things, a morbid appetite. Notwithstanding we gave her the richest herbaceous diet, she ate everything she could put her mouth on. She was fond of horse blankets and articles of human clothing. I found her one day at the clothes line, nearly choked to death, for she had swallowed one leg of something and seemed dissatisfied that she could not get down the other. The most perfect nuisance that I ever had about my place was that full-blooded.

Having read in our agricultural journals of cows that were slaughtered yielding fourteen hundred pounds neat weight, we concluded to sell her to the butcher. We set a high price upon her and got it—that is, we took a note for it, which is the same thing. My bargain with the butcher was the only successful chapter in my bovine experiences. The only taking-off in the whole transaction was that the butcher ran away, leaving me nothing but a specimen of poor chirography, and I already had enough of that among my manuscripts.

My friend, never depend on high-breeds. Some of the most useless of cattle had ancestors spoken of in the "Commentaries of Caesar." That Alderney whose grandfather used to graze on a lord's park in England may not be worth the grass she eats.

THE DREGS IN LEATHERBACKS' TEA-CUP.

We have an earlier tea this evening than usual, for we have a literary friend who comes about this time of the week, and he must go home to retire about eight o'clock. His nervous system is so weak that he must get three or four hours sleep before midnight; otherwise he is next day so cross and censorious he scalps every author he can lay his hand on. As he put his hand on the table with an indelible blot of ink on his thumb and two fingers, which blot he had not been able to wash off, I said, "Well, my old friend Leatherbacks, what books have you been reading to-day?"

"I have also been looking over a book that overhauls the theology and moral character of Abraham Lincoln. This is the only kind of slander that is safe. I have read all the stuff for the last three years published about Abraham Lincoln's unfair courtships and blank infidelity. The protracted discussion has made only one impression upon me, and that is this: How safe it is to slander a dead man! You may say what you will in print about him, he brings no rebutting evidence. I have heard that ghosts do a great many things, but I never heard of one as printing a book or editing a newspaper to vindicate himself. Look out how you vilify a living man, for he may respond with pen, or tongue, or cowhide; but only get a man thoroughly dead (that is, so certified by the coroner) and have a good, heavy tombstone put on the top of him, and then you may say what you will with impunity.

"But I have read somewhere in an old book that there is a day coming when all wrongs will be righted; and I should not wonder if then the dead were vindicated, and all the swine who have uprooted graveyards should, like their ancestors of Gadara, run down a steep place into the sea and get choked. The fact that there are now alive men so debauched of mind and soul that they rejoice in mauling the reputation of those who spent their lives in illustrious achievement for God and their country, and then died as martyrs for their principles, makes me believe in eternal damnation."

"By the way," said he, "have you heard that Odger is coming?"

"What!" said I. He continued without looking up, for he was at that moment running his knife, not over-sharp, through a lamb-chop made out of old sheep. (Wife, we will have to change our butcher!) He continued with a severity perhaps partly caused by the obstinacy of the meat: "I see in the 'Pall-Mall Budget' the startling intelligence that Mr. Odger is coming to the United States on a lecturing expedition. Our American newspapers do not seem, as yet, to have got hold of this news, but the tidings will soon fly, and great excitement may be expected to follow."

Some unwise person might ask the foolish question, "Who is Odger?" I hope, however, that such inquiry will not be made, for I would be compelled to say that I do not know. Whether he is a clergyman or a reformer, or an author, or all these in one, we cannot say. Suffice it he is a foreigner, and that is enough to make us all go wild. A foreigner does not need more than half as much brain or heart to do twice as well as an American, either at preaching or lecturing. There is for many Americans a bewitchment in a foreign brogue. I do not know but that he may have dined with the queen, or have a few drops of lordly blood distributed through his arteries.

If a man can do anything well, he will be acceptable without reference to whether he was born by the Clyde, the Thames, the Seine, or the Hudson. But until those scales be lifted it is sufficient to announce the joyful tidings that "Odger is coming."

THE HOT AXLE.

The express train was flying from Cork to Queenstown. It was going like sixty—that is, about sixty miles an hour. No sight of an Irish village to arrest our speed, no sign of break-down, and yet the train halted. We looked out of the window, saw the brakemen and a crowd of passengers gathering around the locomotive and a dense smoke arising. What was the matter? A hot axle!

We were on the lightning train for Cleveland. We had no time to spare. If we stopped for a half hour we should be greeted by the anathema of a lecturing committee. We felt a sort of presentiment that we should be too late, when to confirm it the whistle blew, and the brakes fell, and the cry all along the train was, "What is the matter?" Answer: "A hot axle!" The wheels had been making too many revolutions in a minute. The car was on fire. It was a very difficult thing to put it out; water, sand and swabs were tried, and caused long detention and a smoke that threatened flame down to the end of the journey.

We thought then, and think now, this is what is the matter with people everywhere. In this swift, "express," American life, we go too fast for our endurance. We think ourselves getting on splendidly, when in the midst of our successes we come to a dead halt. What is the matter? Nerves or muscles or brains give out. We have made too many revolutions in an hour. A hot axle!

Some of the worst tempered people of the day are religious people, from the fact that they have no rest. Added to the necessary work of the world, they superintend two Sunday-schools, listen to two sermons, and every night have meetings of charitable and Christian institutions. They look after the beggars, hold conventions, speak at meetings, wait on ministers, serve as committeemen, take all the hypercriticisms that inevitably come to earnest workers, rush up and down the world and develop their hearts at the expense of all the other functions. They are the best men on earth, and Satan knows it, and is trying to kill them as fast as possible. They know not that it is as much a duty to take care of their health as to go to the sacrament. It is as much a sin to commit suicide with the sword of truth as with a pistol.

A Rocky Mountain locomotive engineer told us that at certain places they change locomotives and let the machine rest, as a locomotive always kept in full heat soon got out of order. Our advice to all overworked good people is, "Slow up!" Slacken your speed as you come to the crossings. All your faculties for work at this rate will be consumed. You are on fire now—see the premonitory smoke. A hot axle!

Some of our young people have read till they are crazed of learned blacksmiths who at the forge conquered thirty languages, and of shoemakers who, pounding sole-leather, got to be philosophers, and of milliners who, while their customers were at the glass trying on their spring hats, wrote a volume of first-rate poems. The fact is no blacksmith ought to be troubled with more than five languages; and instead of shoemakers becoming philosophers, we would like to turn our surplus of philosophers into shoemakers; and the supply of poetry is so much greater than the demand that we wish milliners would stick to their business. Extraordinary examples of work and endurance may do as much harm as good. Because Napoleon slept only three hours a night, hundreds of students have tried the experiment; but instead of Austerlitz and Saragossa, there came of it only a sick headache and a botch of a recitation. We are told of how many books a man can read in the five spare minutes before breakfast, and the ten minutes at noon, but I wish some one could tell us how much rest a man can get in fifteen minutes after dinner, or how much health in an hour's horseback ride, or how much fun in a Saturday afternoon of cricket. He who has such an idea of the value of time that he takes none of it for rest wastes all his time.

Our maidens have lost the languor they once cultivated, and walk the street with stout step, and swing the croquet mallet with a force that sends the ball through two arches, cracking the opposing ball with great emphasis. Our daughters are not ashamed to culture flower beds, and while they plant the rose in the ground a corresponding rose blooms in their own cheek.

But we need another proclamation of emancipation. The human locomotive goes too fast. Cylinder, driving-boxes, rock-shaft, truck and valve-gear need to "slow up." Oh! that some strong hand would unloose the burdens from our over-tasked American life, that there might be fewer bent shoulders, and pale cheeks, and exhausted lungs, and quenched eyes, the law, and medicine, and theology less frequently stopped in their glorious progress, because of the hot axle!

BEEFSTEAK FOR MINISTERS.

There have been lately several elaborate articles remarking upon what they call the lack of force and fire in the clergy. The world wonders that, with such a rousing theme as the gospel, and with such a grand work as saving souls, the ministry should ever be nerveless. Some ascribe it to lack of piety, and some to timidity of temperament. We believe that in a great number of cases it is from the lack of nourishing food. Many of the clerical brotherhood are on low diet. After jackets and sacks have been provided for the eight or ten children of the parsonage, the father and mother must watch the table with severest economy. Coming in suddenly upon the dinner-hour of the country clergyman, the housewife apologizes for what she calls "a picked-up" dinner, when, alas! it is nearly always picked up.

Many of our best young men in preparation for the ministry are going through this martyrdom. The strongest mind in our theological class perished, the doctors said afterward from lack of food. The only time he could afford a doctor was for his post-mortem examination.

I give the financial condition of many of our young theological students when I say:

Here you see a deficit of fifty-one dollars. As there are no "stealings" in a theological seminary, he makes up the balance by selling books or teaching school. He comes into life cowed down, with a patch on both knees and several other places, and a hat that has been "done over" four or five times, and so weak that the first sharp wind that whistles round the corner blows him into glory. The inertness you complain of in the ministry starts early. Do you suppose that if Paul had spent seven years in a cheap boarding house, and the years after in a poorly-supplied parsonage, he would have made Felix tremble? No! The first glance of the Roman procurator would have made him apologize for intrusion.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN OLD PAIR OF SCISSORS.

I was born in Sheffield, England, at the close of the last century, and was, like all those who study Brown's Shorter Catechism, made out of dust. My father was killed at Herculaneum at the time of the accident there, and buried with other scissors and knives and hooks and swords. On my mother's side I am descended from a pair of shears that came to England during the Roman invasion. My cousin hung to the belt of a duchess. My uncle belonged to Hampton Court, and used to trim the king's hair. I came to the United States while the grandfathers of the present generation of children were boys.

When I was young I was a gay fellow—indeed, what might have been called "a perfect blade." I look old and rusty hanging here on the nail, but take me down, and though my voice is a little squeaky with old age, I can tell you a pretty tale. I am sharper than I look. Old scissors know more than you think. They say I am a little garrulous, and perhaps I may tell things I ought not.

I split the rags for the first carpet on the old homestead, and what a merry time we had when the neighbors came to "the quilting!" I lay on the coverlet that was stretched across the quilting-frame and heard all the gossip of 1799. Reputations were ripped and torn just as they are now. Fashions were chattered about, the coalscuttle bonnet of some offensive neighbor (who was not invited to the quilting) was criticised, and the suspicion started that she laced too tight; and an old man who happened to have the best farm in the county was overhauled for the size of his knee-buckles, and the exorbitant ruffles on his shirt, and the costly silk lace to his hat. I lay so still that no one supposed I was listening. I trembled on the coverlet with rage and wished that I could clip the end of their tattling tongues, but found no chance for revenge, till, in the hand of a careless neighbor, I notched and nearly spoiled the patch-work.

Oh! what a gay life the scissors live! I may lie on gayest lady's lap, and little children like me better than almost anything else to play with. The trembling octogenarian takes me by the hand, and the rollicking four-year-old puts on me his dimpled fingers. Mine are the children's curls and the bride's veil. I am welcomed to the Christmas tree, and the sewing-machine, and the editor's table. I have cut my way through the ages. Beside pen, and sword, and needle, I dare to stand anywhere, indispensable to the race, the world-renowned scissors!

But I had a sad mission once. The bell tolled in the New England village because a soul had passed. I sat up all the night cutting the pattern for a shroud. Oh, it was gloomy work. There was wailing in the house, but I could not stop to mourn. I had often made the swaddling-clothes for a child, but that was the only time I fashioned a robe for the grave. To fit it around the little neck, and make the sleeves just long enough for the quiet arms—it hurt me more than the tilt hammers that smote me in Sheffield, than the files of the scissors-grinder at the door. I heard heart-strings snap as I went through the linen, and in the white pleats to be folded over the still heart I saw the snow banked on a grave. Give me, the old scissors, fifty bridal dresses to make rather than one shroud to prepare.

A LIE, ZOOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED.

We stand agape in the British Museum, looking at the monstrous skeletons of the mastodon, megatherium and iguanodon, and conclude that all the great animals thirty feet long and eleven feet high are extinct.

Now, while we do not want to frighten children or disturb nervous people, we have to say that the other day we caught a glimpse of a monster beside which the lizards of the saurian era were short, and the elephants of the mammalian period were insignificant. We saw it in full spring, and on the track of its prey. Children would call the creature "a fib;" rough persons would term it "a whopper;" polite folks would say it was "a fabrication;" but plain and unscientific people would style it "a lie." Naturalists might assign it to the species "Tigris regalis," or "Felis pardus."

We do not think that anatomical and zoological justice has been done to the lie. It is to be found in all zones. Livingstone saw it in Central Africa; Dr. Kane found it on an iceberg beside a polar bear; Agassiz discovered it in Brazil. It thrives about as well in one clime as another, with perhaps a little preference for the temperate zone. It lives on berries, or bananas, or corn, grapes, or artichokes; drinks water, or alcohol, or tea. It eats up a great many children, and would have destroyed the boy who afterward became the father of his country had he not driven it back with his hatchet. (See the last two hundred Sunday-school addresses.)

LONGEVITY.

If it once get born, it lives on almost interminably. Sometimes it has followed a man for ten, twenty or forty years, and has been as healthy in its last leap as in the first. It has run at every president from General Washington to General Grant, and helped kill Horace Greeley. It has barked at every good man since Adam, and every good woman since Eve, and every good boy since Abel, and every good cow since Pharaoh's lean kine. Malarias do not poison it, nor fires burn it, nor winters freeze it. Just now it is after your neighbor; to-morrow it will be after you. It is the healthiest of all monsters. Its tooth knocks out the "tooth of time." Its hair never turns white with age, nor does it limp with decrepitude. It is distinguished for its longevity.

THE LENGTH OF ITS LEGS.

It keeps up with the express train, and is present at the opening and the shutting of the mailbags. It takes a morning run from New York to San Francisco or over to London before breakfast. It can go a thousand miles at a jump. It would despise seven-league boots as tedious. A telegraph pole is just knee-high to this monster, and from that you can judge its speed of locomotion. It never gets out of wind, carries a bag of reputations made up in cold hash, so that it does not have to stop for victuals. It goes so fast that sometimes five million people have seen it the same morning.

KEENNESS OF NOSTRIL.

ACUTENESS OF EAR.

The rabbit has no such power to listen as this creature we speak of. It hears all the sounds that come from five thousand keyholes. It catches a whisper from the other side the room, and can understand the scratch of a pen. It has one ear open toward the east and the other toward the west, and hears everything in both directions. All the tittle-tattle of the world pours into those ears like vinegar through a funnel. They are always up and open, and to them a meeting of the sewing society is a jubilee and a political campaign is heaven.

SIZE OF THROAT.

The snake has hard work to choke down a toad, and the crocodile has a mighty struggle to take in the calf; but the monster of which I speak can swallow anything. It has a throat bigger than the whale that took down the minister who declined the call to Nineveh, and has swallowed whole presbyteries and conferences of clergymen. A Brobdingnagian goes down as easily as a Liliputian. The largest story about business dishonor, or female frailty, or political deception, slips through with the ease of a homoeopathic pellet. Its throat is sufficient for anything round, or square, or angular, or octagonal.

Nothing in all the earth is too big for its mastication and digestion save the truth, and that will stick in its gullet.

It goes in a flock with others of its kind. If one takes after a man or woman, there are at least ten in its company. As soon as anything bad is charged against a man, there are many others who know things just as deleterious. Lies about himself, lies about his wife, lies about his children, lies about his associates, lies about his house, lies about his barn, lies about his store—swarms of them, broods of them, herds of them. Kill one of them, and there will be twelve alive to act as its pall-bearers, another to preach its funeral sermon, and still another to write its obituary.

These monsters beat all the extinct species. They are white, spotted and black. They have a sleek hide, a sharp claw and a sting in their tail. They prowl through every street of the city, craunch in the restaurants, sleep in the hall of Congress, and in grandest parlor have one paw under the piano, another under the sofa, one by the mantel and the other on the door-sill.

But they who spend their time in trying to lasso and decapitate a lie will come back worsted, as did the English cockneys from a fox chase described in the poem entitled "Pills to Purge Melancholy:"

A BREATH OF ENGLISH AIR.

My friend looked white as the wall, flung the "London Times" half across the room, kicked one slipper into the air and shouted, "Talmage, where on earth did you come from?" as one summer I stepped into his English home. "Just come over the ferry to dine with you," I responded. After some explanation about the health of my family, which demanded a sea voyage, and thus necessitated my coming, we planned two or three excursions.

At eight o'clock in the morning we gathered in the parlor in the Red Horse Hotel, at Stratford-on-Avon. Two pictures of Washington Irving, the chair in which the father of American literature sat, and the table on which he wrote, immortalizing his visit to that hotel, adorn the room. From thence we sallied forth to see the clean, quaint village of Stratford. It was built just to have Shakspeare born in. We have not heard that there was any one else ever born there, before or since. If, by any strange possibility, it could be proved that the great dramatist was born anywhere else, it would ruin all the cab drivers, guides and hostelries of the place.

We went of course to the house where Shakspeare first appeared on the stage of life, and enacted the first act of his first play. Scene the first. Enter John Shakspeare, the father; Mrs. Shakspeare, the mother, and the old nurse, with young William.

We went to the church where the poet is buried. It dates back seven hundred years, but has been often restored. It has many pictures, and is the sleeping place of many distinguished dead; but one tomb within the chancel absorbs all the attention of the stranger. For hundreds of years the world has looked upon the unadorned stone lying flat over the dust of William Shakspeare, and read the epitaph written by himself:

Under such anathema the body has slept securely. A sexton once looked in at the bones, but did not dare to touch them, lest his "quietus" should be made with a bare bodkin.

Where is the glory now? What has become of the velvet? Who wears the jewels? Would Amy Robsart have so longed to get into the castle had she known its coming ruin? Where are those who were waited on, and those who waited? What has become of Elizabeth, the visitor, and Robert Dudley, the visited? Cromwell's men dashed upon the scene; they drained the lakes; they befouled the banquet hall; they dismantled the towers; they turned the castle into a tomb, on whose scarred and riven sides ambition and cruelty and lust may well read their doom. "So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord; but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might."

THE MIDNIGHT LECTURE.

At eight o'clock precisely, on consecutive nights, we stepped on the rostrum at Chicago, Zanesville. Indianapolis, Detroit, Jacksonville, Cleveland and Buffalo. But it seemed that Dayton was to be a failure. We telegraphed from Indianapolis, "Missed connection. Cannot possibly meet engagement at Dayton." Telegram came back saying, "Take a locomotive and come on!" We could not get a locomotive. Another telegram arrived: "Mr. Gale, the superintendent of railroad, will send you in an extra train. Go immediately to the depot!" We gathered up our traps from the hotel floor and sofa, and hurled them at the satchel. They would not go in. We put a collar in our hat, and the shaving apparatus in our coat pocket; got on the satchel with both feet, and declared the thing should go shut if it split everything between Indianapolis and Dayton. Arriving at the depot, the train was ready. We had a locomotive and one car. There were six of us on the train—namely, the engineer and stoker on the locomotive; while following were the conductor, a brakeman at each end of the car, and the pastor of a heap of ashes on Schermerhorn street, Brooklyn. "When shall we get to Dayton?" we asked. "Half-past nine o'clock!" responded the conductor. "Absurd!" we said; "no audience will wait till half-past nine at night for a lecturer."

At five minutes of ten o'clock we rolled into the Dayton depot, and before the train came to a halt we were in a carriage with the lecturing committee, going at the horse's full run toward the opera house. Without an instant in which to slacken our pulses, the chairman rushed in upon the stage, and introduced the lecturer of the evening. After in the quickest way shedding overcoat and shawl, we confronted the audience, and with our head yet swimming from the motion of the rail-train, we accosted the people—many of whom had been waiting since seven o'clock'—with the words, "Long-suffering but patient ladies and gentlemen, you are the best-natured audience I ever saw." When we concluded what we had to say, it was about midnight, and hence the title of this little sketch.

As for ourselves, save in rare and peculiar circumstances, good-bye to the lecturing platform, while we try for the rest of our life to imitate the minister who said, "This one thing I do!" There are exhilarations about lecturing that one finds it hard to break from, and many a minister who thought himself reformed of lecturing has, over-tempted, gone up to the American Library or Boston Lyceum Bureau, and drank down raw, a hundred lecturing engagements. Still, a man once in a while finds a new pair of spectacles to look through.

THE SEXTON.

King David, it is evident, once thought something of becoming a church sexton, for he said, "I had rather be a doorkeeper," and so on. But he never carried out the plan, perhaps because he had not the qualification. It requires more talent in some respects to be sexton than to be king. A sexton, like a poet, is born. A church, in order to peace and success, needs the right kind of man at the prow, and the right kind at the stern—that is, a good minister and a good sexton. So far as we have observed, there are four kinds of janitors.

THE FIDGETY SEXTON.

THE LAZY SEXTON.

THE GOOD SEXTON.

THE OLD CRADLE.

The historic and old-time cradle is dead, and buried in the rubbish of the garret. A baby of five months, filled with modern notions, would spurn to be rocked in the awkward and rustic thing. The baby spits the "Alexandra feeding-bottle" out of its mouth, and protests against the old-fashioned cradle, giving emphasis to its utterances by throwing down a rattle that cost seven dollars, and kicking off a shoe imported at fabulous expense, and upsetting the "baby-basket," with all its treasures of ivory hair brushes and "Meen Fun." Not with voice, but by violence of gesture and kicks and squirms, it says: "What! You going to put me in that old cradle? Where is the nurse? My patience! What does mother mean? Get me a 'patented self-rocker!'"

The parents yield. In comes the new-fangled crib. The machine is wound up, the baby put in, the crib set in motion, and mother goes off to make a first-rate speech at the "Woman's Rights Convention!"

Conundrum: Why is a maternal elocutionist of this sort like a mother of old time, who trained four sons for the holy ministry, and through them was the means of reforming and saving a thousand souls, and through that thousand of saving ten thousand more? You answer: "No resemblance at all!" You are right. Guessed the conundrum the first time. Go up to the head of the class!

You see the edge of that rocker worn quite deep? That is where her foot was placed while she sat with her knitting or sewing, on summer afternoons, while the bees hummed at the door and the shout of the boy at the oxen was heard afield. From the way the rocker is worn, I think that sometimes the foot must have been very tired and the ankle very sore; but I do not think she stopped for that. When such a cradle as that got a-going, it kept on for years.

There was a wooden canopy at the head of the old cradle that somehow got loose and was taken off. But your infantile mind was most impressed with the face which much of the time hovered over you. Other women sometimes looked in at the child, and said: "That child's hair will be red!" or, "What a peculiar chin!" or, "Do you think that child will live to grow up?" and although you were not old enough to understand their talk, by instinct you knew it was something disagreeable, and began to cry till the dear, sweet, familiar face again hovered and the rainbow arched the sky. Oh, we never get away from the benediction of such a face! It looks at us through storm and night. It smiles all to pieces the world's frown. After thirty-five years of rough, tumbling on the world's couch, it puts us in the cradle again, and hushes us as with the very lullaby of heaven.

One of the great wants of the age is the right kind of a cradle and the right kind of a foot to rock it. We are opposed to the usurpation of "patented self-rockers." When I hear a boy calling his grandfather "old daddy," and see the youngster whacking his mother across the face because she will not let him have ice-cream and lemonade in the same stomach, and at some refusal holding his breath till he gets black in the face, so that to save the child from fits the mother is compelled to give him another dumpling, and he afterward goes out into the world stubborn, willful, selfish and intractable,—I say that boy was brought up in a "patented self-rocker." The old-time mother would have put him down in the old-fashioned cradle, and sung to him,

and if that did not take the spunk put of him would have laid him in an inverted position across her lap, with his face downward, and with a rousing spank made him more susceptible to the music.

So far as possible, let all women dress beautifully: so God dresses the meadows and the mountains. Let them wear pearls and diamonds if they can afford it: God has hung round the neck of his world strings of diamonds, and braided the black locks of the storm with bright ribbons of rainbow. Especially before and right after breakfast, ere they expect to be seen of the world, let them look neat and attractive for the family's sake. One of the most hideous sights is a slovenly woman at the breakfast table. Let woman adorn herself. Let her speak on platforms so far as she may have time and ability to do so. But let not mothers imagine that there is any new way of successfully training children, or of escaping the old-time self-denial and continuous painstaking.

Let this be the commencement of the law suit:

Attorneys for plaintiff—all the cherished memories of the past.

Attorneys for the defendant—all the humbugs of the present.

For jury—the good sense of all Christendom.

Crier, open the court and let the jury be empaneled.

A HORSE'S LETTER.

[TRANSLATED FOR THE TEA-TABLE.]

Brooklyn Livery Stables,

January 20, 1874.

My dear Gentlemen and Ladies: I am aware that this is the first time a horse has ever taken upon himself to address any member of the human family. True, a second cousin of our household once addressed Balaam, but his voice for public speaking was so poor that he got unmercifully whacked, and never tried it again. We have endured in silence all the outrages of many thousands of years, but feel it now time to make remonstrance. Recent attentions have made us aware of our worth. During the epizoötic epidemic we had at our stables innumerable calls from doctors and judges and clergymen. Everybody asked about our health. Groomsmen bathed our throats, and sat up with us nights, and furnished us pocket-handkerchiefs. For the first time in years we had quiet Sundays. We overheard a conversation that made us think that the commerce and the fashion of the world waited the news from the stable. Telegraphs announced our condition across the land and under the sea, and we came to believe that this world was originally made for the horse, and man for his groom.

But things are going back again to where they were. Yesterday I was driven fifteen miles, jerked in the mouth, struck on the back, watered when I was too warm; and instead of the six quarts of oats that my driver ordered for me, I got two. Last week I was driven to a wedding, and I heard music and quick feet and laughter that made the chandeliers rattle, while I stood unblanketed in the cold. Sometimes the doctor hires me, and I stand at twenty doors waiting for invalids to rehearse all their pains. Then the minister hires me, and I have to stay till Mrs. Tittle-Tattle has time to tell the dominie all the disagreeable things of the parish.

The other night, after our owner had gone home and the hostlers were asleep, we held an indignation meeting in our livery stable. "Old Sorrel" presided, and there was a long line of vice-presidents and secretaries, mottled bays and dappled grays and chestnuts, and Shetland and Arabian ponies. "Charley," one of the old inhabitants of the stable, began a speech, amid great stamping on the part of the audience. But he soon broke down for lack of wind. For five years he had been suffering with the "heaves." Then "Pompey," a venerable nag, took his place; and though he had nothing to say, he held out his spavined leg, which dramatic posture excited the utmost enthusiasm of the audience. "Fanny Shetland," the property of a lady, tried to damage the meeting by saying that horses had no wrongs. She said, "Just look at my embroidered blanket. I never go out when the weather is bad. Everybody who comes near pats me on the shoulder. What can be more beautiful than going out on a sunshiny afternoon to make an excursion through the park, amid the clatter of the hoofs of the stallions? I walk, or pace, or canter, or gallop, as I choose. Think of the beautiful life we live, with the prospect, after our easy work is done, of going up and joining Elijah's horses of fire."

Next, I took the floor, and said that I was born in a warm, snug Pennsylvania barn; was, on my father's side, descended from Bucephalus; on my mother's side, from a steed that Queen Elizabeth rode in a steeple chase. My youth was passed in clover pastures and under trusses of sweet-smelling hay. I flung my heels in glee at the farmer when he came to catch me. But on a dark day I was over-driven, and my joints stiffened, and my fortunes went down, and my whole family was sold. My brother, with head down and sprung in the knees, pulls the street car. My sister makes her living on the tow path, hearing the canal boys swear. My aunt died of the epizoötic. My uncle—blind, and afflicted with the bots, the ringbone and the spring-halt—wanders about the commons, trying to persuade somebody to shoot him. And here I stand, old and sick, to cry out against the wrongs of horses—the saddles that gall, the spurs that prick, the snaffles that pinch, the loads that kill.

At this a vicious-looking nag, with mane half pulled out, and a "watch-eye," and feet "interfering," and a tail from which had been subtracted enough hair to make six "waterfalls," squealed out the suggestion that it was time for a rebellion, and she moved that we take the field, and that all those who could kick should kick, and that all those who could bite should bite, and that all those who could bolt should bolt, and that all those who could run away should run away, and that thus we fill the land with broken wagons and smashed heads, and teach our oppressors that the day of retribution has come, and that our down-trodden race will no more be trifled with.

When this resolution was put to vote, not one said "Aye," but all cried "Nay, nay," and for the space of half an hour kept on neighing. Instead of this harsh measure, it was voted that, by the hand of Henry Bergh, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I should write this letter of remonstrance.

My dear gentlemen and ladies, remember that we, like yourselves, have moods, and cannot always be frisky and cheerful. You do not slap your grandmother in the face because this morning she does not feel as well as usual; why, then do you slash us? Before you pound us, ask whether we have been up late the night before, or had our meals at irregular hours, or whether our spirits have been depressed by being kicked by a drunken hostler. We have only about ten or twelve years in which to enjoy ourselves, and then we go out to be shot into nothingness. Take care of us while you may. Job's horse was "clothed with thunder," but all we ask is a plain blanket. When we are sick, put us in a "horse-pital." Do not strike us when we stumble or scare. Suppose you were in the harness and I were in the wagon, I had the whip and you the traces, what an ardent advocate you would be for kindness to the irrational creation! Do not let the blacksmith drive the nail into the quick when he shoes me, or burn my fetlocks with a hot file. Do not mistake the "dead-eye" that nature put on my foreleg for a wart to be exterminated. Do not cut off my tail short in fly-time. Keep the north wind out of our stables. Care for us at some other time than during the epizoötics, so that we may see your kindness is not selfish.

My dear friends, our interests are mutual. I am a silent partner in your business. Under my sound hoof is the diamond of national prosperity. Beyond my nostril the world's progress may not go. With thrift, and wealth, and comfort, I daily race neck and neck. Be kind to me if you want me to be useful to you. And near be the day when the red horse of war shall be hocked and impotent, and the pale horse of death shall be hurled back on his haunches, but the white horse of peace, and joy, and triumph shall pass on, its rider with face like the sun, all nations following!

Your most obedient servant,

Charley Bucephalus.

KINGS OF THE KENNEL.

I said, when I lost Carlo, that I would never own another dog. We all sat around, like big children, crying about it; and what made the grief worse, we had no sympathizers. Our neighbors were glad of it, for he had not always done the fair thing with them. One of them had lost a chicken when it was stuffed and all ready for the pan, and suspicions were upon Carlo.

I was the only counsel for the defendant; and while I had to acknowledge that the circumstantial evidence was against him, I proved his general character for integrity, and showed that the common and criminal law were on our side, Coke and Blackstone in our favor, and a long list of authorities and decisions: II. Revised Statutes, New York, 132, § 27; also, Watch vs. Towser, Crompton and Meeson, p. 375; also, State of New Jersey vs. Sicem Blanchard.

When I made these citations, my neighbor and his wife, who were judges and jurors in the case, looked confounded; and so I followed up the advantage I had gained with the law maxim, "Non minus ex dolo quam ex culpa quisque hac lege tenetur," which I found afterward was the wrong Latin, but it had its desired effect, so that the jury did not agree, and Carlo escaped with his life; and on the way home he went spinning round like a top, and punctuating his glee with a semicolon made by both paws on my new clothes.

He knows more than a great many people. Never do we take a walk but the poodles, and the rat-terriers, and the grizzly curs with stringy hair and damp nose, get after him. They tumble off the front door step and out of the kennels, and assault him front and rear. I have several times said to him (not loud enough for Presbytery to hear), "Nick, why do you stand all this? Go at them!" He never takes my advice. He lets them bark and snap, and passes on unprovokedly without sniff or growl. He seems to say, "They are not worth minding. Let them bark. It pleases them and don't hurt me. I started out for a six-mile tramp, and I cannot be diverted. Newfoundlanders like me have a mission. My father pulled three drowning men to the beach, and my uncle on my mother's side saved a child from the snow. If you have anything brave, or good, or great for me to do, just clap your hand and point out the work, and I will do it, but I cannot waste my time on rat-terriers."

Many an author has got a drop of printers' ink spattered in his eye, and collapsed. The critic who had lobsters for supper the night before, and whose wife in the morning had parted his hair on the wrong side, snarled at the new book, and the time that the author might have spent in new work he squanders in gunning for critics. You might better have gone straight ahead, Nick! You will come to be estimated for exactly what you are worth. If a fool, no amount of newspaper or magazine puffery can set you up; and if you are useful, no amount of newspaper or magazine detraction can keep you down. For every position there are twenty aspirants; only one man can get it; forthwith the other nineteen are on the offensive. People are silly enough to think that they can build themselves up with the bricks they pull out of your wall. Pass on and leave them. What a waste of powder for a hunter to go into the woods to shoot black flies, or for a man of great work to notice infinitesimal assault! My Newfoundland would scorn to be seen making a drive at a black-and-tan terrier.

Nick's head was up, but I advised him that he had better keep out of that canine misunderstanding. But he gave one look, as much as to say, "Here at last is an occasion worthy of me," and at that dashed into the fray. There had been no order in the fight before, but as Nick entered they all pitched at him. They took him fore, and aft, and midships. It was a greater undertaking than he had anticipated. He shook, and bit, and hauled, and howled. He wanted to get out of the fight, but found that more difficult than to get in.

Now, if there is anything I like, it is fair play. I said, "Count me in!" and with stick and other missiles I came in like Blucher at nightfall. Nick saw me and plucked up courage, and we gave it to them right and left, till our opponents went scampering down the hill, and I laid down the weapons of conflict and resumed my profession as a minister, and gave the mortified dog some good advice on keeping out of scrapes, which homily had its proper effect, for with head down and penitent look, he jogged back with me to the city.

Lesson for dogs and men: Keep out of fights. If you see a church contest, or a company of unsanctified females overhauling each other's good name until there is nothing left of them but a broken hoop skirt and one curl of back hair, you had better stand clear. Once go in, and your own character will be an invitation to their muzzles. Nick's long, clean ear was a temptation to all the teeth. You will have enough battles of your own, without getting a loan of conflicts at twenty per cent a month.

THE MASSACRE OF CHURCH MUSIC.

There has been an effort made for the last twenty years to kill congregational singing. The attempt has been tolerably successful; but it seems to me that some rules might be given by which the work could be done more quickly, and completely. What is the use of having it lingering on in this uncertain way? Why not put it out of its misery? If you are going to kill a snake, kill it thoroughly, and do not let it keep on wagging its tail till sundown. Congregational singing is a nuisance, anyhow, to many of the people. It interferes with their comfort. It offends their taste. It disposes their nose to flexibility in the upward direction. It is too democratic in its tendency. Down with congregational singing, and let us have no more of it.

The first rule for killing it is to have only such tunes as the people cannot sing!

Beside that, if you let them sing one tune at a service, they will be putting their oar into the other tunes and bothering the choir. There is nothing more annoying to the choir than, at some moment when they have drawn out a note to exquisite fineness, thin as a split hair, to have some blundering elder to come in with a "Praise ye the Lord!" Total abstinence, I say! Let all the churches take the pledge even against the milder musical beverages; for they who tamper with champagne cider soon get to Hock and old Burgundy.

Now, if all the tunes are new, there will be no temptation to the people. They will not keep humming along, hoping they will find some bars down where they can break into the clover pasture. They will take the tune as an inextricable conundrum, and give it up. Besides that, Pisgah, Ortonville and Brattle Street are old fashioned. They did very well in their day. Our fathers were simple-minded people, and the tunes fitted them. But our fathers are gone, and they ought to have taken their baggage with them. It is a nuisance to have those old tunes floating around the church, and sometime, just as we have got the music as fine as an opera, to have a revival of religion come, and some new-born soul break out in "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me!" till the organist stamps the pedal with indignation, and the leader of the tune gets red in the face and swears. Certainly anything that makes a man swear is wrong—ergo, congregational singing is wrong. "Quod erat demonstrandum;" which, being translated, means "Plain as the nose on a man's face."

My wife, seated beside me, did not like the music. But I said: "What beautiful sentiment! My dear, it is a pastoral. You might have known that from 'Wo-haw-gee!' You have had your taste ruined by attending the Brooklyn Tabernacle." The choir repeated the last line of the hymn four times. Then the prima donna leaped on to the first line, and slipped, and fell on to the second, and that broke and let her through into the third. The other voices came in to pick her up, and got into a grand wrangle, and the bass and the soprano had it for about ten seconds; but the soprano beat (women always do), and the bass rolled down into the cellar, and the soprano went up into the garret, but the latter kept on squalling as though the bass, in leaving her, had wickedly torn out all her back hair. I felt anxious about the soprano, and looked back to see if she had fainted; but found her reclining in the arms of a young man who looked strong enough to take care of her.

But let us come as near to it as we can. The tune "Pisgah" has been standing long enough on "Jordan's stormy banks." Let it pass over and get out of the wet weather. Good-bye, "Antioch," "Harwell" and "Boylston." Good-bye till we meet in glory.

If after three months of taking these two prescriptions the congregational singing is not thoroughly dead, send me a letter directed to my name, with the title of O.F.M. (Old Fogy in Music), and I will, on the receipt thereof, write Another prescription, which I am sure will kill it dead as a door nail, and that is the deadest thing in all history.

THE BATTLE OF PEW AND PULPIT.

Two more sermons unloaded, and Monday morning I went sauntering down town, ready for almost anything. I met several of my clerical friends going to a ministers' meeting. I do not often go there, for I have found that some of the clerical meetings are gridirons where they roast clergymen who do not do things just as we do them. I like a Presbyterian gridiron no better than a Methodist one, and prefer to either of them an old-fashioned spit, such as I saw one summer in Oxford, England, where the rabbit is kept turning round before a slow fire, in blessed state of itinerancy, the rabbit thinking he is merely taking a ride, while he is actually roasting.

As on the Monday morning I spoke of I was passing down the street, I heard high words in a church. What could it be? Was it the minister, and the sexton, and the trustees fighting? I went in to see, when, lo! I found that the Pew and the Pulpit were bantering each other at a great rate, and seemed determined to tell each one the other's faults. I stood still as a mouse that I might hear all that was said, and my presence not be noticed.

The Pulpit: "You keep me so poor I cannot buy the books necessary to keep me fresh. After the babies are clothed, and the table is provided for, and the wardrobe supplied, my purse is empty, and you know the best carpenter cannot make good shingles without tools. Better pay up your back salary instead of sitting there howling at me. You eased your conscience by subscribing for the support of the gospel, but the Lord makes no record of what a man subscribes; he waits to see whether he pays. The poor widow with the two mites is applauded in Scripture because she paid cash down. I have always noticed that you Pews make a big noise about Pulpit deficiencies, just in proportion to the little you do. The fifty cents you pay is only premium on your policy of five dollars' worth of grumbling. O critical Pew! you had better scour the brass number on your own door before you begin to polish the silver knob on mine."

THE DEVIL'S GRIST-MILL.

The above name has been given to one of the geysers of California, that group of boiling springs, now famous. Indeed, the whole region has been baptized with Satanic nomenclature.

The guide showed us what he called the "Devil's Mush-pot," the "Devil's Pulpit," the "Devil's Machine Shop," and, hearing a shrill whistle in the distance, we were informed it was the "Devil's Tea-kettle." Seeing some black water rushing from a fountain, from which the people of the neighborhood and tourists dip up genuine ink, we were told it was the "Devil's Ink-stand." Indeed, you are prepared for this on the Pacific Railroad, as your guide book points you to the "Devil's Gate," and the "Devil's Slide," and the "Devil's Peak."

We protest against this surrender of all the geysers to the arch demon. All the writers talk of the place as infernal. We do not believe this place so near to hell as to heaven. We doubt if Satan ever comes here. He knows enough of hot climates, by experience, to fly from the hiss of these subterraneous furnaces. Standing amid the roaring, thundering, stupendous wonder of two hundred spouting water springs, we felt like crying out, "Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God almighty!"

The whole scene is unique and incomparable. The Yosemite makes us think of the Alps; San Francisco reminds us of Chicago; Foss, the stage driver, hurling his passengers down the mountain at break-neck speed, suggests the driver of an Alpine diligence; Hutchings' mountain horse, that stumbled and fell flat upon us, suggested our mule-back experiences in Tête Noir Pass of Switzerland; but the geysers remind us of nothing that we ever saw, or ever expect to see. They have a voice, a bubble, a smoke, a death-rattle, peculiar to themselves. No photographist can picture them, no words describe them, no fancy sketch them.

The fact is that no one can afford in California to take the same route twice, for each one has a glory of its own. If a traveler have but one day for the Louvre Gallery, he cannot afford to spend it all in one corridor; and as California is one great picture gallery, filled with the masterpieces of Him who paints with sunshine and dew and fire, and sculptures with chisel of hurricane and thunderbolt, we cannot afford to pass more than once before any canvas or marble.

There is a bang at your bed-room door at five-o'clock in the morning, rousing you to go up and explore them; and after spending an hour or two in wandering among them, you come back to the breakfast prepared by the model landlord of California, jolly, obliging, intelligent, reasonable. As you mount the stage for departure you give him a warm shake of the hand, and suggest that it would be a grand thing if some one with a vein of poetry in his mind and the faith of God in his heart would come round some day, and passing among the geysers with a sprinkle of hot steam, would baptize them with a Christian name.

Let us ascribe to Satan nothing that is grand, or creative, or wise. He could not make one of these grains of alum. He could not blow up one of these bubbles on the spring. He does some things that seem smart; but taking him all in all, he is the biggest fool in the universe.

If the devil wants to boil his "Tea-kettle," or stir his "Mush-pot," or whirl his "Grist-mill," let him do it in his own territory. Meanwhile, let the water and the fire and the vapor, at the lift of David's orchestral baton, praise the Lord!

THE CONDUCTOR'S DREAM.

He had been on the train all day, had met all kinds of people, received all sorts of treatment, punctured all kinds of tickets, shouted "All out!" and "All aboard!" till throat, and head, and hand, and foot were weary. It would be a long while before we would get to another depot, and so he sagged down in the corner of the car to sleep. He was in the most uncomfortable position possible. The wind blew in his neck, his arm was hung over the back of the seat, he had one foot under him, and his knee pressing hard against a brass hinge. In that twisted and convoluted position he fell asleep, and soon began to dream.

PUSH & PULL.

We have long been acquainted with a business firm whose praises have never been sung. I doubt whether their names are ever mentioned on Exchange. They seem to be doing more business and have more branch houses than the Stewarts or Lippincotts. You see their names almost everywhere on the door. It is the firm of Push & Pull. They generally have one of their partners' names on outside of the door, and the other on the inside: "Push" on the outside and "Pull" on the inside. I have found their business-houses in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, London and Edinburgh. It is under my eye, whether I go to buy a hat, a shawl, or a paper of pins, or watch, or ream of foolscap. They are in all kinds of business; and from the way they branch out, and put up new stores, and multiply their signboards on the outside and inside of doors, I conclude that the largest business firm on earth to-day is Push & Pull.

When these gentlemen join the church, they make things go along vigorously. The roof stops leaking; a new carpet blooms on the church floor; the fresco is retouched; the high pulpit is lowered till it comes into the same climate with the pew; strangers are courteously seated; the salary of the minister is paid before he gets hopelessly in debt to butcher and baker; and all is right, financially and spiritually, because Push & Pull have connected themselves with the enterprise.

These men can do anything they set their hands to—publish a newspaper, lay out a street, build a house, control a railroad, manage a church, revolutionize a city. In fact, any two industrious, honorable, enterprising men can accomplish wonders. One does the out-door work of the store, and the other the indoor work. One leads, the other follows; but both working in one direction, all obstacles are leveled before them.

I wish that more of our young men could graduate from the store of Push & Pull. We have tens of thousands of young men doing nothing. There must be work somewhere if they will only do it. They stand round, with soap locks and scented pocket-handkerchiefs, tipping their hats to the ladies; while, instead of waiting for business to come to them, they ought to go to work and make a business. Here is the ladder of life. The most of those who start at the top of the ladder spend their life in coming down, while those who start at the bottom may go up. Those who are born with a gold spoon in their mouth soon lose the spoon. The two school bullies that used to flourish their silk pocket-handkerchiefs in my face, and with their ivory-handled, four-bladed knives punch holes through my kite—one of them is in the penitentiary, and the other ought to be.

If you cannot get the right kind of business partner, marry a good, honest wife. Fine cheeks and handsome curls are very well, but let them be mere incidentals. Let our young men select practical women; there are a few of them left. With such a one you can get on with almost all heavy loads of life. You will be Pull, and she Push; and if you do not get the house built and the fortune established, send me word, and I will tear this article up in such small pieces that no one will ever be able to find it.

Life is earnest work, and cannot be done with the tips of the fingers. We want more crowbars and fewer gold toothpicks. The obstacles before you cannot be looked out of countenance by a quizzing glass. Let sloth and softliness go to the wall, but three cheers for Push & Pull, and all their branch business houses!

BOSTONIANS.

We ran up to the Boston anniversaries to cast our vote with those good people who are in that city on the side of the right. We like to go to the modern Athens two or three times a year. Among other advantages, Boston always soothes our nerves. It has a quieting effect upon us. The people there are better satisfied than any people we know of. Judging from a few restless spirits who get on some of the erratic platforms of that city, and who fret and fume about things in general, the world has concluded that Boston is at unrest. But you may notice that the most of the restless people who go there are imported speakers, whom Boston hires to come once a year and do for her all the necessary fretting.

The genuine Bostonian is satisfied. He rises moderately early, goes to business without any especial haste, dresses comfortably, talks deliberately, lunches freely, and goes home to his family at plausible hours. He would like to have the world made better, but is not going to make himself sick in trying to cure the moral ailments of others.

The ladies of Boston have more color in their cheeks than those of many cities, and walk as though they would live to get round the next corner. It is not so fashionable to be delicate. They are robust in mind and always ready for an argument. State what you consider an indisputable proposition, and they will say: "Yes, but then—" They are not afraid to attack the theology of a minister, or the jurisprudence of a lawyer, or the pharmacy of a doctor. If you do not look out, the Boston woman will throw off her shawl and upset your logic in a public meeting.

We like the men and women of Boston. They have opinions about everything—some of them adverse to your own, but even in that case so well expressed that, in admiration for the rhetoric, you excuse the divergence of sentiment. We never found a half-and-half character in Boston. The people do not wait till they see which way the smoke of their neighbors' chimneys blows before they make up their own minds.

The most conspicuous book on the parlor table of the hotels of other cities is a book of engravings or a copy of the Bible. In some of the Boston hotels, the prominent book on the parlor table is "Webster's Unabridged Dictionary." You may be left in doubt about the Bostonian's character, but need not doubt his capacity to parse a sentence, or spell without any resemblance of blunder the word "idiosyncrasy."

There are fewer dandies in Boston than in most cities. Clothes, as a general thing, do not make fun of the people they sit on. The humps on the ladies' backs are not within two feet of being as high as in some of the other cities, and a dromedary could look at them without thinking itself caricatured. You see more of the outlandishness of fashion in one day on Broadway than in a week on any one street of Boston. Doubtless, Boston is just as proud as New York, but her pride is that of brains, and those, from the necessities of the case, are hidden.

The anniversary week in Boston closed by a display of flowers and fruits in Horticultural Hall. It was appropriate that philanthropists and Christians, hot from discussions of moral and religious topics, should go in and take a bath of rose leaves and geraniums. Indeed, I think the sweetest anniversary of the week was that of these flowers. A large rhododendron presided. Azaleas and verbenas took part in the meeting. The Chinese honeysuckle and clematis joined in the doxology. A magnolia pronounced the benediction. And we went home praying for the time when the lily of the valley shall be planted in every heart, and the desert shall blossom as the rose.

JONAH VERSUS THE WHALE.

Unbelievers have often told us that the story of the prophet swallowed by a great fish was an absurdity. They say that, so long in the stomach of the monster, the minister would have been digested. We have no difficulty in this matter. Jonah, was a most unwilling guest of the whale. He wanted to get out. However much he may have liked fish, he did not want it three times a day and all the time. So he kept up a fidget, and a struggle, and a turning over, and he gave the whale no time to assimilate him. The man knew that if he was ever to get out he must be in perpetual motion. We know men that are so lethargic they would have given the matter up, and lain down so quietly that in a few hours they would have gone into flukes and fish bones, blow-holes and blubber.

SOMETHING UNDER THE SOFA.

Not more than twenty-five miles from New York city, and not more than two years ago, there stood a church in which occurred a novelty. We promised not to tell; but as we omit all names, we think ourselves warranted in writing the sketch. The sacred edifice had stood more than a hundred years, until the doors were rickety, and often stood open during the secular week. The window glass in many places had been broken out. The shingles were off and the snow drifted in, and the congregation during a shower frequently sat under the droppings of the sanctuary. All of which would have been a matter for sympathy, had it not been for the fact that the people of the neighborhood were nearly all wealthy, and lived in large and comfortable farm houses, making the appearance of their church a fit subject for satire.

The pulpit was giving way with the general wreck, was unpainted, and the upholstery on book-board and sofa seemed calling out with Jew's voice, "Any old clo'? Any old clo'?" One Sabbath, the minister felt some uneasiness under the sofa while the congregation were singing, and could not imagine the cause; but found out the next day that a maternal cat had made her nest there with her group of offspring, who had entered upon mortal life amid these honorable surroundings.

We see many churches in city as well as town that need rehabilitation and reconstruction. People of a neighborhood have no right to live in houses better constructed than their church. Better touch up the fresco, and put on a new roof, and tear out the old pews which ignore the shape of a man's back, and supersede the smoky lamps by clarified kerosene or cheap gas brackets. Lower you high pulpit that your preacher may come down from the Mont Blanc of his isolation and solitariness into the same climate of sympathy with his audience. Tear away the old sofa, ragged and spring-broken, on which the pastors of forty years have been obliged to sit, and see whether there are any cats in your antediluvian pulpit.

Whenever we see a professed minister of religion lacking in frankness of soul, deceitful in his friendship, shaking hands heartily when you meet him, but in private taking every possible opportunity of giving you a long, deep scratch, or in public newspapers giving you a sly dig with the claw of his pen, we say: "Another cat in the pulpit!"

Once a year let all our churches be cleaned with soap, and sand, and mop, and scrubbing brush, and the sexton not forget to give one turn of his broom under the pastor's chair. Would that with one bold and emphatic "scat!" we could drive the last specimen of deceitfulness and skulking from the American pulpit!

THE WAY TO KEEP FRESH.

How to get out of the old rut without twisting off the wheel, or snapping the shafts, or breaking the horse's leg, is a question not more appropriate to every teamster than to every Christian worker. Having once got out of the old rut, the next thing is to keep out. There is nothing more killing than ecclesiastical humdrum. Some persons do not like the Episcopal Church because they have the same prayers every Sabbath, but have we not for the last ten years been hearing the same prayers over and over again, the product of a self-manufactured liturgy that has not the thousandth part of the excellency of those petitions that we hear in the Episcopal Church?

In many of our churches sinners hear the same exhortations that they have been hearing for the last fifteen years, so that the impenitent man knows, the moment the exhorter clears his throat, just what is going to be said; and the hearer himself is able to recite the exhortation as we teach our children the multiplication table forward or backward. We could not understand the doleful strain of a certain brother's prayer till we found out that he composed it on a fast day during the yellow fever in 1821, and has been using it ever since.

If we would keep fresh, let us make occasional excursions into other circles than our own. Artists generally go with artists, farmers with farmers, mechanics with mechanics, clergymen with clergymen, Christian workers with Christian workers. But there is nothing that sooner freshens one up than to get in a new group, mingling with people whose thought and work run in different channels. For a change put the minister on the hay rack and the farmer in the clergyman's study.

Let us read books not in our own line. After a man has been delving in nothing but theological works for three months, a few pages in the Patent-office Report will do him more good than Doctor Dick on "The Perseverance of the Saints." Better than this, as a diversion, is it to have some department of natural history or art to which you may turn, a case of shells or birds, or a season ticket to some picture gallery. If you do nothing but play on one string of the bass viol, you will wear it out and get no healthy tune. Better take the bow and sweep it clear across in one grand swirl, bringing all four strings and all eight stops into requisition.

We cannot see the natural world through the books or the eyes of others. All this talk about "babbling brooks" is a stereotyped humbug. Brooks never "babble." To babble is to be unintelligent and imperfect of tongue. But when the brooks speak, they utter lessons of beauty that the dullest ear can understand. We have wandered from the Androscoggin in Maine to the Tombigbee in Alabama, and we never found a brook, that "babbled." The people babble who talk about them, not knowing what a brook is. We have heard about the nightingale and the morning lark till we tire of them. Catch for your next prayer meeting talk a chewink or a brown thresher. It is high time that we hoist our church windows, especially those over the pulpit, and let in some fresh air from the fields and mountains.

CHRISTMAS BELLS.

The sexton often goes into the tower on a sad errand. He gives a strong pull at the rope, and forth from the tower goes a dismal sound that makes the heart sink. But he can now go up the old stairs with a lithe step and pull quick and sharp, waking up all the echoes of cavern and hill with Christmas bells. The days of joy have come, days of reunion, days of congratulation. "Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy that shall be to all people."

First, let the bells ring at the birth of Jesus! Mary watching, the camels moaning, the shepherds rousing up, the angels hovering, all Bethlehem stirring. What a night! Out of its black wing is plucked the pen from which to write the brightest songs of earth and the richest doxologies of heaven. Let camel or ox stabled that night in Bethlehem, after the burden-bearing of the day, stand and look at Him who is to carry the burdens of the world. Put back the straw and hear the first cry of Him who is come to assuage the lamentation of all ages.

Christmas bells ring in family reunions! The rail trains crowded with children coming home. The poultry, fed as never since they were born, stand wondering at the farmer's generosity. The markets are full of massacred barnyards. The great table will be spread and crowded with two, or three, or four generations. Plant the fork astride the breast bone, and with skillful twitch, that we could never learn, give to all the hungry lookers-on a specimen of holiday anatomy. Mary is disposed to soar, give her the wing. The boy is fond of music, give him the drum stick. The minister is dining with you, give him the parson's nose. May the joy reach from grandfather, who is so dreadful old he can hardly find the way to his plate, down to the baby in the high chair with one smart pull of the table cloth upsetting the gravy into the cranberry. Send from your table a liberal portion to the table of the poor, some of the white meat as well as the dark, not confining your generosity to gizzards and scraps. Do not, as in some families, keep a plate and chair for those who are dead and gone. Your holiday feast would be but poor fare for them; they are at a better banquet in the skies.

Let the whole land be full of chime and carol. Let bells, silver and brazen, take their sweetest voice, and all the towers of Christendom rain music.

We wish all our friends a merry Christmas. Let them hang up their stockings; and if Santa Claus has any room for us in his sleigh, we will get in and ride down their chimney, upsetting all over the hearth a thousand good wishes.

POOR PREACHING.

There never was a time when in all denominations of Christians there was so much attractive sermonizing as to-day. Princeton, and Middletown, and Rochester, and New Brunswick, are sending into the ministry a large number of sharp, earnest, consecrated men. Stupidity, after being regularly ordained, is found to be no more acceptable to the people than before, and the title of Doctorate cannot any longer be substituted for brains. Perhaps, however, there may get to be a surfeit of fine discourses. Indeed, we have so many appliances for making bright and incisive preachers that we do not know but that after a while, when we want a sleepy discourse as an anodyne, we shall have to go to the ends of the earth to find one; and dull sermons may be at a premium, congregations of limited means not being able to afford them at all; and so we shall have to fall back on chloral or morphine.

Are we not, therefore, doing a humanitarian work when we give to congregations some rules by which, if they want it, they may always have poor preaching?

Secondly. For securing poor preaching, wait on your pastor with frequent committees. Let three men some morning tie their horses at the dominie's gate, and go in and tell him how to preach, and pray, and visit. Tell him all the disagreeable things said about him for six months, and what a great man his predecessor was, how much plainer his wife dressed, and how much better his children behaved. Pastoral committees are not like the small-pox—you can have them more than once; they are more like the mumps, which you may have first on one side and then on the other. If, after a man has had the advantage of being manipulated by three church committees, he has any pride or spirit left, better give him up as incorrigible.

SHELVES A MAN'S INDEX.

In Chelsea, a suburb of London, and on a narrow street, with not even a house in front, but, instead thereof, a long range of brick wall, is the house of Thomas Carlyle. You go through a narrow hall and turn to the left, and are in the literary workshop where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world have been forged. The two front windows have on them scant curtains of reddish calico, hung at the top of the lower sash, so as not to keep the sun from looking down, but to hinder the street from looking in.

The room has a lounge covered with the same material, and of construction such as you would find in the plainest house among the mountains. It looks as if it had been made by an author not accustomed to saw or hammer, and in the interstices of mental work. On the wall are a few wood-cuts in plain frames or pinned against the wall; also a photograph of Mr. Carlyle taken one day, as his family told us, when he had a violent toothache and could attend to nothing else, it is his favorite picture, though it gives him a face more than ordinarily severe and troubled.

We had there confirmed our former theory of a man's study as only a part of himself, or a piece of tight-fitting clothing. It is the shell of the tortoise, just made to fit the tortoise's back. Thomas Carlyle could have no other kind of a workshop. What would he do with a damask-covered table, or a gilded inkstand, or an upholstered window? Starting with the idea that the intellect is all and the body naught but an adjunct or appendage, he will show that the former can live and thrive without any approval of the latter. He will give the intellect all costly stimulus, and send the body supperless to bed. Thomas Carlyle taken as a premise, this shabby room is the inevitable conclusion. Behold the principle.

We have a very precise friend. Everything is in severe order. Finding his door-knob in the dark, you could reason out the position of stove, and chair, and table; and placing an arrow at the back of the book on one end of the shelf, it would fly to the other end, equally grazing all the bindings. It is ten years since John Milton, or Robert Southey, or Sir William Hamilton have been out of their places, and that was when an ignoramus broke into the study. The volumes of the encyclopedias never change places. Manuscripts unblotted, and free from interlineation, and labeled. The spittoon knows its place in the corner, as if treated by tobacco chewers with oft indignity. You could go into that study with your eyes shut, turn around, and without feeling for the chair throw yourself back with perfect confidence that the furniture would catch you. No better does a hat fit his head, or shoe his foot, or the glove his hand, than the study fits his whole nature.

We have a friend of many peculiarities. Entering his house, you find nothing in the place where you expected it. "Don Quixote," with, all its windmills mixed up with "Dr. Dick on the Sacraments," Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog," and "Charnock on the Attributes." Passing across the room, you stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake his essay on the "Copernican System" for blotting paper. Many of his books are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers, Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If, some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is absent, to "clear up," a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For many days the question is, "Where is my pen? Who has the concordance? What on earth has become of the dictionary? Where is the paper cutter?" Work is impeded, patience lost, engagements are broken, because it was not understood that the study is a part of the student's life, and that you might as well try to change the knuckles to the inside of the hand, or to set the eyes in the middle of the forehead, as to make the man of whom we speak keep his pen on the rack, or his books off the floor, or the blotting paper straight in the portfolio.

The gazelle will have soft fur, and the lion a shaggy hide, and the sanctum sanctorum is the student's cuticle.

BEHAVIOR AT CHURCH.

Around the door of country meeting-houses it has always been the custom for the people to gather before and after church for social intercourse and the shaking of hands. Perhaps because we, ourselves, were born in the country and had never got over it, the custom pleases us. In the cities we arrive the last moment before service and go away the first moment after. We act as though the church were a rail-car, into which we go when the time for starting arrives, and we get out again as soon as the depot of the Doxology is reached. We protest against this business way of doing things. Shake hands when the benediction is pronounced with those who sat before and those who sat behind you. Meet the people in the aisle, and give them Christian salutation. Postponement of the dining hour for fifteen minutes will damage neither you nor the dinner. That is the moment to say a comforting word to the man or woman in trouble. The sermon was preached to the people in general; it is your place to apply it to the individual heart.

The church aisle may be made the road to heaven. Many a man who was unaffected by what the minister said has been captured for God by the Christian word of an unpretending layman on the way out.

In Paul's time he told the Christians to greet each other with a holy kiss. We are glad the custom has been dropped, for there are many good people who would not want to kiss us, as we would not want to kiss them. Very attractive persons would find the supply greater than the demand. But let us have a substitute suited to our age and land. Let it be good, hearty, enthusiastic, Christian hand-shaking.

Governor Wiseman, our grave friend at tea, broke in upon us at this moment and said: I am not fond of indiscriminate hand-shaking, and so am not especially troubled by the lack of cordiality on the part of church-goers. But I am sometimes very much annoyed on Sabbaths with the habit of some good people in church. It may be foolish in me; but when the wind blows from the east, it takes but little to disturb me.

There is, for instance, the coughing brigade. If any individual right ought to be maintained at all hazards, it is the right of coughing. There are times when you must cough. There is an irresistible tickling in the throat which demands audible demonstration. It is moved, seconded and unanimously carried that those who have irritated windpipes be heard. But there are ways with hand or handkerchief of breaking the repercussion. A smothered cough is dignified and acceptable if you have nothing better to offer. But how many audiences have had their peace sacrificed by unrestrained expulsion of air through the glottis! After a sudden change in the weather, there is a fearful charge made by the coughing brigade. They open their mouths wide, and make the arches ring with the racket. They begin with a faint "Ahem!" and gradually rise and fall through all the scale of dissonance, as much as to say: "Hear, all ye good people! I have a cold! I have a bad cold! I have an awful bad cold! Hear how it racks me, tears me, torments me. It seems as if my diaphragm must be split. I took this awful bad cold the other night. I added to it last Sunday. Hear how it goes off! There it is again. Oh dear me! If I only had 'Brown's troches,' or the syrup of squills, or a mustard plaster, or a woolen stocking turned wrong side out around my neck!" Brethren and sisters who took cold by sitting in the same draught join the clamor, and it is glottis to glottis, and laryngitis to laryngitis, and a chorus of scrapings and explosions which make the service hideous for a preacher of sensitive nerves.

Governor Wiseman went on further to say that the habits of the pulpit sometimes annoyed him as much as the habits of the pew. The Governor said: I cannot bear the "preliminaries" of religious service.

By common consent the exercises in the churches going before the sermon are called "preliminaries." The dictionary says that a "preliminary" is that which precedes the main business. We do not think the sermon ought to be considered the main business. When a pastor at the beginning of the first prayer says "O God!" he has entered upon the most important duty of the service. We would not depreciate the sermon, but we plead for more attention to the "preliminaries." If a minister cannot get the attention of the people for prayer or Bible reading, it is his own fault. Much of the interest of a service depends upon how it is launched.

This idea is fostered by home elocutionary professors who would have the minister take the earlier exercises of the occasion to get his voice in tune. You must not speak out at first. It is to be a private interview between you and heaven. The people will listen to the low grumble, and think it must be very good if they could only hear it. As for ourselves, we refuse to put down our head in public prayer until we find out whether or not we are going to be able to hear. Though you preach like an angel, you will not say anything more important than that letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, or that Psalm of David which you have just now read to the backs of the heads of the congregation. Laymen and ministers, speak out! The opening exercises were not instituted to clear your voice, but to save souls. If need be, squeeze a lemon and eat "Brown's troches" for the sake of your voice before you go to church; but once there, make your first sentence resonant and mighty for God. An hour and a half is short time anyhow to get five hundred or five thousand people ready for heaven. It is thought classic and elegant to have a delicate utterance, and that loud tones are vulgar. But we never heard of people being converted by anything they could not hear. It is said that on the Mount of Olives Christ opened His mouth and taught them, by which we conclude He spake out distinctly. God has given most Christians plenty of lungs, but they are too lazy to use them. There are in the churches old people hard of hearing who, if the exercises be not clear and emphatic, get no advantage save that of looking at the blessed minister.

MASCULINE AND FEMININE.

There are men who suppose they have all the annoyances. They say it is the store that ruffles the disposition; but if they could only stay at home as do their wives, and sisters, and daughters, they would be, all the time, sweet and fair as a white pond lily. Let some of the masculine lecturers on placidity of temper try for one week the cares of the household and the family. Let the man sleep with a baby on one arm all night, and one ear open to the children with the whooping-cough in the adjoining apartment. Let him see the tray of crockery and the cook fall down stairs, and nothing saved but the pieces. Let the pump give out on a wash-day, and the stove pipe, when too hot for handling, get dislocated. Let the pudding come out of the stove stiff as a poker. Let the gossiping gabbler of next door come in and tell all the disagreeable things that neighbors have been saying. Let the lungs be worn out by staying indoors without fresh air, and the needle be threaded with nerves exhausted. After one week's household annoyances, he would conclude that Wall street is heaven and the clatter of the Stock Exchange rich as Beethoven's symphony.

Accompanying masculine criticism of woman's temper goes the popular criticism of woman's dress.

A convention has recently been held in Vineland, attended by the women who are opposed to extravagance in dress. They propose, not only by formal resolution, but by personal example, to teach the world lessons of economy by wearing less adornment and dragging fewer yards of silk.

We wish them all success, although we would have more confidence in the movement if so many of the delegates had not worn bloomer dress. Moses makes war upon that style of apparel in Deuteronomy xxii. 5: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto man." Nevertheless we favor every effort to stop the extravagant use of dry goods and millinery.

We have, however, no sympathy with the implication that women are worse than men in this respect. Men wear all they can without interfering with their locomotion, but man is such an awkward creature he cannot find any place on his body to hang a great many fineries. He could not get round in Wall street with eight or ten flounces, and a big-handled parasol, and a mountain of back hair. Men wear less than women, not because they are more moral, but because they cannot stand it. As it is, many of our young men are padded to a superlative degree, and have corns and bunions on every separate toe from wearing shoes too tight.

But the largest room in the world is room for improvement, and we would cheer on those who would attempt reformation either in male or female attire. Meanwhile, we rejoice that so many of the pearls, and emeralds, and amethysts, and diamonds of the world are coming in the possession of Christian women. Who knows but that the spirit of ancient consecration may some day come upon them, and it shall again be as it was in the time of Moses, that for the prosperity of the house of the Lord the women may bring their bracelets, and earrings, and tablets and jewels? The precious stones of earth will never have their proper place till they are set around the Pearl of Great Price.

LITERARY FELONY.

We have recently seen many elaborate discussions as to whether plagiarism is virtuous or criminal—in other words, whether writers may steal. If a minister can find a sermon better than any one he can make, why not preach it? If an author can find a paragraph for his book better than any he can himself manufacture, why not appropriate it?

That sounds well. But why not go further and ask, if a woman find a set of furs better than she has in her wardrobe, why not take them? If a man find that his neighbor has a cow full Alderney, while he has in his own yard only a scrawny runt, why not drive home the Alderney? Theft is taking anything that does not belong to you, whether it be sheep, oxen, hats, coats or literary material.

What every minister needs is a fresh message that day from the Lord. We would sell cheap all our parchments of licensure to preach. God gives his ministers a license every Sabbath and a new message. He sends none of us out so mentally poor that we have nothing to furnish but a cold hash of other people's sermons. Our haystack is large enough for all the sheep that come round it, and there is no need of our taking a single forkful from any other barrack. By all means use all the books you can get at, but devour them, chew them fine and digest them, till they become a part of the blood and bone of your own nature. There is no harm in delivering an oration or sermon belonging to some one else provided you so announce it. Quotation marks are cheap, and let us not be afraid to use them. Do you know why "quotation" marks are made up of four commas, two at the head of the paragraph adopted and two at the close of it? Those four commas mean that you should stop four times before you steal anything.

Sermons are successful not according to the head involved in them, but according to the heart implied, and no one can feel aright while preaching a literary dishonesty. Let us be content to wear our own coat, though the nap on it is not quite as well looking, to ride on our own horse, though he do not gallop as gracefully and will "break up" when others are passing. There is a work for us all to do, and God gives us just the best tools to do it. What folly to be hankering after our neighbor's chalk line and gimlet!

LITERARY ABSTINENCE.

It is as much an art not to read as to read. With what pains, and thumps, and whacks at school we first learned the way to put words together!

We did not mind so much being whipped by the schoolmaster for not knowing how to read our lesson, but to have to go out ourselves and cut the hickory switch with which the chastisement was to be inflicted seemed to us then, as it does now, a great injustice.

Notwithstanding all our hard work in learning to read we find it quite as hard now to learn how not to read. There are innumerable books and newspapers from which one had better abstain.

There are but very few newspapers which it is safe to read all through, though we know of one that it is best to peruse from beginning to end, but modesty forbids us stating which one that is. In this day readers need as never before to carry a sieve.

It requires some heroism to say you have not read such and such a book. Your friend gives you a stare which implies your literary inferiority. Do not, in order to answer the question affirmatively, wade through indiscriminate slush.

Whether young or old, be cautious about what you read in the newspapers. You cannot day after day go through three columns of murder trial without being a worse man than when you began. While you are trying to find out whether Stokes was lying in wait for Fisk, Satan is lying in wait for you. Skip that half page of divorce case. Keep out of the mud. The Burdell and Sickles cases, through the unclean reading they afforded to millions of people long ago, led their thousands into abandoned lives and pitched them off the edge of a lost eternity. With so much healthful literature of all sorts, there is no excuse for bringing your minds in contact with evil. If there were a famine, there might be some reason for eating garbage, but the land is full of bread. When we may, with our families, sit around the clean warm fire-hearth of Christian knowledge, why go hunting in the ash barrels for cinders?

SHORT OR LONG PASTORATES.

The question is being discussed in many journals, "How long ought a minister to stay in one place?" Clergymen and laymen and editors are wagging tongue and pen on the subject—a most practical question and easy to answer. Let a minister stay in a place till he gets done—that is, when he has nothing more to say or do.

Some ministers are such ardent students of the Bible and of men, they are after a twenty-five years' residence in a parish so full of things that ought to be said, that their resignation would be a calamity. Others get through in three months and ought to go; but it takes an earthquake to get them away. They must be moved on by committees, and pelted with resolutions, stuck through with the needles of the ladies' sewing society, and advised by neighboring ministers, and hauled up before presbyteries and consociations; and after they have killed the church and killed themselves, the pastoral relation is dissolved.

We knew of a man who got a unanimous call. He wore the finest pair of gaiters that ever went into that pulpit; and when he took up the Psalm book to give out the song, it was the perfection of gracefulness. His tongue was dipped in "balm of a thousand flowers," and it was like the roll of one of Beethoven's symphonies to hear him read the hardest Bible names, Jechonias, Zerubbabel and Tiglath-pileser. It was worth all the salary paid him to see the way he lifted his pocket-handkerchief to his eyelids.

Next, a woman with a very sharp tongue was sent to talk to the minister's wife. The war-cloud thickened, the pickets were driven in, and then a skirmish, and after a while all the batteries were opened, and each side said that the other side lied, and the minister dropped his pocket-handkerchief and showed his claws as long as those of Nebuchadnezzar after he had been three years eating grass like an ox. We admire long pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows they have been there twenty-nine years too long. Their congregations are patiently waiting their removal to a higher latitude. Meanwhile, those churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet—not because they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen foot, since it would hurt them more than the object assaulted.

If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical tyranny, it might better be abandoned. There are many ministers who go away from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as many who do not go soon enough. A husband might just as well try to keep his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try to keep a church's love by ecclesiastical violence. Study the best time to quit.

AN EDITOR'S CHIP-BASKET.

On our way out the newspaper rooms we stumbled over the basket in which is deposited the literary material we cannot use. The basket upset and surprised us with its contents. On the top were some things that looked like fifteen or twenty poems. People outside have no idea of the amount of rhyme that comes to a printing office. The fact is that at some period in every one's life he writes "poetry." His existence depends upon it. We wrote ten or fifteen verses ourselves once. Had we not written them just then and there, we might not be here. They were in long metre, and "Old Hundred" would have fitted them grandly.

Many people are seized with the poetic spasm when they are sick, and their lines are apt to begin with.

Others on Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow. For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto. Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used. You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket. What a way that is to treat incipient Tennysons and Longfellows!

Next in the pile of torn and upset things is the speech of some one on the momentous occasion of the presentation of a gold-headed cane, or silver pitcher, or brass kettle for making preserves. It was "unexpected," a "surprise" and "undeserved," and would "long be cherished." "Great applause, and not a dry eye in the house," etc., etc. But there is not much room in a paper for speeches. In this country everybody speaks.

An American is in his normal condition when he is making a speech. He is born with "fellow-citizens" in his mouth, and closes his earthly life by saying, "One word more, and I have done." Speeches being so common, newspaper readers do not want a large supply, and so many of these utterances, intended to be immortal, drop into oblivion through that inexhaustible reservoir, the editorial chip-basket.

Let no one enter the field of literature for the purpose of "making a living" unless as a very last resort. There are thousands of persons to-day starving to death with a steel pen in their hand. The story of Grub street and poets living on thin soup is being repeated all over this land, although the modern cases are not so conspicuous. Poverty is no more agreeable because classical and set in hexameters. The hungry author cannot breakfast on "odes to summer." On this, cold day how many of the literati are shivering! Martyrs have perished in the fire, but more persons have perished for lack of fire. Let no editor through hypercriticism of contributed articles add to this educated suffering.

What is that we hear in the next room? It is the roar of a big fire as it consumes unavailable literary material—epics, sonnets, homilies, tractates, compilations, circulars, dissertations. Some of them were obscure, and make a great deal of smoke. Some of them were merry, and crackle. All of them have ended their mission and gone down, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

THE MANHOOD OF SERVICE.

During very hard times two Italian artists called at our country home, asking if we did not want some sketching done, and they unrolled some elegant pictures, showing their fine capacity. We told them we had no desire for sketches, but we had a cistern to clean, and would pay them well for doing it. Off went their coats, and in a few hours the work was done and their wages awarded. How much more honorable for them to do what they could get to do rather than to wait for more adapted employment!

Why did not the girls of Northampton spend their summers embroidering slippers or hemming handkerchiefs, and thus keep at work unobserved and more popular? Because they were not fools. They said: "Let us go up and see Mount Adams, and the Profile, and Mount Washington. We shall have to work only five hours a day, and all the time we will be gathering health and inspiration." Young men, those are the girls to seek when you want a wife, rather than the wheezing victims of ruinous work chosen because it is more popular. About the last thing we would want to marry is a medicine-chest. Why did not the students of Dartmouth, during their vacation, teach school? First, because teaching is a science, and they did not want to do three months of damage to the children of the common school. Secondly, because they wanted freedom from books as man makes them, and opportunity to open the ponderous tome of boulder and strata as God printed them. Churches and scientific institutions, these will be the men to call—brawny and independent, rather than the bilious, short-breathed, nerveless graduates who, too proud to take healthful recreation, tumble, at commencement day, into the lap of society so many Greek roots.

BALKY PEOPLE.

Passing along a country road quite recently, we found a man, a horse and wagon in trouble. The vehicle was slight and the road was good, but the horse refused to draw, and his driver was in a bad predicament. He had already destroyed his whip in applying inducements to progress in travel. He had pulled the horse's ears with a sharp string. He had backed him into the ditch. He had built a fire of straw underneath him, the only result a smashed dash-board. The chief effect of the violences and cruelties applied was to increase the divergency of feeling between the brute and his master. We said to the besweated and outraged actor in the scene that the best thing for him to do was to let his horse stand for a while unwhipped and uncoaxed, setting some one to watch him while he, the driver, went away to cool off. We learned that the plan worked admirably; that the cold air, and the appetite for oats, and the solitude of the road, favorable for contemplation, had made the horse move for adjournment to some other place and time; and when the driver came up, he had but to take up the reins, and the beast, erst so obstinate, dashed down the road at a perilous speed.

We know of pastors who have balky parishioners. When any important move is to take place, and all the other horses of the team are willing to draw, they lay themselves back in the harness.

First the pastor pats the obstreperous elder or deacon on the neck and tells him how much he thinks of him. This only makes him shake his mane and grind his bit. He will die first before he consents to such a movement. Next, he is pulled by the ear, with a good many sharp insinuations as to his motives for holding back. Fires of indignation are built under him for the purpose of consuming his balkiness. He is whipped with the scourge of public opinion, but this only makes him kick fiercely and lie harder in the breeching-straps. He is backed down into the ditch of scorn and contempt, but still is not willing to draw an ounce. O foolish minister, trying in that way to manage a balky parishioner! Let him alone. Go on and leave him there. Pay less attention to the horse that balks, and give more oats to those that pull. Leave him out in the cold. Some day you will come back and find him glad to start. At your first advance he will arch his neck, paw his hoof, bend into the bit, stiffen the traces and dash on. We have the same prescription for balky horses and men: for a little while let them alone.

ANONYMOUS LETTERS.

In boyhood days we were impressed with the fertility of a certain author whose name so often appeared in the spelling books and readers, styled Anon. He seemed to write more than Isaac Watts, or Shakespeare, or Blair. In the index, and scattered throughout all our books, was the name of Anon. He appeared in all styles of poetry and prose and dialogue. We wondered where he lived, what his age was, and how he looked, it was not until quite late in boyhood that we learned that Anon was an abbreviation for anonymous, and that he was sometimes the best saint and at other times the most extraordinary villain.

After centuries of correspondence old Anonymous is as fertile of thought and brain and stratagem as ever, and will probably keep on writing till the last fire burns up his pen and cracks to pieces his ink bottle. Anonymous letters sometimes have a mission of kindness and gratitude and good cheer. Genuine modesty may sometimes hide the name of an epistolary author or authoress. It may be a "God bless you" from some one who thinks herself hardly in a position to address you. It may be the discovery of a plot for your damage, in which the revelator does not care to take the responsibility of a witness. It may be any one of a thousand things that mean frankness and delicacy and honor and Christian principle. We have received anonymous letters which we have put away among our most sacred archives.

Sometimes the anonymous crime takes the form of a newspaper article; and if the matter be pursued, the editor-in-chief puts it off on the managing editor, and the managing editor upon the book critic, and the book critic upon the reporter.

Let every young man know that when he is tempted to pen anything which requires him to disguise his handwriting he is in fearful danger. You despoil your own nature by such procedure more than you can damage any one else. Bowie-knife and dagger are more honorable than an anonymous pen sharpened for defamation of character. Better try putting strychnine in the flour barrel. Better mix ratsbane in the jelly cake. That behavior would be more elegant and Christian.

After much observation we have fixed upon this plan: If any one writes us in defamation of another, we adopt the opposite theory. If the letter says that the assaulted one lies, we take it as eulogistic of his veracity; or that he is unchaste, we set him down as pure; or fraudulent, we are seized with a desire to make him our executor. We do so on logical and unmistakable grounds. A defamatory letter is from the devil or his satellites. The devil hates only the good. The devil hates Mr. A; ergo, Mr. A is good.

If, since the world stood, there have been composed and sent off by mail or private postmen 1,600,378 anonymous letters derogatory of character, then 1,600,378 were vicious and damnable. If you are compelled to choose between writing a letter with false signature vitriolic of any man's integrity or any woman's honor on the one hand, and the writing a letter with a red-hot nail dipped in adder's poison on a sheet woven of leper scales, choose the latter. It were healthier, nobler, and could better endure the test of man's review and God's scrutiny.

BRAWN OR BRAIN.

Governor Wiseman (our oracular friend who talked in the style of an oration) was with us this evening at the tea-table, and we were mentioning the fact that about thirty colleges last summer in the United States contested for the championship in boat-racing. About two hundred thousand young ladies could not sleep nights, so anxious were they to know whether Yale or Williams would be the winner. The newspapers gave three and four columns to the particulars, the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair, enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of Criticism for the other.

"Midnight oil," so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene. Where hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred. Kirk White, while at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten o'clock that night instead of three o'clock the next morning, he would have been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all collegians. Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the religion bilious. We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong stomach. Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric juices. Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.

Give the brain a chance as well as the arm. Do not let the animal eat up the soul. Let the body be the well-fashioned hulk, and the mind the white sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on toward the harbor of glorious achievement. When that boat starts, we want to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with sky-rockets.

"By the way," I said, "Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a cheering tendency? Governor, do you ever have the blues?"

The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his spectacles up on his forehead, replied:

Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as "the blues." There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects. The immediate cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or pickled oysters at twelve o'clock the night before.

Besides that, why sit ye here with the blues, ye favored sons and daughters of men? Shone upon by such stars, and breathed on by such air, and sung to by so many pleasant sounds, you ought not to be seen moping. Especially if light from the better world strikes its aurora through your night sky, ought you be cheerful. You can afford to have a rough luncheon by the way if it is soon to end amid the banqueters in white. Sailing toward such a blessed port, do not have your flag at half mast. Leave to those who take too much wine "the gloomy raven tapping at the chamber door, on the night's Plutonian shore," and give us the robin red-breast and the chaffinch. Let some one with a strong voice give out the long-metre doxology, and the whole world "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow."

"But do you not suppose, Governor Wiseman, that every man has his irritated days?"

The probability is that if you would look at the weather-vane you would find that the wind is northeast, and you might remember that you have lost much sleep lately. It might happen to be that you are out of joint instead of the day. Be careful and not write many letters while you are in that irritated mood. You will pen some things that you will be sorry for afterward.

Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our discipline. Life would get nauseating if it were all honey. That table would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Blustering March and weeping April prepare us for shining May. This world is a poor hitching post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of the window, watching to see us come up.

No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness and power. It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough, but is wanting in moral muscle. It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting, and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.

One reason for this is the ineffable softness of much of what is called Christian literature. The attempt is to bring us up on tracts made up of thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and more impatience with insipidity, though it be prayerful and sanctimonious. He who stands with irksome repetitions asking people to "Come to Jesus," while he gives no strong common-sense reason why they should come, drives back the souls of men. If, with all the thrilling realities of eternity at hand, a man has nothing to write which can gather up and master the thoughts and feelings of men, his writing and speaking are a slander on the religion which he wishes to eulogize.

WARM-WEATHER RELIGION.

It takes more grace to be an earnest and useful Christian in summer than in any other season. The very destitute, through lack of fuel and thick clothing, may find the winter the trying season, but those comfortably circumstanced find summer the Thermopylæ that tests their Christian courage and endurance.

The spring is suggestive of God and heaven and a resurrection day. That eye must be blind that does not see God's footstep in the new grass, and hear His voice in the call of the swallow at the eaves. In the white blossoms of the orchards we find suggestion of those whose robes have been made white in the blood of the Lamb. A May morning is a door opening into heaven.

So autumn mothers a great many moral and religious suggestions. The season of corn husking, the gorgeous woods that are becoming the catafalque of the dead year, remind the dullest of his own fading and departure.

But summer fatigues and weakens, and no man keeps his soul in as desirable a frame unless by positive resolution and especial implorations. Pulpit and pew often get stupid together, and ardent devotion is adjourned until September.

But who can afford to lose two months out of each year, when the years are so short and so few? He who stops religious growth in July and August will require the next six months to get over it. Nay, he never recovers. At the season when the fields are most full of leafage and life let us not be lethargic and stupid.

Let us remember that our exit from this world will more probably be in the summer than in any other season, and we cannot afford to die at a time when we are least alert and worshipful. At mid-summer the average of departures is larger than in cool weather. The sun-strokes, the dysenteries, the fevers, the choleras, have affinity for July and August. On the edge of summer Death stands whetting his scythe for a great harvest. We are most careful to have our doors locked, and our windows fastened, and our "burglar alarm" set at times when thieves are most busy, and at a season of the year when diseases are most active in their burglaries of life we need to be ready.

Our charge, therefore, is, make no adjournment of your religion till cool weather. Whether you stay in town, or seek the farm house, or the sea-shore, or the mountains, be faithful in prayer, in Bible reading and in attendance upon Christian ordinances. He who throws away two months of life wastes that for which many a dying sinner would have been willing to give all his possessions when he found that the harvest was past and the summer was ended.

Many people have found this world a desert-march. They go half consumed of trouble all their days. But glory be to God! we are not turned out on a desert to die. Here is the long, cool, certain, refreshing shadow of the Lord.

It is our misfortune that we mistake God's shadow for the night. If a man come and stand between you and the sun, his shadow falls upon you. So God sometimes comes and stands between us and worldly successes, and His shadow falls upon us, and we wrongly think that it is night. As a father in a garden stoops down to kiss his child the shadow of his body falls upon it; and so many of the dark misfortunes of our life are not God going away from us, but our heavenly Father stooping down to give us the kiss of His infinite and everlasting love. It is the shadow of a sheltering Rock, and not of a devouring lion.

Instead of standing right out in the blistering noon-day sun of earthly trial and trouble, come under the Rock. You may drive into it the longest caravan of disasters. Room for the suffering, heated, sunstruck, dying, of all generations, in the shadow of the great Rock:

HIDING EGGS FOR EASTER.

Those who were so unfortunate as to have been born and brought up in the city know nothing about that chapter in a boy's history of which I speak.

About a month before Easter there comes to the farmhouse a scarcity of eggs. The farmer's wife begins to abuse the weasels and the cats as the probable cause of the paucity. The feline tribe are assaulted with many a harsh "Scat!" on the suspicion of their fondness for omelets in the raw. Custards fail from the table. The Dominick hens are denounced as not worth their mush. Meanwhile, the boys stand round the corner in a broad grin at what is the discomfiture of the rest of the family.

The truth must be told that the boys, in anticipation of Easter, have, in some hole in the mow or some barrel in the wagon-house, been hiding eggs. If the youngsters understand their business, they will compromise the matter, and see that at least a small supply goes to the house every day. Too great greed on the part of the boy will discover the whole plot, and the charge will be made: "De Witt, I believe you are hiding the eggs!" Forthwith the boy is collared and compelled to disgorge his possessions.

At this season of the year the hens are melancholy. They want to hatch, but how can they? They have the requisite disposition, and the capacity, and the feathers, and the nest, and everything but the eggs. With that deficit, they sometimes sit obstinately and defy the boy's approaches. Many a boy has felt the sharp bill of old Dominick strike the back of his hand, inflicting a wound that would have roused up the whole farmhouse to see what was the matter had it not been that the boy wanted to excite no suspicion as to the nature of his expedition. Immediately over the hen's head comes the boy's cap, and there is a scatteration of feathers all over the hay-mow, and the boy is victor.

It sometimes happens that, in the agitation of bringing the eggs into the household harbor, the boy drops the hat or the basket, and the whole enterprise is shipwrecked. From our own experience, it is very difficult to pick up eggs after you have once dropped them. You have found the same experience in after life. Your hens laid a whole nestful of golden eggs on Wall street. You had gathered them up. You were bringing them in. You expected a world of congratulations, but just the day before the consummation, something adverse ran against you, and you dropped the basket, and the eggs broke. Wise man were you if, instead of sitting down to cry or attempting to gather up the spilled yolks, you built new nests and invited a new laying.

That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the entire digestive capacity of the children was tested. You have never had anything so good to eat since. You found the eggs. You hid them. They were your contribution to the table. Since then you have seen eggs scrambled, eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter morning in boyhood.

Let us send the boys out into the country every year for an airing. If their grandfather and grandmother be yet alive, they will give them a good time. They will learn in a little while the mysteries of the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how to keep Easter. They will take the old people back to the time when you yourself were a boy. There will be for the grandson an extra cake in each oven. And grandfather and grandmother will sit and watch the prodigy, and wonder if any other family ever had such grandchildren. It will be a good thing when the evenings are short, and the old folks' eyesight is somewhat dim, if you can set up in their house for a little while one or two of these lights of childhood. For the time the aches and pains of old age will be gone, and they will feel as lithe and merry as when sixty years ago they themselves rummaged hayrick, and mow and wagon-house, hiding eggs for Easter.

SINK OR SWIM.

We entered the ministry with a mortal horror of extemporaneous speaking. Each week we wrote two sermons and a lecture all out, from the text to the amen. We did not dare to give out the notice of a prayer-meeting unless it was on paper. We were a slave to manuscript, and the chains were galling; and three months more of such work would have put us in the graveyard. We resolved on emancipation. The Sunday night was approaching when we expected to make violent rebellion against this bondage of pen and paper. We had an essay about ten minutes long on some Christian subject, which we proposed to preach as an introduction to the sermon, resolved, at the close of that brief composition, to launch out on the great sea of extemporaneousness.

We crawled down the pulpit in a state of exhilaration; we never before saw such handsome darkness. The odor of the escaping gas was to us like "gales from Araby." Did a frightened young man ever have such fortunate deliverance? The providence was probably intended to humble the trustees, yet the scared preacher took advantage of it.

But after we got home we saw the wickedness of being in such dread. As the Lord got us out of that predicament, we resolved never again to be cornered in one similar. Forthwith the thralldom was broken, we hope never again to be felt. How demeaning that a man with a message from the Lord Almighty should be dependent upon paper-mills and gasometers! Paper is a non-conductor of gospel electricity. If a man have a five-thousand-dollar bill of goods to sell a customer, he does not go up to the purchaser and say, "I have some remarks to make to you about these goods, but just wait till I get out my manuscript." Before he got through reading the argument the customer would be in the next door, making purchases from another house.

It would be a grand thing if every minister felt strong enough in body to thrash any man in his audience improperly behaving, but always kept back from such assault by the fact that it would be wrong to do so. There is a good deal of heart and head in our theology, but not enough liver and backbone. We need a more stalwart Christian character, more roast beef rare, and less calf's-foot jelly. This will make the pulpit more bold and the pew more manly.

Which thoughts came to us this week as we visited again the village church aforesaid, and preached out of the same old Bible in which, years ago, we laid the ten-minute manuscript, and we looked upon the same lights that once behaved so badly. But we found it had been snowing since the time we lived there, and heads that then were black are white now, and some of the eyes which looked up to us that memorable night when the gasometer failed us, thirteen years ago, are closed now, and for them all earthly lights have gone out for ever.

SHELLS FROM THE BEACH.

We have wandered far and wide, but found no such place to rest in. We can live here forty-eight hours in one day, and in a night get a Rip Van Winkle sleep, waking up without finding our gun rusty or our dog dead.

No wonder that Mr. James, the first minister of this place, lived to eighty years of age, and Mr. Hunting, his successor, lived to be eighty-one years of age, and Doctor Buel, his successor, lived to be eighty-two years of age. Indeed, it seems impossible for a minister regularly settled in this place to get out of the world before his eightieth year. It has been only in cases of "stated supply," or removal from the place, that early demise has been possible. And in each of these cases of decease at fourscore it was some unnecessary imprudence on their part, or who knows but that they might be living yet? That which is good for settled pastors being good for other people, you may judge the climate here is salutary and delectable for all.

The place was settled in 1648, and that is so long ago that it will probably never be unsettled. The Puritans took possession of it first, and have always held it for the Sabbath, for the Bible and for God. Much maligned Puritans! The world will stop deriding them after a while, and the caricaturists of their stalwart religion will want to claim them as ancestors, but it will be too late then; for since these latter-day folks lie about the Puritans now, we will not believe them when they want to get into the illustrious genealogical line.

That document of two centuries ago reads strangely behind the times, but it will be some hundreds of years yet before other communities come up to the point where that document stops. All our laws and institutions are yet to be Christianized. The Puritans took possession of this land in the name of Christ, and it belongs to Him; and if people do not like that religion, let them go somewhere else. They can find many lands where there is no Christian religion to bother them. Let them emigrate to Greenland, and we will provide them with mittens, or to the South Sea Islands, and we will send them ice-coolers. This land is for Christ. Our Legislatures and Congresses shall yet pass laws as radically evangelical as the venerable document above referred to. East Hampton, instead of being two hundred years behind, is two hundred years ahead.

Glorious place to summer! Darwin and Stuart, Mill and Huxley and Renan have not been through here yet. May they miss the train the day they start for this place! With an Atlantic Ocean in which to wash, and a great-hearted, practical, sympathetic gospel to take care of all the future, who could not be happy in East Hampton?

The strong sea-breeze ruffles the sheet upon which we write, and the "white caps" are tossing up as if in greeting to Him who walks the pavements of emerald and opal:

CATCHING THE BAY MARE.

It may be a lack of education on our part, but we confess to a dislike for horse-races. We never attended but three; the first in our boyhood, the second at a country fair, where we were deceived as to what would transpire, the third last Sabbath morning. We see our friends flush with indignation at this last admission; but let them wait a moment before they launch their verdict.

Our horse was in the pasture-field. It was almost time to start for church, and we needed the animal harnessed. The boy came in saying it was impossible to catch the bay mare, and calling for our assistance. We had on our best clothes, and did not feel like exposing ourself to rough usage; but we vaulted the fence with pail of water in hand, expecting to try the effect of rewards rather than punishments. The horse came out generously to meet us. We said to the boy, "She is very tame. Strange you cannot catch her." She came near enough to cautiously smell the pail, when she suddenly changed her mind, and with one wild snort dashed off to the other end of the field.

Whether she was not thirsty, or was critical of the manner of presentation, or had apprehensions of our motive, or was seized with desire for exercise in the open air, she gave us no chance to guess. We resolved upon more caution of advance and gentler voice, and so laboriously approached her; for though a pail of water is light for a little way, it gets heavy after you have gone a considerable distance, though its contents be half spilled away.

We felt that the time had come for us to produce the rope halter, which with our left hand we had all the while kept secreted behind our back. We put it over her neck, when the beast wheeled, and we seized her by the point where the copy-books say we ought to take Time, namely, the forelock. But we had poor luck. We ceased all caressing tone, and changed the subjunctive mood for the imperative. There never was a greater divergence of sentiment than at that instant between us and the bay mare. She pulled one way, we pulled the other. Turning her back upon us, she ejaculated into the air two shining horse-shoes, both the shape of the letter O, the one interjection in contempt for the ministry, and the other in contempt for the press.

At this unhappy juncture, she who some years ago took us for "better or for worse" came to the rescue, finding us in the latter condition. She advanced to the field with a wash-basin full of water, offering that as sole inducement, and gave one call, when the horse went out to meet her, and under a hand, not half as strong as ours, gripping the mane, the refractory beast was led to the manger.

Standing with our feet in the damp grass and our new clothes wet to a sop, we learned then and there how much depends on the way you do a thing. The proposition we made to the bay mare was far better than that offered by our companion; but ours failed and hers succeeded. Not the first nor the last time that a wash-basin has beaten a pail. So some of us go all through life clumsily coaxing and awkwardly pursuing things which we want to halter and control. We strain every nerve, only to find ourselves befooled and left far behind, while some Christian man or woman comes into the field, and by easy art captures that which evaded us.

There is a knack in doing things. If all those who plough in State and Church had known how to hold the handles, and turn a straight furrow, and stop the team at the end of the tiled, the world would long ago have been ploughed into an Eden. What many people want is gumption—a word as yet undefined; but if you do not know what it means, it is very certain you do not possess the quality it describes. We all need to study Christian tact. The boys in the Baskinridge school-house laughed at William L. Dayton's impediment of speech, but that did not hinder him from afterward making court-room and senate-chamber thrill under the spell of his words.

In our early home there was a vicious cat that would invade the milk-pans, and we, the boys, chased her with hoes and rakes, always hitting the place where she had been just before, till one day father came out with a plain stick of oven-wood, and with one little clip back of the ear put an end to all of her nine lives. You see everything depends upon the style of the stroke, and not upon the elaborateness of the weapon. The most valuable things you try to take will behave like the bay mare; but what you cannot overcome by coarse persuasion, or reach at full run, you can catch with apostolic guile. Learn the first-rate art of doing secular or Christian work, and then it matters not whether your weapon be a basin or a pail.

OUR FIRST AND LAST CIGAR.

The time had come in our boyhood which we thought demanded of us a capacity to smoke. The old people of the household could abide neither the sight nor the smell of the Virginia weed. When ministers came there, not by positive injunction but by a sort of instinct as to what would be safest, they whiffed their pipe on the back steps. If the house could not stand sanctified smoke, you may know how little chance there was for adolescent cigar-puffing.

By some rare good fortune which put in our hands three cents, we found access to a tobacco store. As the lid of the long, narrow, fragrant box opened, and for the first time we own a cigar, our feelings of elation, manliness, superiority and anticipation can scarcely be imagined, save by those who have had the same sensation. Our first ride on horseback, though we fell off before we got to the barn, and our first pair of new boots (real squeakers) we had thought could never be surpassed in interest; but when we put the cigar to our lips, and stuck the lucifer match to the end of the weed, and commenced to pull with an energy that brought every facial muscle to its utmost tension, our satisfaction with this world was so great, our temptation was never to want to leave it.

With these sentiments we passed down the village street and out toward our country home. Our head did not feel exactly right, and the street began to rock from side to side, so that it was uncertain to us which side of the street we were on. So we crossed over, but found ourself on the same side that we were on before we crossed over. Indeed, we imagined that we were on both sides at the same time, and several fast teams driving between. We met another boy, who asked us why we looked so pale, and we told him we did not look pale, but that he was pale himself.

We sat down under the bridge and began to reflect on the prospect of early decease, and on the uncertainty of all earthly expectations. We had determined to smoke the cigar all up and thus get the worth of our money, but were obliged to throw three-fourths of it away, yet knew just where we threw it, in case we felt better the next day.

Getting home, the old people were frightened, and demanded that we state what kept us so late and what was the matter with us. Not feeling that we were called to go into particulars, and not wishing to increase our parents' apprehension that we were going to turn out badly, we summed up the case with the statement that we felt miserable at the pit of the stomach. We had mustard plasters administered, and careful watching for some hours, when we fell asleep and forgot our disappointment and humiliation in being obliged to throw away three-fourths of our first cigar. Being naturally reticent, we have never mentioned it until this time.

We kept our promise. With the same resolution went overboard coffee and tea. That night we were born into a new physical, mental and moral life. Perhaps it may be better for some to smoke, and study nights, and take exciting temperance beverages; but we are persuaded that if thousands of people who now go moping, and nervous, and half exhausted through life, down with "sick headaches" and rasped by irritabilities, would try a good large dose of abstinence, they would thank God for this paragraph of personal experience, and make the world the same bright place we find it—a place so attractive that nothing short of heaven would be good enough to exchange for it.

The first cigar made us desperately sick; the throwing away of our last made us gloriously well. For us the croaking of the midnight owl hath ceased, and the time of the singing of birds has come.

MOVE, MOVING, MOVED.

The first of May is to many the beginning of the year. From that are dated the breakages, the social startings, the ups and downs, of domestic life. One-half New York is moving into smaller houses, the other half into larger. The past year's success or failure decides which way the horses of the furniture-wagon shall turn their heads.

Days before, the work of packing commenced. It is astonishing how many boxes and barrels are required to contain all your wares. You come upon a thousand things that you had forgotten, too good to throw away and too poor to keep: old faded carpet-bags that would rouse the mirth of the town if you dared to carry them into the street; straw hats out of the fashion; beavers that you ought to have given away while they might have been useful; odd gloves, shoes, coats and slips of carpet that have been the nest of rats, and a thousand things that you laid away because you some day might want them, but never will.

The first of May dawns. The carts come. It threatens rain, but not a drop until you get your best rosewood chairs out of doors, and your bedding on the top of the wagon. Be out at twelve o'clock you must, for another family are on your heels, and Thermopylæ was a very tame pass compared with the excitement which rises when two families meet in the same hall—these moving out and those moving in. They swear, unless they have positive principles to prohibit. A mere theory on the subject of swearing will be no hindrance. Long-established propriety of speech, buttressed up by the most stalwart determination is the only safety. Men who talk right all the rest of the year sometimes let slip on the first of May. We know a member of the church who uses no violence of speech except on moving day, and then he frequently cries out: "By the great United States!"

As our last load starts we go in to take a farewell look at the old place. In that parlor we have been gay with our friends many a time, and as we glance round the room we seem to see the great group of their faces. The best furniture we ever had in our parlor was a circle of well-wishers. Here is the bed-room where we slept off the world's cares, and got up glad as the lark when the morning sky beckons it upward. Many a time this room has been full of sleep from door-sill to ceiling. We always did feel grandly after we had put an eight-hour nap between us and life's perplexities. We are accustomed to divide our time into two parts: the first to be devoted to hard, blistering, consuming work, and the rest to be given to the most jubilant fun; and sleep comes under the last head.

We step into the nursery for a last look. The crib is gone, and the doll babies and the blockhouses, but the echoes have not yet stopped galloping; May's laugh, and Edith's glee, and Frank's shout, as he urged the hobby-horse to its utmost speed, both heels struck into the flanks, till out of his glass eye the horse seemed to say:

Moving-day is almost gone. It is almost night. Tumble everything into the new house. Put up the bedsteads. But who has the wrench, and who the screws? Packed up, are they? In what box? It may be any one of the half dozen. Ah! now I know in which box you will find it; in the last one you open! Hungry, are you? No time to talk of food till the crockery is unpacked. True enough, here they come. That last jolt of the cart finished the teacups. The jolt before that fractured some of the plates, and Bridget now drops the rest of them. The Paradise of crockery-merchants is moving-day. I think, from the results which I see, that they must about the first of May spend most of their time in praying for success in business.

It may be that very soon some of our rich relatives will, at their demise, "will" us each one a house, so that we shall be permanently fixed. We should be sorry to have them quit the world under any circumstances; but if, determined to go anyhow, they should leave us a house, the void would not be so large, especially if it were a house, well furnished and having all the modern improvements. We would be thankful for any good advice they might leave us, but should more highly appreciate a house.

May all the victims of moving-day find their new home attractive! If they have gone into a smaller house, let them congratulate themselves at the thought that it takes less time to keep a small house clean than a big one. May they have plenty of Spaulding's glue with which to repair breakages! May the carpets fit better than they expected, and the family that moved out have taken all their cockroaches and bedbugs with them!

And, better than all—and this time in sober earnest—by the time that moving-day comes again, may they have made enough money to buy a house from which they will never have to move until the House of many mansions be ready to receive them!

ADVANTAGE OF SMALL LIBRARIES.

We never see a valuable book without wanting it. The most of us have been struck through with a passion for books. Town, city and state libraries to us are an enchantment. We hear of a private library of ten thousand volumes, and think what a heaven the owner must be living in. But the probability is that the man who has five hundred volumes is better off than the man who has five thousand. The large private libraries in uniform editions, and unbroken sets, and Russia covers, are, for the most part, the idlers of the day; while the small libraries, with broken-backed books, and turned-down leaves, and lead-pencil scribbles in the margin, are doing the chief work for the world and the Church.

What we can have any time we never have. I found a group of men living at the foot of Whiteface Mountain who had never been to the top, while I had come hundreds of miles to ascend it. They could go any time so easily. It is often the case that those who have plain copies of history are better acquainted with the past than those who have most highly adorned editions of Bancroft, Prescott, Josephus and Herodotus. It ought not so to be, you say. I cannot help that; so it is.

Books are sometimes too elegantly bound to be read. The gilt, the tinge, the ivory, the clasps, seem to say: "Hands off!" The thing that most surprised me in Thomas Carlyle's library was the fewness of the books. They had all seen service. None of them had paraded in holiday dress. They were worn and battered. He had flung them at the ages.

More beautiful than any other adornments are the costly books of a princely library; but let not the man of small library stand looking into the garnished alcoves wishing for these unused volumes. The workman who dines on roast beef and new Irish potatoes will be healthier and stronger than he who begins with "mock-turtle," and goes up through the lane of a luxuriant table till he comes to almond-nuts. I put the man of one hundred books, mastered, against the man of one thousand books of which he has only a smattering.

We get many letters from clergymen asking advice about reading, and deploring their lack of books. I warrant they all have books enough to shake earth and heaven with, if the books were rightly used. A man who owns a Bible has, to begin with, a library as long as from here to heaven. The dullest preachers I know of have splendid libraries. They own everything that has been written on a miracle, and yet when you hear them preach, if you did not get sound asleep, that would be a miracle. They have all that Calvin and other learned men wrote about election, and while you hear them you feel that you have been elected to be bored. They have been months and years turning over the heavy tomes on the divine attributes, trying to understand God, while some plain Christian, with a New Testament in his hand, goes into the next alley, and sees in the face of an invalid woman peace and light and comfort and joy which teach him in one hour what God is.

There are two kinds of dullness—learned dullness and ignorant dullness. We think the latter preferable, for it is apt to be more spicy. You cannot measure the length of a man's brain, nor the width of his heart, nor the extent of his usefulness by the size of his library.

Life is so short you cannot know everything. There are but few things we need to know, but let us know them well. People who know everything do nothing. You cannot read all that comes out. Every book read without digestion is so much dyspepsia. Sixteen apple-dumplings at one meal are not healthy.

Use to the utmost what books you have, and do not waste your time in longing after a great library. You wish you could live in the city and have access to some great collection of books. Be not deceived. The book of the library which you want will be out the day you want it. I longed to live in town that I might be in proximity to great libraries. Have lived in town thirteen years, and never found in the public library the book I asked for but once; and getting that home, I discovered it was not the one I wanted. Besides, it is the book that you own that most profits, not that one which you take from "The Athenæum" for a few days.

Excepting in rare cases, you might as well send to the foundling hospital and borrow a baby as to borrow a book with the idea of its being any great satisfaction. We like a baby in our cradle, but prefer that one which belongs to the household. We like a book, but want to feel it is ours. We never yet got any advantage from a borrowed book. We hope those never reaped any profit from the books they borrowed from us, but never returned. We must have the right to turn down the leaf, and underscore the favorite passage, and write an observation in the margin in such poor chirography that no one else can read it and we ourselves are sometimes confounded.

REFORMATION IN LETTER-WRITING.

We congratulate the country on the revolution in epistolary correspondence. Through postal cards we not only come to economy in stamps, and paper, and ink, and envelopes, but to education in brevity. As soon as men and women get facility in composition they are tempted to prolixity. Hence some of us formed the habit of beginning to read a letter on the second page, because we knew that the writer would not get a-going before that; and then we were apt to stop a page or two before the close, knowing that the remaining portions would be taken in putting down the brakes.

The postal card is a national deliverance. Without the conventional "I take my pen in hand," or other rigmarole—which being translated means, "I am not quite ready to begin just now, but will very soon"—the writer states directly, and in ten or twenty words, all his business.

The advantage of such a thing is that, if you do not answer such a letter no offence is taken, it is so short and costs only a cent; whereas, if the author had taken a great sheet of letter paper, filled it with compliments and graceful solicitations, folded it, and run the gummed edge along the lips at the risk of being poisoned, and stuck on a stamp (after tedious examination of it to see whether or not it had been used before, or had only been mauled in your vest pocket), the offence would have been mortal, and you would have been pronounced mean and unfit for the ministry.

Postal cards are likewise a relief to that large class of persons who by sealed envelope are roused to inquisitiveness. As such a closed letter lies on the mantel-piece unopened, they wonder whom it is from, and what is in it, and they hold it up between them and the light to see what are the indications, and stand close by and look over your shoulder while you read it, and decipher from your looks whether it is a love-letter or a dun. The postal card is immediate relief to them, for they can read for themselves, and can pick up information on various subjects free of charge.

But, after all, the great advantage of this new postal arrangement is economy in the consumption of time. It will practically add several years to a man's life, and will keep us a thousand times, at the beginning of our letters, from saying "Dear Sir" to those who are not at all dear, and will save us from surrendering ourselves with a "Yours, truly," to those to whom we will never belong. We hail the advent of the postal-card system.

ROYAL MARRIAGES.

There has lately been such a jingle of bells in St. Petersburg and London that we have heard them quite across the sea. The queen's son has married the daughter of the Russian emperor. We are glad of it. It is always well to have people marry who are on the same level. The famous affiancing in New York of a coachman with the daughter of the millionaire who employed him did not turn out well. It was bad for her, but worse for the coachman. Eagle and ox are both well in their places, but let them not marry. The ox would be dizzy in the eyrie, and the eagle ill at home in the barnyard. When the children of two royal homes are united, there ought be no begrudging of powder for the cannonading, or of candles for the illumination. All joy to the Duke of Edinburgh and his fortunate duchess.

But let not our friends across the sea imagine that we have no royal marriages here in this western wilderness. Whenever two hearts come together pledged to make each other happy, binding all their hopes and fears and anticipations in one sheaf, calling on God to bless and angels to witness, though no organ may sound the wedding-march, and no bells may chime, and no Dean of Westminster travel a thousand miles to pronounce the ceremony,—that is a royal marriage.

We deplore the fact that because of the fearful extravagances of modern society many of our best people conclude that they cannot possibly afford to marry.

We are getting a fearful crop of old bachelors. They swarm around us. They go through life lopsided. Half dressed, they sit round cold mornings, all a-shiver, sewing on buttons and darning socks, and then go down to a long boarding-house table which is bounded on the north and south and east and west by the Great Sahara Desert. We do not pity them at all. May all their buttons be off to-morrow morning! Why do they not set up a plain home of their own and come into the ark two and two?

The supporting of a wife is looked upon as a great horror. Why, dear friends, with right and healthy notions of time and eternity it is very easy to support a wife if she be of the kind worth supporting. If she be educated into false notions of refinement and have "young ladies' institutes" piled on her head till she be imbecile, you will never be able to support her. Everything depends on whether you take for your wife a woman or a doll-baby. Our opinion is that three-fourths the successful men of the day owe much of their prosperity to the wife's help. The load of life is so heavy it takes a team of two to draw it. The ship wants not only a captain, but a first mate. Society to-day, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic, very much needs more royal marriages.

THREE VISITS.

Yesterday was Saturday to you, but it was Sunday to me. In other words, it was a day of rest. We cannot always be working. If you drive along in a deep rut, and then try to turn off, you are very apt to break the shafts. A skillful driver is careful not to get into a deep rut. You cannot always be keeping on in the same way. We must have times of leisure and recreation.

A great deal of Christian work amounts to nothing, from the fact that it is not prefaced and appendixed by recreation. Better take hold of a hammer and give one strong stroke and lay it down than to be all the time so fagged out that we cannot move the hammer.

Well, yesterday being a day of rest to me, I made three visits in New York.

The first was to the Tombs—an institution seemingly full now, a man or woman or boy at every wicket. A great congregation of burglars, thieves, pickpockets and murderers. For the most part, they are the clumsy villains of society; the nimble, spry ones get out of the way, and are not caught. There are those who are agile as well as depraved in that dark place. Stokes, representing the aristocracy of crime; Foster, the democracy of sin; and Rozensweig, the brute. Each cell a commentary upon the Scripture passage, "The way of the transgressor is hard."

God hasten the time when our Sabbath-schools, instead of being flower-pots for a few choice children, shall gather up the perishing rabble outside, like Ralph Wells' school in New York, and Father Hawley's school in Hartford, and John Wanamaker's school in Philadelphia! There is not much chance in our fashionable Sunday-schools for a boy out at the elbows. Many of our schools pride themselves on being gilt-edged; and when-we go out to fulfill the Saviour's command, "Feed my lambs," we look out chiefly for white fleeces. I like that school the best, which, in addition to the glorious gospel, carries soap and fine-tooth combs. God save the dying children of the street! I saw a child in the Tombs four years of age, and said, "What in the world can this little child be doing here?" They told me the father had been arrested and the child had to go with him. Allegory, parable, prophecy: "Where the father goes the child goes." Father inside the grates, and son outside waiting to get in.

I wish they would get some other name for that—the Tombs—for it is the cleanest prison I ever saw. But the great want of that prison and of all others is sunshine. God's light is a purifier. You cannot expect reformation where you brood over a man with perpetual midnight. Oh that some Howard or Elizabeth Fry would cry through all the dungeons of the earth, "Let there be light!" I never heard of anybody being brought to God or reformed through darkness. God Himself is light, and that which is most like God is most healthful and pure.

Saddened by this awful wreck of men and morals, we came along the corridors where the wives stood weeping at the wicket-door of their husbands, and parents over their lost children. It was a very sad place. There were some men I was surprised to find there—men whom I had seen in other places, in holy places, in consecrated places.

We came out into the sunlight after that, and found ourselves very soon in the art-gallery at Twenty-third street. That was my second visit. Mr. Kensett, the great artist, recently died, and six hundred and fifty of his pictures are now on exhibition. In contrast with the dark prison scene, how beautiful the canvas! Mr. Kensett had an irresistible way of calling trees and rocks and waters into his pictures. He only beckoned and they came. Once come, he pinioned them for ever. Why, that man could paint a breeze on the water, so it almost wet your face with the spray. So restful are his pictures you feel after seeing them as though for half a day you had been sprawled under a tree in July weather, summered through and through.

May the time hasten when the Frenchmen who put on canvas their Cupids poorly clad, and the Germans who hang up homely Dutch babies in the arms of the Virgin Mary and call them Madonnas, shall be overruled by the artists who, like Kensett, make their canvas a psalm of praise to the Lord of the winds and the waters!

I stepped across the way into the Young Men's Christian Association of New York, with its reading-rooms and library and gymnasium and bath-rooms, all means of grace—a place that proposes to charm young men from places of sin by making religion attractive. It is a palace for the Lord—the pride of New York, or ought to be; I do not believe it really is, but it ought to be. It is fifty churches with its arms of Christian usefulness stretched out toward the young men.

If a young man come in mentally worn out, it gives him dumb-bells, parallel bars and a bowling-alley with no rum at either end of it. If physically worsted, it rests him amid pictures and books and newspapers. If a young man come in wanting something for the soul, there are the Bible-classes, prayer-meetings and preaching of the gospel.

I never saw a more beautiful scene in any public building than on one of these bright sofas, fit for any parlor in New York, where lay a weary, plain, exhausted man resting—sound asleep.

Another triumph of Christianity that building is—a Christianity that is erecting lighthouses on all the coasts, and planting its batteries on every hill-top, and spreading its banquets all the world over.

Well, with these reflections I started for Brooklyn. It was just after six o'clock, and tired New York was going home. Street cars and ferries all crowded. Going home! Some to bright places; to be lovingly greeted and warmed and fed and rested. Others to places dark and uncomely; but as I sat down in my own home I could not help thinking of the three spectacles. I had seen during the day Sin, in its shame; Art, in its beauty; Religion, in its work of love. God give repentance to the first, wider appreciation to the second, and universal conquest to the third!

MANAHACHTANIENKS.

We should like to tell so many of our readers as have survived the pronunciation of the above word that the Indians first called the site on which New York was built Manahachtanienks. The translation of it is, "The place where they all got drunk." Most uncomplimentary title; We are glad that it has been changed; for though New York has several thousand unlicensed grogshops, we consider the name inappropriate, although, if intemperance continues to increase as rapidly for the next hundred years as during the last twenty years, the time will come when New York may appropriately take its old Indian nomenclature.

Old-time New York is being rapidly forgotten, and it may be well to revive some historical facts. At an expense of three thousand dollars a year men with guide-book in hand go through the pyramids of Egypt and the picture-galleries of Rome and the ruins of Pompeii, when they have never seen the strange and historical scenes at home.

We advise the people who live in Brooklyn, Jersey City and up-town New York to go on an exploration.

Go to No. 1 Broadway and remember that George Washington and Lord Cornwallis once lived there.

Go to the United States Treasury, on Wall Street, and remember that in front of it used to stand a pillory and a whipping-post.

Go to the corner of Pearl and Broad streets, and remember that was the scene of Washington's farewell to the officers with whom he had been so long associated.

Go to Canal street, and remember it was so called because it once was literally a canal.

The electric telegraph was born in the steeple of the old Dutch Church, now the New York post-office—that is, Benjamin Franklin made there his first experiments in electricity. When the other denominations charge the Dutch Church with being slow, they do not know that the world got its lightning out of one of its church steeples.

Washington Irving was born in William street, halfway between John and Fulton. "Knickerbocker" was considered very saucy; but if any man ever had a right to say mirthful things about New York, it was Washington Irving, who was born there. At the corner of Varick and Charlton streets was a house in which Washington, John Adams and Aaron Burr resided.

George Whitefield preached at the corner of Beekman and Nassau streets.

But why particularize, when there is not a block or a house on the great thoroughfare which has not been the scene of a tragedy, a fortune ruined, a reputation sacrificed, an agony suffered or a soul lost?

A DIP IN THE SEA.

Shakespeare has been fiercely mauled by the critics for confusion of metaphor in speaking of taking up "arms against a sea of troubles." The smart fellows say, How could a man take "arms against a sea?" In other words, it is not possible to shoot the Pacific Ocean. But what Shakespeare suggests is, this jocund morning, being done all around the coast from Florida to Newfoundland, especial regiments going out from Cape May, Long Branch, East Hampton, Newport and Nahant; ten thousand bathers, with hands thrown into the air, "taking up arms against the sea." But the old giant has only to roll over once on his bed of seaweed, and all this attacking host are flung prostrate upon the beach.

At this point begin the raptures of bathing. You have left the world on the beach, and are caught up in the arms of experiences that you never feel on land. If you are far enough out, the breaking wave curves over you like a roof inlaid and prismatic, bending down on the other side of you in layers of chalk and drifts of snow, and the lightning flash of the foam ends in the thunder of the falling wave. You fling aside from your arms, as worthless, amethyst and emerald and chrysoprase. Your ears are filled with the halo of sporting elements, and your eyes with all tints and tinges and double-dyes and liquid emblazonment. You leap and shout and clap your hands, and tell the billows to come on, and in excess of glee greet persons that you never saw before and never will again, and never want to, and act so wildly that others would think you demented but that they also are as fully let loose; so that if there be one imbecile there is a whole asylum of lunatics.

But while bathing, the ludicrous will often break through the grand. Swept hither and thither, you find, moving in reel and cotillon, saraband and rigadoon and hornpipe, Quakers and Presbyterians who are down on the dance. Your sparse clothing feels the stress of the waves, and you think what an awful thing it would be if the girdle should burst or a button break, and you should have, out of respect to the feelings of others, to go up the beach sidewise or backward or on your hands and knees.

Close beside you, in the surf, is a judge of the Court of Appeals, with a garment on that looks like his grandmother's night-gown just lifted from the wash-tub and not yet wrung out. On the other side is a maiden with a twenty-five-cent straw hat on a head that ordinarily sports a hundred dollars' worth of millinery. Yonder is a doctor of divinity with his head in the sand and his feet beating the air, traveling heavenward, while his right hand clutches his wife's foot, as much as to say, "My feet are useless in this emergency; give me the benefit of yours."

Oh, the glee of sea-bathing! It rouses the apathetic. It upsets the supercilious and pragmatical. It is balsamic for mental wounds. It is a tonic for those who need strength, and an anodyne for those who require soothing, and a febrifuge for those who want their blood cooled; a filling up for minds pumped dry, a breviary for the superstitious with endless matins and vespers, and to the Christian an apocalyptic vision where the morning sun gilds the waters, and there is spread before him "a sea of glass mingled with fire." "Thy way, O God, is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters!"

HARD SHELL CONSIDERATIONS.

The plumage of the robin red-breast, the mottled sides of the Saranac trout, the upholstery of a spider's web, the waist of the wasp fashionably small without tight lacing, the lustrous eye of the gazelle, the ganglia of the star-fish, have been discoursed upon; but it is left to us, fagged out from a long ramble, to sit down on a log and celebrate the admirable qualities of a turtle. We refer not to the curious architecture of its house—ribbed, plated, jointed, carapace and plastron divinely fashioned—but to its instincts, worthy almost of being called mental and moral qualities.

We admire also the turtle's capacity of being at home everywhere. He carries with him his parlor, nursery, kitchen, bed-chamber and bathroom. Would that we all had an equal faculty of domestication! In such a beautiful world, and with so many comfortable surroundings, we ought to feel at home in any place we are called to be. While we cannot, like the tortoise, carry our house on our back, we are better off than he, for by the right culture of a contented spirit we may make the sky itself the mottled shell of our residence, and the horizon all around us shall be the place where the carapace shuts down on the plastron.

We admire still more the tortoise's determination to right itself. By way of experiment, turn it upside down, and then go off a piece to see it regain its position. Now, there is nothing when put upon its back which has such little prospect of getting to its feet again as this animal. It has no hands to push with and nothing against which to brace its feet, and one would think that a turtle once upside down would be upside down for ever. But put on its back, it keeps on scrabbling till it is right side up. We would like to pick up this animal from the dust and put it down on Broadway, if men passing by would learn from it never to stop exertion, even when overthrown. You cannot by commercial disasters be more thoroughly flat on your back than five minutes ago was this poor thing; but see it yonder nimbly making for the bushes. Vanderbilt or Jay Gould may treat you as we did the tortoise a few moments ago. But do not lie still, discouraged. Make an effort to get up. Throw your feet out, first in one direction and then in another. Scrabble!

But we must get up off this log, for the ante are crawling over us, and the bull-frogs croak as though the night were coming on. The evening star hangs its lantern at the door of the night to light the tired day to rest. The wild roses in the thicket are breathing vespers at an altar cushioned with moss, while the fire-flies are kindling their dim lamps in the cathedral of the woods. The evening dew on strings of fern is counting its beads in prayer. The "Whip-poor-will" takes up its notes of complaint, making us wonder on our way home what "Will" it was that in boyhood maltreated the ancestors of this species of birds, whether William Wordsworth, or William Cowper, or William Shakspeare, so that the feathered descendants keep through all the forests, year after year, demanding for the cruel perpetrator a sound threshing, forgetting the Bryant that praised them and the Tennyson that petted them and the Jean Ingelow who throws them crumbs, in their anxiety to have some one whip poor Will.

WISEMAN, HEAVYASBRICKS AND QUIZZLE.

We had muffins that night. Indeed, we always had either muffins or waffles when Governor Wiseman was at tea. The reason for this choice of food was that a muffin or a waffle seemed just suited to the size of Wiseman's paragraphs of conversation. In other words, a muffin lasted him about as long as any one subject of discourse; and when the muffin was done, the subject was done.

We never knew why he was called governor, for he certainly never ruled over any State, but perhaps it was his wise look that got him the name. He never laughed; had his round spectacles far down on the end of his nose, so that he could see as far into his plate as any man that ever sat at our tea-table. When he talked, the conversation was all on his side. He considered himself oracular on most subjects. You had but to ask him a question, and without lifting his head, his eye vibrating from fork to muffin, he would go on till he had said all he knew on that theme. We did not invite him to our house more than once in about three months, for too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

At the same sitting we always had our young friend Fred Quizzle. He did not know much, but he was mighty in asking questions. So when we had Governor Wiseman, the well, we had Quizzle, the pump.

Fred Quizzle did not talk until over two years of age, notwithstanding all his parents' exertions toward getting him to say "papa" and "mamma." After his parents had made up their minds that he would never talk at all, he one day rose from his block houses, looked into his father's eyes, and cried out, "How?" as if inquiring in what manner he had found his way into this world. His parent, outraged at the child's choice of an adverb for his first expression instead of a noun masculine or a noun feminine indicative of filial affection, proceeded to chastise the youngster, when Fred Quizzle cried out for his second, "Why?" as though inquiring the cause of such hasty punishment.

This early propensity for asking questions grew on him till at twenty-three years of age he was a prodigy in this respect. So when we had Governor Wiseman we also had Fred Quizzle, the former to discourse, the latter to start him and keep him going.

When at our table, the time not positively occupied in mastication he employed in looking first at Quizzle, the interlocutor, and then at Governor Wiseman, the responding oracle.

Quizzle.—How have you, Governor Wiseman, kept yourself in such robust health so long a time?

Wiseman.—By never trifling with it, sir. I never eat muffins too hot. This one, you see, has had some time to cool. Besides, when I am at all disordered, I immediately send for the doctor.

There are books proposing that we all become our own medical attendant. Whenever we are seized with any sort of physical disorder, we are to take down some volume in homeopathy, allopathy, hydropathy, and running our finger along the index, alight upon the malady that may be afflicting us. We shall find in the same page the name of the disease and the remedy. Thus: chapped hands—glycerine; cold—squills; lumbago—mustard-plasters; nervous excitement—valerian; sleeplessness—Dover's powders.

In ordinary cases the best doctor you can have is mother or grandmother, who has piloted through the rocks of infantile disease a whole family. She has salve for almost everything, and knows how to bind a wound or cool an inflammation. But if mother be dead or you are afflicted with a maternal ancestor that never knew anything practical, and never ill, better in severe cases have the doctor right away. You say that it is expensive to do that, while a book on the treatment of diseases will cost you only a dollar and a half. I reply that in the end it is very expensive for an inexperienced man to be his own doctor; for in addition to the price of the book there are the undertaker's expenses.

Some of the younger persons at the table laughed at the closing sentence of Wiseman, when Doctor Heavyasbricks looked up, put down his knife and said: "My young friends, what are you laughing at? I see no cause of merriment in the phrase 'undertaker's expenses.' It seems to me to be a sad business. When I think of the scenes amid which an undertaker moves, I feel more like tears than hilarity."

Quizzle.—If you are opposed, Governor Wiseman, to one's being his own doctor, what do you think of every man's being his own lawyer?

Wiseman.—I think just as badly of that.

"There are none such!" cries out Quizzle.

Why, where have you lived? There are as many honest men in the legal profession as in any other, and rogues more than enough in all professions. Many a farmer, going down to attend court in the county-seat, takes a load of produce to the market, carefully putting the specked apples at the bottom of the barrel, and hiding among the fresh ones the egg which some discouraged hen after five weeks of "setting" had abandoned, and having secured the sale of his produce and lost his suit in the "Court of Common Pleas," has come home denouncing the scoundrelism of attorneys.

You shall find plenty of honest lawyers if you really need them; and in matters involving large interests you had better employ them.

Especially avoid the mistake of making your own "last will and testament" unless you have great legal skillfulness. Better leave no will at all than one inefficiently constructed. The "Orphans' Court" could tell many a tragedy of property distributed adverse to the intention of the testator. You save twenty to a hundred dollars from your counsel by writing your own will, and your heirs pay ten thousand dollars to lawyers in disputes over it. Perhaps those whom you have wished especially to favor will get the least of your estate, and a relative against whom you always had especial dislike will get the most, and your charities will be apportioned differently from what you anticipated—a hundred dollars to the Bible Society, and three thousand to the "hook and ladder company."

Wiseman.—No doubt. I see no reason why, because I am advancing in years, I should become melancholy.

One of the heartiest things I have seen of late is the letter of Rev. Dr. Dowling as he retires from active work in the ministry. He hands over his work to the younger brethren without sigh, or groan, or regret. He sees the sun is quite far down in the west, and he feels like hanging up his scythe in the first apple tree he comes to. Our opinion is that he has made a little mistake in the time of day, and that while he thinks it is about half-past five in the afternoon, it is only about three. I guess his watch is out of order, and that he has been led to think it later than it really is. But when we remember how much good he has done, we will not begrudge him his rest either here or hereafter.

At any rate, taking the doctor's cheerful valedictory for a text, I might preach a little bit of a sermon on the best way of getting old. Do not be fretted because you have to come to spectacles. While glasses look premature on a young man's nose, they are an adornment on an octogenarian's face. Besides that, when your eyesight is poor, you miss seeing a great many unpleasant things that youngsters are obliged to look at.

Do not worry because the time comes on when you must go into the next world. It is only a better room, with finer pictures, brighter society and sweeter music. Robert McCheyne, and John Knox, and Harriet Newell, and Mrs. Hemans, and John Milton, and Martin Luther will be good enough company for the most of us. The cornshocks standing in the fields to-day will not sigh dismally when the buskers leap over the fence, and throwing their arms around the stack, swing it to the ground. It is only to take the golden ear from the husk. Death to the aged Christian is only husking-time, and then the load goes in from the frosts to the garner.

My congratulations to those who are nearly done with the nuisances of this world. Give your staff to your little grandson to ride horse on. You are going to be young again, and you will have no need of crutches. May the clouds around the setting sun be golden, and such as to lead the "weather-wise" to prophesy a dear morning!

Quizzle.—But, Governor Wiseman, does it not give you a little uneasiness in this day of so much talk about cremation as to what will become of your body after you leave this sphere?

No; I have no uneasiness about my body after I have left it. The idea you speak of will never be carried out. I know that the papers are ardently discussing whether or not it will be best to burn the bodies of the dead, instead of burying them. Scientific journals contend that our cemeteries are the means of unhealthy exhalations, and that cremation is the only safe way of disposing of the departed. Some have advocated the chemical reduction of the physical system.

I have, as yet, been unable to throw myself into a mood sufficiently scientific to appreciate this proposal. It seems to me partly horrible and partly ludicrous. I think that the dead populations of the world are really the most quiet and unharmful. They make no war upon us, and we need make no war upon them. I am very certain that all the damage we shall ever do this world, will be while we are animate. It is not the dead people that are hard to manage, but the living. Some whistle to keep their courage up while going along by graveyards; I whistle while moving among the wide awake. Before attempting this barbaric disposal of the human form as a sanitary improvement, it would be better to clear the streets and "commons" of our cities of their pestiferous surroundings. Try your cremation on the dogs and cats with extinct animation.

But I have no fear that I shall thus be desecrated by my surviving friends. I have more fear of epitaphs. I do not wonder that people have sometimes dictated the inscription on their own tombstones when I see what inappropriate lines are chiseled on many a slab. There needs to be a reformation in epitaphiology.

People often ask me for appropriate inscriptions for the graves of their dead. They tell the virtues of the father, or wife, or child, and want me to put in compressed shape all that catalogue of excellences.

Of course I fail in the attempt. The story of a lifetime cannot be chiseled by the stone-cutter on the side of a marble slab. But it is not a rare thing to go a few months after by the sacred spot and find that the bereft friends, unable to get from others an epitaph sufficiently eulogistic, have put their own brain and heart to work and composed a rhyme. Now, the most unfit sphere on earth for an inexperienced mind to exercise the poetic faculty is in epitaphiology. It does very well in copy-books, but it is most unfair to blot the resting-place of the dead with unskilled poetic scribble. It seems to me that the owners of cemeteries and graveyards should keep in their own hand the right to refuse inappropriate and ludicrous epitaph.

One would have thought that the New Hampshire village would have risen in mob to prevent the inscription that was really placed on one of its tombstones descriptive of a man who had lost his life at the foot of a vicious mare on the way to brook:

One would have thought that even conservative New Jersey would have been in rebellion at a child's epitaph which in a village of that State reads thus:

Let not such discretions be allowed in hallowed places. Let not poetizers practice on the tombstone. My uniform advice to all those who want acceptable and suggestive epitaph is, Take a passage of Scripture. That will never wear out. From generation to generation it will bring down upon all visitors a holy hush; and if before that stone has crumbled the day comes for waking up of all the graveyard sleepers, the very words chiseled on the marble may be the ones that shall ring from the trumpet of the archangel.

Four months ago the air was full of evil prophecies. If a man believed one half he saw in the newspapers, he must have felt that this world was a failure, not paying more than ten cents on a dollar. To one good prophet like Isaiah or Ezekiel we had a thousand Balaams, each mounted on his appropriate nag.

First came the fearful announcement that in consequence of the financial depression we would have bread-riots innumerable and great slaughter. But where have been your riots? There was here and there a swinging of shillalahs, and a few broken heads which would probably have got broken anyhow; but the men who made the disturbance were found to be lounging vagabonds who never worked even when they had a chance.

Prophecy was also made that there would be a general starvation. We do not believe that in the United States there have been twenty sober people famished in the last year. Aware of the unusual stress upon the poor, the hand of charity has been more active and full than ever; and though many have been denied their accustomed luxuries, there has been bread for all.

The necessity for retrenchment has blessed the whole land. Many of us have learned how to make a thousand dollars do what fifteen hundred dollars—

Quizzle broke in at the first opportunity and said, "No doubt, governor, it is easy for you to be placid, for everything has gone well with you since you started life, whereas my mother died when I was little, and I was kicked and cuffed about by a step-mother whose name I cannot bear to hear."

Ha! ha! said Governor Wiseman. It is the old story of step-mothers. I don't believe they are any worse than other people, taking the average. I have often wondered why it is that the novels and romances always make the step-mother turn out so very badly. She always dresses too much and bangs the children. The authors, if writing out of their own experience, must have had a very hard time.

The child, haying been taught that the lady of the household is "nothing but a step-mother," screams at the least chastisement, knowing that the neighbors' window is up and this will be a good way of making publication. That is called cruelty which is only a most reasonable, moderate and Christian spanking. What a job she has in navigating a whole nursery of somebody else's children through mumps, measles, whooping-cough and chicken-pox! One of the things that I rejoice over in life is that it is impossible that I ever become a step-mother. In many cases she has the largest possible toil for the least reward.

Blessed be the Lord who setteth the solitary in families that there are glorious exceptions! The new mother comes to the new home, and the children gather the first day around her as the natural protector. They never know the difference between the first and second mother. They seem like two verses of the same hymn, two days of the summer, two strokes of the same bell, two blessings from the same God.

She is watchful all night long over the sick little one, bathing the brow and banishing the scare of the feverish dream. After a while those children will rise up to do her honor; and when her work is done, she will go up to get the large reward that awaits a faithful, great-hearted Christian step-mother in the land where the neighbors all mind their own business.

A LAYER OF WAFFLES.

Several months had passed along since we had enjoyed the society of Governor Wiseman, Doctor Heavyasbricks and Fred Quizzle. At our especial call they had come again.

The evening air was redolent with waffles baked in irons that had given them the square imprint which has come down through the ages as the only orthodox pattern.

No sooner had our friends seated themselves at the tea-table than—

Quizzle began: I see, Governor Wiseman, that the races have just come off in England. What do you think of horse-racing?

Quizzle.—But do you not, Governor Wiseman, believe in out-door sports and recreations?

Yes, said the governor, but it ought to be something that helps a man as well as the brute. I prefer those recreations that are good both for a man's body and soul. We want our entire nature developed.

Two thousand people one morning waited at the depot in Albany for the arrival of the remains of the great pugilist, Heenan. Then they covered the coffin with immortelles. No wonder they felt badly. The poor fellow's work was done. He had broken the last nose. He had knocked out the last tooth. He had bunged up the last eye. He had at last himself thrown up the sponge. The dead hero belonged to the aristocracy of hard-hitters. If I remember rightly, he drew the first blood in the conflict with one who afterward became one of the rulers of the nation—the Honorable John Morrissey, member of Congress of the United States and chief gambler at Saratoga.

There is just now an attempt at the glorification of muscle. The man who can row the swiftest, or strike a ball the farthest, or drop the strongest wrestler is coming to be of more importance. Strong muscle is a grand thing to have, but everything depends on how you use it. If Heenan had become a Christian, he would have made a capital professor in Polemic Theology. If the Harvard or Yale student shall come in from the boat-race and apply his athletic strength to rowing the world out of the breakers, we say "All hail!" to him. The more physical force a man has, the better; but if Samson finds nothing more useful to do than carrying of gate-posts, his strong muscle is only a nuisance.

A very prominent literary man apologized to me the other day for his merciless attack on one of my books, saying that he felt miserable that morning and must pitch into something; and my book being the first one on the table, he pitched into that. Our health decides our style of work. If this world is to be taken for God, we want more sanctified muscle. The man who comes to his Christian work having had sound sleep the night before, and the result of roast beef rare in his organism, can do almost anything. Luther was not obliged to nurse his appetite with any plantation bitters, but was ready for the coarsest diet, even the "Diet of Worms."

But while I advocate all sports, and exercises, and modes of life that improve the physical organism, I have no respect for bone, and nerve, and muscle in the abstract. Health is a fine harp, but I want to know what tune you are going to play on it. I have not one daisy to put on the grave of a dead pugilist or mere boat-racer, but all the garlands I can twist for the tomb of the man who serves God, though he be as physically weak as Richard Baxter, whose ailments were almost as many as his books, and they numbered forty.

"But, Governor Wiseman," said Quizzle, "do you not think that it is possible to combine physical, mental and spiritual recreations?"

Oh yes, replied the governor; I like this new mode of mingling religion with summer pleasures. Soon the Methodists will be shaking out their tents and packing their lunch-baskets and buying their railroad and steamboat tickets for the camp-meeting grounds. Martha's Vineyard, Round Lake, Ocean Grove and Sea Cliff will soon mingle psalms and prayers with the voice of surf and forest. Rev. Doctor J.H. Vincent, the silver trumpet of Sabbath-schoolism, is marshaling a meeting for the banks of Chautauqua Lake which will probably be the grandest religious picnic ever held since the five thousand sat down on the grass and had a surplus of provision to take home to those who were too stupid to go. From the arrangement being made for that meeting in August, I judge there will be so much consecrated enthusiasm that there may be danger that some morning, as the sun strikes gloriously through the ascending mist of Chautauqua Lake, our friends may all go up in a chariot of fire, leaving our Sunday-schools in a bereft condition. If they do go up in that way, may their mantle or their straw hat fall this way!

Quizzle.—Do you not think, governor, that there are inexpensive modes of recreation which are quite as good as those that absorb large means?

Yes, said the governor; we need to cut the coat according to our cloth. When I see that the Prince of Wales is three hundred thousand dollars in debt, notwithstanding his enormous income, I am forcibly reminded that it is not the amount of money a man gets that makes him well off, but the margin between the income and the outgo. The young man who while he makes a dollar spends a dollar and one cent is on the sure road either to bankruptcy or the penitentiary.

Next to the evil of living beyond one's means is that of spending all one's income. There are multitudes who are sailing so near shore that a slight wind in the wrong direction founders them. They get on well while the times are usual and the wages promptly paid; but a panic or a short period of sickness, and they drop helpless. Many a father has gone with his family in a fine carriage drawn by a spanking team till he came up to his grave; then he lay down, and his children have got out of the carriage, and not only been compelled to walk, but to go barefoot. Against parsimony and niggardliness I proclaim war; but with the same sentence I condemn those who make a grand splash while they live, leaving their families in destitution when they die.

Wiseman.—Have not yet made up my mind. The question is coming up in all our households as to the best mode of vacation. We shall all need rest. The first thing to do is to measure the length of your purse; you cannot make a short purse reach around Saratoga and the White Mountains. There may be as much health, good cheer and recuperation in a country farmhouse where the cows come up every night and yield milk without any chalk in it.

What the people of our cities need is quiet. What the people of the country need is sightseeing. Let the mountains come to New York and New York go to the mountains. The nearest I ever get to heaven in this world is lying flat down on my back under a tree, looking up through the branches, five miles off from a post-office or a telegraph station. But this would be torture to others.

Independent of what others do or say, let us in the selection of summer recreations study our own temperament and finances. It does not pay to spend so much money in July and August that you have to go pinched and half mad the rest of the year. The healthiest recreations do not cost much. In boyhood, with a string and a crooked pin attached to it, I fished up more fun from the mill-pond than last summer with a five-dollar apparatus I caught among the Franconia Mountains.

There being a slight pause in the conversation, Doctor Heavyasbricks woke gradually up and began to move his lips and to show strong symptoms of intention to ask for himself a question. He said: I have been attending the anniversaries in New York, and find that they are about dead. Wiseman, can you tell me what killed them?

Governor Wiseman replied: It is a great pity that the anniversaries are dead. They once lived a robust life, but began some fifteen years ago to languish, and have finally expired. To the appropriate question, What killed them? I answer, Peregrination was one of the causes. There never has been any such place for the anniversaries as the Broadway Tabernacle. It was large and social and central. When that place was torn down, the anniversaries began their travels. Going some morning out of the warm sunshine into some cathedral-looking place, they got the chills, and under the dark stained glass everything looked blue. In the afternoon they would enter some great square hall where everything was formal.

It is almost impossible to have a genial and successful meeting in a square hall. When in former days the country pastor said to his congregation, "Meet me at the New York anniversaries," they all knew where to go; but after the old Broadway Tabernacle went down, the aforesaid congregation might have looked in five or six places and not found their minister. The New York anniversaries died on the street between the old Tabernacle and St. Paul's Methodist Cathedral.

Diluted Christian oratory also helped to kill the anniversaries. The men whom we heard in our boyhood on the Broadway platform believed in a whole Bible, and felt that if the gospel did not save the world nothing ever would; consequently, they spoke in blood-red earnestness and made the place quake with their enthusiasm. There came afterward a weak-kneed stock of ministers who thought that part of the Bible was true, if they were not very much mistaken, and that, on the whole, religion was a good thing for most people, certainly if they had weak constitutions, and that man could be easily saved if we could get the phrenologist to fix up his head, and the gymnasium to develop his muscle, and the minister to coax him out of his indiscretions. Well, the anniversaries could not live on pap and confectionery, and so they died for lack of strong meat.

But the day of resurrection will come. Mark that! The tide of Bible evangelism will come up again. We may be dead, but our children will see it. New York will be thronged with men and women who will come up once a year to count the sheaves of harvest, and in some great building thronged from the platform to the vestibule an aroused Christian audience will applaud the news, just received by telegraph, of a nation born in a day, and sing with more power than when Thomas Hastings used to act as precentor:

Wiseman.—There is much discussion in the papers as to how long or short sermons and prayers ought to be. Some say a discourse ought to last thirty minutes, and others forty, and others an hour, and prayers should be three minutes long, or five, or fifteen. You might as well discuss how long a frock-coat ought to be, or how many ounces of food a man ought to eat. In the one case, everything depends upon the man's size; in the other, everything on the capacity of his stomach. A sermon or a prayer ought to go on as long as it is of any profit. If it is doing no good, the sermon is half an hour too long, though it take only thirty minutes. If the audience cough, or fidget, or shuffle their feet, you had better stop praying. There is no excuse, for a man's talking or praying too long if he have good eyesight and hearing.

But suppose a man have his sermon written and before him. You say he must go through with it? Oh no. Let him skip a few leaves. Better sacrifice three or four sheets of sermon-paper than sacrifice the interest of your hearers. But it is a silly thing for a man in a prayer-meeting or pulpit to stop merely because a certain number of minutes have expired while the interest is deepening—absurd as a hunter on the track of a roebuck, and within two minutes of bringing down its antlers, stopping because his wife said that at six o'clock precisely he must be home to supper. Keep on hunting till your ammunition gives out.

Quizzle.—I see there was no lack of interest when the brewers' convention met the other day in Boston, and that in their longest session the attention did not flag.

Wiseman.—Yes; I see that speeches were made on the beneficial use of fermented liquors. The announcement was made that during the year 8,910,823 barrels of the precious stuff had been manufactured. I suppose that while the convention was there Boston must have smelt like one great ale-pitcher. The delegates were invited to visit the suburbs of the city. Strange that nobody thought of inviting them to visit the cemeteries and graveyards, especially the potter's field, where thousands of their victims are buried. Perhaps you are in sympathy with these brewers, and say that if people would take beer instead of alcohol drunkenness would cease. But for the vast majority who drink, beer is only introductory to something stronger. It is only one carriage in the same funeral. Do not spell it b-e-e-r, but spell it b-i-e-r. May the lightnings of heaven strike and consume all the breweries from river Penobscot to the Golden Horn!

Quizzle.—I see, governor, that you were last week in Washington. How do things look there?

I think that the two houses of Congress are the best and most capable of any almost ever assembled. Of course there is a dearth of great men. Only here and there a Senator or Representative you ever before heard of. Indeed, the nuisances of our national council in other days were the great men who took, in making great speeches, the time that ought to have been spent in attending to business. We all know that it was eight or ten "honorable" bloats of the last thirty years who made our chief international troubles.

Our Congress is made up mostly of practical every-day men. They have no speeches to make, and no past political reputation to nurse, and no national fame to achieve. I like the new crop of statesmen better than the old, although it is a shorter crop. They do not drink so much rum, and not so large a proportion of them will die of delirium tremens. They may not have such resounding names as some of their predecessors, but I prefer a Congress of ordinary men to a group of Senators and Representatives overawed and led about by five or six overgrown, political Brobdingnagians.

While in Washington we had a startling occurrence. A young man in high society shot another young man, who fell dead instantly.

But do not think, my dear Fred, that I am opposed to everything because I have this evening spoken against so many different things. I cannot take the part of those who pride themselves in hurling a stout No against everything.

A friend called my attention to the fact that Sanballat wanted to hold consultation with Nehemiah in the plain of O-no. That is the place where more people stay, to-day, than in any other. They are always protesting, throwing doubt on grand undertakings; and while you are in the mountain of O-yes, they spend their time on the plain of O-no. In the harness of society they are breeching-straps, good for nothing but to hold back.

You propose to call a minister. All the indications are that he is the right man. Nine-tenths of the congregation are united in his favor. The matter is put to vote. The vast majority say "Ay!" the handful of opponents responded "O no!"

Some men were born backward, and have been going that way ever since. Opposition to everything has become chronic. The only way they feel comfortable is when harnessed with the face toward the whiffletree and their back to the end of the shafts. They may set down their name in the hotel register as living in Boston, Chicago, Savannah or Brooklyn, but they really have been spending all their lives on the plain of O-no. There let them be buried with their face toward the west, for in that way they will lie more comfortably, as other people are buried with their face to the east. Do not impose upon them by putting them in the majority. O-no!

We rejoice that there seems more liberality among good men, and that they have made up their minds to let each one work in his own way. The scalping-knives are being dulled.

As we sat at the head of the table interested in all that was going on, and saw Governor Wiseman with his honorable name, and Quizzle and Heavyasbricks with their unattractive titles, we thought of the affliction of an awkward or ill-omened name.

When there are so many pleasant names by which children may be called, what right has a parent to place on his child's head a disadvantage at the start? Worse than the gauntlet of measles and whooping-cough and mumps which the little ones have to run is this parental outrage.

What a struggle in life that child will have who has been baptized Jedekiah or Mehitabel! If a child is "called after" some one living, let that one be past mid-life and of such temperament that there shall be no danger of his becoming an absconder and a cheat. As far as possible let the name given be short, so that in the course of a lifetime there be not too many weeks or months taken up in the mere act of signature. The burdens of life are heavy enough without putting upon any one the extra weight of too much nomenclature. It is a sad thing when an infant has two bachelor uncles, both rich and with outrageous names, for the baby will have to take both titles, and that is enough to make a case of infant mortality.

Quizzle.—You seem to me, governor, to be more sprightly at every interview.

Well, that is so, but I do not know how long it will last; stout people like myself often go the quickest.

But the delicate people are shy of peril. They know that disease has been fishing for them for twenty years, and they keep away from the hook. No trout can be caught if he sees the shadow of the sportsman on the brook. These people whom everybody expects to die, live on most tenaciously.

I know of a young lady who evidently married a very wealthy man of eighty-five years on the ground he was very delicate, and with reference to her one-third. But the aged invalid is so careful of his health, and the young wife so reckless of hers, that it is now uncertain whether she will inherit his store-houses or he inherit her wedding-rings.

Health and longevity depend more upon caution and intelligent management of one's self than upon original physical outfit. Paul's advice to the sheriff is appropriate to people in all occupations: "Do thyself no harm!"

Besides that, said the governor, I have moved and settled in very comfortable quarters since I was at this table before. The house I have moved in is not a better house, but somehow I feel more contented.

Set not your affections on luxurious upholstery and spacious drawing-room. Be grateful and be humble.

If the house is not as large nor in as good neighborhood as the one you formerly occupied, make the best of it. It is astonishing what a good time you may have in a small room. Your present neighbors are just as kind as those you left, if you only knew them. Do not go around your house sticking up your nose at the small pantry, and the ugly mantel-pieces, and the low ceiling. It is a better place than your divine Master occupied, and to say the least you are no better than He. If you are a Christian, you are on your way to a King's mansion, and you are now only stopping a little in the porter's lodge at the gate. Go down in the dark lanes of the city and see how much poorer off many of your fellow-citizens are. If the heart be right, the home will be right.

FRIDAY EVENING.

Our friend Churchill was a great man for religious meetings. As he shoved back from our tea-table he said, "I must be off to church."

Then he yawned as though he expected to have a dull time, and asked me why it was that religious meetings were often so very insipid and that many people went to them merely as a matter of duty. Without waiting for me to give my opinion, he said he thought that there was a sombre hue given to such meetings that was killing and in a sort of soliloquy continued:

There is one thing Satan does well. He is good at stating the discouraging side. He knows how to fish for obstacles, and every time brings up his net full. Do not let us help him in his work. If you have anything to say in prayer-meeting that is disheartening, may you forget your speech! Tell us something on the bright side.

I know a Christian man who did something outrageously wrong. Some one said to me: "Why do you not expose him?" I replied: "That is the devil's work and it will be thoroughly done. If there is anything good about him, we would rather speak of that."

On a dark day do not go around closing the window-shutters. The world is dark enough without your making it more so. Is there anybody in the room who has a match? Please then strike it. There is only one kind of champagne that we temperance folks can take, and that is encouraging remark. It is a stimulus, and what makes it better than all other kinds of champagne is it leaves no headache.

I said to him, I think religious meetings have been improved in the last few years. One of the grandest results of the Fulton street prayer-meeting is the fact that all the devotional services of the country have been revolutionized. The tap of the bell of that historical prayer-meeting has shortened the prayers and exhortations of the church universal.

But since it has become the custom to throw open the meetings for remark and exhortation, there has been a jubilee among the religious bores who wander around pestering the churches. We have two or three outsiders who come about once in six weeks into our prayer-meeting; and if they can get a chance to speak, they damage all the interest. They talk long and loud in proportion as they have nothing to say. They empty on us several bushels of "ohs" and "ahs." But they seldom get a chance, for we never throw the meeting open when we see they are there. We make such a close hedge of hymns and prayers that they cannot break into the garden.

By what right such men go about in ecclesiastical vagabondism to spoil the peace of devotional meetings it is impossible to tell. Either that nuisance must be abated or we must cease to "throw open" our prayer-meetings for exhortation.

A few words about the uses of a week-night service. Many Christians do not appreciate it; indeed, it is a great waste of time, unless there be some positive advantage gained.

The French nation at one time tried having a Sabbath only once in ten days. The intelligent Christian finds he needs a Sabbath every three or four days, and so builds a brief one on the shore of a week-day in the shape of an extra religious service. He gets grace on Sabbath to bridge the chasm of worldliness between that and the next Sabbath, but finds the arch of the bridge very great, and so runs up a pier midway to help sustain the pressure.

There are one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week, and but two hours of public religious service on Sabbath. What chance have two hours in a battle with one hundred and sixty-eight?

If you were ever in the army you know what it is to see an officer on horseback dash swiftly past carrying a dispatch. You wondered as he went what the news was. Was the army to advance, or was an enemy coming?

So every Christian carries a dispatch from God to the world. Let him ride swiftly to deliver it. The army is to advance and the enemy is coming. Go out and fulfill your mission. You may have had a letter committed to your care, and after some days you find it in one of your pockets, you forgot to deliver it. Great was your chagrin when you found that it pertained to some sickness or trouble. God gives every man a letter of warning or invitation to carry, and what will be your chagrin in the judgment to find that you nave forgotten it!

A week-night meeting widens the pulpit till all the people can stand on it. Such a service tests one's piety. No credit for going to church on Sabbath. Places of amusement are all closed, and there is no money to be made. But week-nights every kind of temptation and opportunity spreads before a man, and if he goes to the praying circle he must give up these things. The man who goes to the weekly service regularly through moonlight and pitch darkness, through good walking and slush ankle-deep, will in the book of judgment find it set down to his credit. He will have a better seat in heaven than the man who went only when the walking was good, and the weather comfortable, and the services attractive, and his health perfect. That service which costs nothing God accounts as nothing.

The week-night service gives additional opportunity of religious culture, and we find it so difficult to do right and be right that we cannot afford to miss any opportunity. Such a service is a lunch between the Sabbath meals, and if we do not take it we get weak and faint. A truth coming to us then ought to be especially effective.

If you are on a railroad train, and stop at the depot, and a boy comes in with a telegram, all the passengers lean forward and wonder if it is for them. It may be news from home. It must be urgent or it would not be brought there. Now, if while we are rushing on in the whirl of every-day excitement, a message of God meets us, it must be an urgent and important message. If God speaks to us in a meeting mid-week, it is because there is something that needs to be said before next Sunday.

THE SABBATH EVENING TEA-TABLE.

When this evening comes we do not have any less on our table because it is a sacred day, but a little more. On other evenings we have in our dining-hall three of the gas-burners lighted, but on Sabbath evening we have four. We try to have the conversation cheerfully religious.

After the children are sleepy we do not keep them up to recite the "Larger Catechism." During summer vacation, when we have no evening service to attend at church, we sometimes have a few chapters of a Christian book read or a column of a Christian newspaper, or if any one has an essay on any religious theme, we hear that.

We tarry long after the tea has got cold. We do not care if the things are not cleared off till next morning. If any one has a perplexing passage of Scripture to explain, we gather all the lights possible on that subject. We send up stairs for concordance and Bible dictionary. It may be ten o'clock at night before the group is dispersed from the Sabbath evening tea-table.

Some of the chapters following may be considered as conversations condensed or as paragraphs read. You will sometimes ascribe them to the host, at other times to the hostess, at other times to the strangers within the gates.

His hair was as white as any snow-bank through which he had waded to meet his appointments. He sympathized with every one, could swing from mood to mood very easily, and found the bridge between laughter and tears a short one and soon crossed. He was like an orchard in October after some of the frosts, the fruit so ripe and mellow that the least breeze would fill the laps of the children. He ate scarcely anything at the tea-table, for you do not want to put much fuel in an engine when it has nearly reached the depot. Old Dominie Scattergood gave his entire time to religious discourse when he sat with us at the close of the Lord's day.

How calm and bright and restful the light that falls on the Sabbath evening tea-table! Blessed be its memories for ever and ever! and Jessie, and De Witt, and May, and Edith, and Frank, and the baby, and all the visitors, old and young, thick-haired and bald-headed, say Amen!

THE WARM HEART OF CHRIST.

The first night that old Dominie Scattergood sat at our tea-table, we asked him whether he could make his religion work in the insignificant affairs of life, or whether he was accustomed to apply his religion on a larger scale. The Dominie turned upon us like a day-dawn, and addressed us as follows:

There is no warmer Bible phrase than this: "Touched with the feeling of our infirmities." The Divine nature is so vast, and the human so small, that we are apt to think that they do not touch each other at any point. We might have ever so many mishaps, the government at Washington would not hear of them, and there are multitudes in Britain whose troubles Victoria never knows; but there is a throne against which strike our most insignificant perplexities. What touches us, touches Christ. What annoys us, annoys Christ. What robs us, robs Christ. He is the great nerve-centre to which thrill all sensations which touch us who are his members.

Chronic complaints, the rheumatism, the neuralgia, the dyspepsia, after a while cease to excite human sympathy, but with Christ they never become an old story. He is as sympathetic as when you felt the first twinge of inflamed muscle or the first pang of indigestion. When you cannot sleep, Christ keeps awake with you. All the pains you ever had in your head are not equal to the pains Christ had in His head. All the acute suffering you ever had in your feet is not equal to the acute suffering Christ had in His feet. By His own hand He fashioned your every bone, strung every nerve, grew every eyelash, set every tooth in its socket, and your every physical disorder is patent to Him, and touches His sympathies.

He is also touched with the infirmities of our prayers. Nothing bothers the Christian more than the imperfections of his prayers. His getting down on his knees seems to be the signal for his thoughts to fly every whither. While praying about one thing he is thinking about another. Could you ever keep your mind ten minutes on one supplication? I never could. While you are praying, your store comes in, your kitchen comes in, your losses and gains come in. The minister spreads his hands for prayer, and you put your head on the back of the pew in front, and travel round the world in five minutes.

He is touched with the infirmity of our temper.

There are some who, notwithstanding all that is said or done to them can smile back. But many of you are so constructed that if a man insults you, you either knock him down or wish you could. While with all resolution and prayer you resist this, remember that Christ knows how much you have been lied about, and misrepresented, and trod on. He knows that though you said something that was hot, you kept back something that was ten times hotter. He takes into account your explosive temperament. He knows that it requires more skill to drive a fiery span than a tame roadster. He knows how hard you have put down the "brakes" and is touched with the feeling of your infirmity.

Christ also sympathizes with our poor efforts at doing good.

It is comforting to know that it is not the learned and the great and the eloquent that Christ seems to stand closest by. The "Swamp-angel" was a big gun, and made a stunning noise, but it burst before it accomplished anything, while many an humble rifle helped decide the contest. Christ made salve out of spittle to cure a blind man, and the humblest instrumentality may, under God, cure the blindness of the soul. Blessed be God for the comfort of His gospel!

SACRIFICING EVERYTHING.

Ourselves.—Dominie Scattergood, why did Christ tell the man inquiring about his soul to sell all he had and give everything to the poor? Is it necessary for one to impoverish himself in order to be a Christian?

The Dominie.—You mistake the purport of Christ's remark. He was not here teaching the importance of benevolence, but the duty of self-conquest. That young man had an all absorbing love of wealth. Money was his god, and Christ is not willing to occupy the throne conjointly with any other deity. This was a case for what the doctors call heroic treatment. If a physician meet a case of unimportant sickness, he prescribes a mild curative, but sometimes he comes to a room where the case is almost desperate; ordinary medicine would not touch it. It is "kill or cure," and he treats accordingly. This young man that Christ was medicating was such a case. There did not seem much prospect, and He gives him this powerful dose, "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"

Still, we must admire the manner in which the Great Physician took the diagnosis of this man's case and grappled it. We all need heroic spiritual treatment. We do not get well of sin because we do not realize what a dire disease it is, and that we cannot cure it with a spiritual panacea, a gentle antidote, a few grains of spiritual morphine, a mild moral corrective or a few drops of peppermint on white sugar.

We want our pride killed, and we read an essay on that sweet grace of humility, and we go on as proud as ever. The pleasant lozenge does not do the work. Rather let us set ourselves to do that for Christ which is most oppugnant to our natural feelings. You do not take part in prayer-meeting because you cannot pray like Edward Payson, or exhort like John Summerfield. If you want to crush your pride, get up anyhow, though your knees knock together, and your tongue catches fast, and you see some godless hearer in prayer-meeting laughing as though she would burst.

Deal with your avarice in the same heroic style. Having heard the charitable cause presented, at the first right impulse thrust your hand in your pocket where the money is, and pull it out though it half kills you. Pull till it comes. Put it on the plate with an emphasis, and turn your face away before you are tempted to take it back again. All your sweet contemplation about benevolence will not touch your case. Heroic treatment or nothing!

We treat our sins too politely. We ought to call them by their right names. Hatred to our neighbor should not be called hard thoughts, but murder: "whoso hateth his brother is a murderer!" Sin is abominable. It has tusks and claws, and venom in its bite, and death in its stroke. Mild treatment will not do. It is loathsome, filthy and disgusting. If we bid a dog in gentle words to go out of the house, he will lie down under the table. It wants a sharp voice and a determined manner to make him clear out, and so sin is a vile cur that cannot be ejected by any conservative policy. It must be kicked out!

Alas for the young man of the text! He refused Christ's word and went away to die, and there are now those who cannot submit to Christ's command, and after fooling their time away with moral elixirs suddenly relapse and perish. They might have been cured, but would not take the medicine.

THE YOUNGSTERS HAVE LEFT.

The children after quitting the tea-table were too noisy for Sabbath night, and some things were said at the table critical of their behavior, when old Dominie Scattergood dawned upon the subject and said:

We expect too much of our children when they become Christians. Do not let us measure their qualifications by our own bushel. We ought not to look for a gravity and deep appreciation of eternal things such as we find in grown persons. We have seen old sheep in the pasture-field look anxious and troubled because the lambs would frisk.

No doubt the children that were lifted by their mothers in Christ's arms, and got His blessing, five minutes after He set them down were as full of romp as before they came to Him. The boy that because he has become a Christian is disgusted with ball-playing, the little girl who because she has given her heart to God has lost her interest in her waxen-doll, are morbid and unhealthy. You ought not to set the life of a vivacious child to the tune of Old Hundred.

No, no! If the supply at the Lord's table were limited, He would let the children come in first and the older ones go without, as a punishment for not having come in while they themselves were children. If the wind is from the northeast, and the air is full of frost and snow, and part of the flock must be left out on the mountains, let it be the old sheep, for they can stand it better than the lambs. O Shepherd of Israel, crowd them all in before the coming of the tempest!

Myself.—Dominie Scattergood, what do yow think of this discussion in the papers on the subject of liturgies?

Scattergood.—I know there has been much talk of late about liturgies in the churches, and whether or not audiences should take audible part in religious service. While others are discussing that point, let me say that all the service of the Church ought to be responsive if not with audible "Amen," and unanimous "Good Lord, deliver us," then with hearty outburst of soul.

Let not the prayer of him that conducts public service go up solitary and alone, but accompanied by the heartfelt ejaculation of all the auditory. We sit down on a soft cushion, in a pew by architectural skill arranged to fit the shape of our back, and are tempted to fall into unprofitable reveries. Let the effort be on the part of every minister to make the prayer and the Scripture-reading and the giving out of the hymn so emphatic that the audience cannot help but respond with all the soul.

The reason that congregations have their heads bobbing about in prayer-time is because the officiating clergyman is apt to petition in the abstract. He who calls the troubles of his people by their right names, and tenderly lays hold of the cancers of the souls before him, will not lack in getting immediate heartfelt, if not audible, response.

While we have not as much interest in the agitated question of liturgies as would make us say ten words about it, we are interested more than we can tell in the question, How shall the officiating ministers, in all the churches, give so much point, and adaptedness, and vigor and blood-red earnestness of soul to their public devotions as shall make all the people in church feel that it is the struggle for their immortal life in which the pastor is engaged? Whether it be in tones that strike the ear, or with a spiritual emphasis heard only in the silent corridor of the heart, let all the people say Amen!

Myself.—What do you think, Dominie, about all this talk about sensationalism in the pulpit?

Scattergood.—As far as I can understand, it seems to be a war between stagnation and sensationalism, and I dislike both.

I hate sensationalism in the pulpit so far as that word means the preaching of everything but the gospel, but the simple fact is that whenever and wherever faith and repentance and heaven and hell are proclaimed with emphasis there will be a sensation. The people in our great cities are hungry for the old gospel of Christ. If our young men in the ministry want large audiences, let them quit philosophizing, and hair-splitting, and botanizing, and without gloves take hold of men's sins and troubles, and there will be no lack of hearers. Stagnation is worse than sensationalism.

Let us all wake up and go to work. There are in the private membership of our churches and in the ministry a great many men who are dead, but have never had the common decency to get buried. With the harvest white and "lodging" for lack of a sickle, instead of lying under the trees criticising the sweating reapers who are at work, let us throw off our own coat and go out to see how good a swathe we can cut.

Myself.—You seem, Dominie Scattergood, though you have been preaching a great while, to be very healthy and to have a sound throat.

Scattergood.—Yes; I don't know any reason why ministers should not be as well as other persons. I have never had the ministers' sore throat, but have avoided it by the observance of two or three rules which I commend to you of less experience. The drug stores are full of troches, lozenges and compounds for speakers and singers. All these medicines have an important mission, but how much better would it be to avoid the ills than to spend one's time in trying to cure them!

1. Speak naturally. Let not incompetent elocutionists or the barbarisms of custom give you tones or enunciations at war with those that God implanted. Study the vocal instrument and then play the best tune on it possible, but do not try to make a flute sound like a trumpet, or a bagpipe do the work of a violin.

Myself.—I notice, Dominie, that your handwriting is not as good as your health. Your letter in reply to my invitation to be here was so indistinct that I could not tell whether it was an acceptance or a declinature.

Scattergood.—Well, I have not taken much care of my autograph. I know that the attempt has been made to reduce handwriting to a science. Many persons have been busy in gathering the signatures of celebrated men and women. A Scotchman, by the name of Watson, has paid seventy-five thousand dollars for rare autographs. Rev. Dr. Sprague, of Albany, has a collection marvelous for interest.

After we read an interesting book we want to see the author's face and his autograph. But there is almost always a surprise or disappointment felt when for the first time we come upon the handwriting of persons of whom we have heard or read much. We often find that the bold, dashing nature sometimes wields a trembling pen, and that some man eminent for weakness has a defiant penmanship that looks as if he wrote with a splinter of thunderbolt.

On the contrary, one's handwriting is often the antipodes of his character. An unreasonable schoolmaster has often, by false instruction, cramped or ruined the pupil's chirography for ever. If people only knew how a brutal pedagogue in the academy used to pull my ears while learning to write, I should not be so often censured for my own miserable scribble. I defy any boy to learn successfully to make "hooks and trammels" in his copy-book, or ever after learn to trace a graceful calligraphy, if he had "old Talyor" bawling over him. I hope never to meet that man this side of heaven, lest my memory of the long-ago past be too much for the sense of ministerial propriety.

There are great varieties of circumstances that influence and decide the autograph. I have no faith in the science of chirography. I could, from a pack of letters in one pigeon-hole, put to rout the whole theory. I have come to the conclusion that he who judges of a man's character by his penmanship makes a very poor guess. The boldest specimen of chirography I ever received was from a man whose wife keeps him in perpetual tremor, he surrendering every time she looks toward the broomstick.

Myself.—What do you think, Dominie, of the fact that laymen have begun to preach? and what is your opinion of the work they are doing in Scotland?

For the first time in many a day the old Dominie grew sarcastic, and said:

I have a sly suspicion that the layman who has for seven years given the most of his time to the study of the truth is better prepared to preach the gospel than a man who has given that length of time in theological seminaries to the study of what other people say about the Bible. In other words, we like water just dipped from the spring, though handed in a gourd, rather than water that has been standing a week in a silver pitcher.

After Calvin has twisted us one way, and Arminius has twisted us another, and we get our head full of the old Andover and New Haven theological fights, and the difference between Ante-Nicene Trinitarianism and Post-Nicene Trinitarianism, it is a luxury to meet some evangelist who can tell us in our common mother-tongue of Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost.

Some cry out, "It is dangerous to have laymen take such prominent positions in the Church." Dangerous to what? Our dignity, our prerogatives, our clerical rights? It is the same old story. If we have a mill on the stream, we do not want some one else to build a mill on the same stream. It will take the water off our wheel. But, blessed be God! the river of salvation is deep and strong enough to grind corn for all nations.

If a pulpit is so weak that the wave of religious zeal on the part of the laity submerges it, then let it go under. We cannot expect all other shipping to forsake the sea lest they run down our craft. We want more watchmen on the wall, more sentinels at the gate, more recruits for the field. Forward the whole Christian laity! Throw up no barrier to their advancement. Do not hang the Church until dead by the neck with "red-tape."

I laughed outright, though I ought to have cried, when I read in one of our papers a statement of the work of Moody and Sankey in Edinburgh, which statement closed with the luscious remark that "Probably the Lord is blessing their work." I never saw a word put in more awkward and forced and pitiable predicament than that word probably. While heaven and earth and hell have recognized the stupendous work now going on in Scotland under God and through the instrumentality of these American evangelists, a correspondent thinks that probably something has happened.

The first cry is, "The people converted are the lower population, and not the educated." We wonder if five hundred souls brought to Christ from the "Cowgate" and "Coalhole," and made kings and priests unto God, and at last seated on thrones so high they will not be able to reach down with their foot to the crown of an earthly monarch, is not worth some consideration?

Then the cry is, "They will not hold out." Time only will show that. They are doing all they can. You cannot expect them to hold out ten years in six weeks. The most faithful Christians we have ever known were brought in through revivals, and the meanest, stingiest, dullest, hardest-to-get-on-with Christians have joined when the church was dead.

When a candidate for admission comes before session in revival times, I ask him only seven or eight questions; but when he comes during a cold state of religion, I ask him twenty questions, and get the elders to ask him as many more. In other words, I have more faith in conversions under special religious influence than under ordinary.

Oh for great awakenings all over Christendom!

We have had a drought so long we can stand a freshet. Let the Hudson and the Thames and the Susquehanna rise and overflow the lowlands, and the earth be full of the knowledge of God as the waters fill the seas. That time is hastening, probably!

FAMILY PRAYERS.

Take first the statement that unless our children are saved in early life they probably never will be. They who go over the twentieth year without Christ are apt to go all the way without Him. Grace, like flower-seed, needs to be sown in spring. The first fifteen years of life, and often the first six, decide the eternal destiny.

The first thing to do with a lamb is to put it in the arms of the Great Shepherd. Of course we must observe natural laws. Give a child excessive meat diet, and it will grow up sensual, and catechism three times a day, and sixty grains in each dose, won't prevent it. Talk much in your child's presence about the fashions, and it will be fond of dress, notwithstanding all your lectures on humility. Fill your house with gossip, and your children will tattle. Culture them as much as you will, but give them plenty of money to spend, and they will go to destruction.

Family prayers are often of no use. Perhaps they are too hurried. We have so much before us of the day's work that we must hustle the children together. We get half through the chapter before the family are seated. We read as if we were reading for a wager. We drop on our knees, are in the second or third sentence before they all get down. It is an express train, with amen for the first depot. We rush for the hat and overcoat, and are on the way to the store, leaving the impression that family prayers are a necessary nuisance, and we had better not have had any gathering of the family at all. Better have given them a kiss all around; it would have taken less time and would have been more acceptable to God and them.

Family prayers often fail in adaptedness. Do not read for the morning lesson a genealogical chapter, or about Samson setting the foxes' tails on fire, or the prophecy about the horses, black and red, and speckled, unless you explain why they were speckled. For all the good your children get from such reading, you might as well have read a Chinese almanac. Rather give the story of Jesus, and the children climbing into his arms, or the lad with the loaves and fishes, or the Sea of Galilee dropping to sleep under Christ's lullaby.

Family prayer also fails when the whole day is not in harmony with it. A family prayer, to be worth anything, ought to be twenty-four hours long. It ought to give the pitch to all the day's work and behavior. The day when we get thoroughly mad upsets the morning devotion. The life must be in the same key with the devotion.

Family prayer is infinitely important. If you are a parent, and are not a professor of religion, and do not feel able to compose a prayer, get some one of the many books that have been written, put it down before you, and read prayers for the household. God has said that He will "pour out His fury upon the family that call not upon His name."

Prayer for our children will be answered. My grandmother was a praying woman. My father's name was David. One day, he and other members of the family started for a gay party. Grandmother said: "Go, David, and enjoy yourself; but all the time you and your brothers and sisters are there, I will be praying for you." They went, but did not have a very good time, knowing that their mother was praying for them.

The next morning, grandmother heard loud weeping in the room below. She went down and found her daughter crying violently. What was the matter? She was in anxiety about her soul—an anxiety that found no relief short of the cross. Word came that David was at the barn in great agony. Grandmother went and found him on the barn floor, praying for the life of his soul.

CALL TO SAILORS.

One of the children asked us at the tea-table if we had ever preached at sea. We answered, No! but we talked one Sabbath, mid-Atlantic, to the officers, crew and passengers of the steamship "China." By the way, I have it as it was taken down at the time and afterward appeared in a newspaper, and here is the extract:

No persons bound from New York to Liverpool ever had more cause for thanksgiving to God than we. The sea so smooth, the ship so staunch, the companionship so agreeable, all the circumstances so favorable. O Thou who holdest the winds in Thy fist, blessed be Thy glorious name for ever!

Englishmen, Costa Ricans, Germans, Spaniards, Japanese, Irishmen, Americans—gathered, never to meet again till the throne of judgment is lifted—let us join hands to-day around the cross of Jesus and calculate our prospect for eternity. A few moments ago we all had our sea-glasses up watching the vessel that went by. "What is her name?" we all asked, and "Whither is she bound?"

We pass each other on the ocean of life to-day. We only catch a glimpse of each other. The question is, "Whither are we bound? For harbor of light or realm of darkness?" As we decide these questions, we decide everything.

Officers and crew of this ship, have you not often felt the need of divine help? In the hour of storm and shipwreck, far away from your homes, have you not called for heavenly rescue? The God who then heard thy prayer will hear thee now. Risk not your soul in the great future without compass, or chart, or anchor, or helmsman. You will soon have furled your last sail, and run up the last ratline, and weathered the last gale, and made the last voyage. What next? Where then will be your home, who your companions, what your occupation?

Let us all thank God for this Sabbath which has come to us on the sea. How beautifully it bridges the Atlantic! It hovers above every barque and brig and steamer, it speaks of a Jesus risen, a grave conquered, a heaven open. It is the same old Sabbath that blessed our early days. It is tropical in its luxuriance, but all its leaves are prayers, and all its blossoms praise. Sabbath on the sea! How solemn! How suggestive! Let all its hours, on deck, in cabin, in forecastle, be sacred.

Some of the old tunes that these sailors heard in boyhood times would sound well to-day floating among the rigging. Try "Jesus, lover of my soul," or "Come, ye sinners, poor and needy," or "There is a fountain filled with blood." As soon as they try those old hymns, the memory of loved ones would come back again, and the familiar group of their childhood would gather, and father would be there, and mother who gave them such good advice when they came to sea, and sisters and brothers long since scattered and gone.

Now, may the blessing of God come down upon officers and crew and passengers! Whatever our partings, our losses, our mistakes, our disasters in life, let none of us miss heaven. On that shore may we land amid the welcome of those who have gone before. They have long been waiting our arrival, and are now ready to conduct us to the foot of the throne. Look, all ye voyagers for eternity! Land ahead! Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

What Paul said to the crew and passengers on the corn-ship of the Mediterranean is appropriate here: "Now I exhort you to be of good cheer!" God fit us for the day when the archangel, with one foot on the sea and the other on the land, shall swear by Him that liveth for ever and ever that time shall be no longer!

JEHOSHAPHAT'S SHIPPING.

Your attention is called to a Bible incident that you may not have noticed. Jehoshaphat was unfortunate with his shipping. He was about to start another vessel. The wicked men of Ahaziah wanted to go aboard that vessel as sailors. Jehoshaphat refused to allow them to go, for the reason that he did not want his own men to mingle with those vicious people.

In other words, he knew what you and I know very well, that it is never safe to go in the same boat with the wicked. But there are various applications of that idea. We too often forget it, and are not as wise as Jehoshaphat was when he refused to allow his men to be in companionship in the same boat with the wicked men of Ahaziah.

The principle I stated is appropriate to the formation, in the first place, of all domestic alliances. I have often known women who married men for the purpose of reforming them from dissipated habits. I never knew one successful in the undertaking. Instead of the woman lifting the man up, the man drags her down. This is inevitably the case. The greatest risk that one ever undertakes is attempting the voyage of life in a boat in which the wicked sail; this remark being most appropriate to the young persons who are in my presence. It is never safe to sail with the sons of Ahaziah. The aged men around me will bear out the statement that I have made. There is no exception to it.

If, therefore, you have a choice when you go out in the world as to whether you will be associated in business circles with men who love God, or those who are hostile to the Christian religion, you might better sacrifice some of your financial interests and go among the people of God than risk the interests of your immortal soul.

Jehoshaphat knew it was unsafe for his men to go in one boat with the men of Ahaziah, and you cannot afford to have business associations with those who despise God, and heed not His commandments. I admit the fact that a great many men are forced into associations they despise, and there are business circles in which we are compelled to go which we do not like, but if you have a choice, see that you make an intelligent and safe one.

It is always best to keep ourselves under Christian influences. It is not possible, if you mingle in associations that are positively Christian, not to be made better men or women. The Christian people with whom you associate may not be always talking their religion, but there is something in the moral atmosphere that will be life to your soul. You choose out for your most intimate associates eight or ten Christian people. You mingle in that association; you take their counsel; you are guided by their example, and you live a useful life, and die a happy death, and go to a blessed eternity. There is no possibility of mistaking it; there is not an exception in all the universe or ages—not one.

For this reason I wish that Christians engage in more religious conversation. I do not really think that Christian talk is of so high a type as it used to be. Some of you can look back to your very early days and remember how the neighbors used to come in and talk by the hour about Christ and heaven and their hopes of the eternal world. There has a great deal of that gone out of fashion.

You take two Christian people of this modern day and place them in the same room (I suppose the two men may have no worldly subjects in common). What are they talking about? There being no worldly subject common to them, they are in great stress for a subject, and after a long pause Mr. A remarks: "It is a pleasant evening."

Again there is a long pause. These two men, both redeemed by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, heaven above them, hell beneath them, eternity before them, the glorious history of the Church of Jesus Christ behind them, certainly after a while they will converse on the subject of religion. A few minutes have passed and Mr. B remarks: "Fine autumn we are having."

Again there is a profound quiet. Now, you suppose that their religious feelings have really been dammed back for a little while; the men have been postponing the things of God and eternity that they may approach the subject with more deliberation, and you wonder what useful thing Mr. B will say to Mr. A in conversation.

It is the third time, and perhaps it is the last that these two Christian men will ever meet until they come face to face before the throne of God. They know it. The third attempt is now made. Mr. A says to Mr. B: "Feels like snow!"

But there are Christian associations where men and women do talk out their religion; and my advice to you is to seek out all those things, and remember that just in proportion as you seek such society will you be elevated and blessed. After all, the gospel boat is the only safe boat to sail in. The ships of Jehoshaphat went all to pieces at Eziongeber.

Come aboard this gospel craft, made in the dry-dock of heaven and launched nineteen hundred years ago in Bethlehem amid the shouting of the angels. Christ is the captain, and the children of God are the crew. The cargo is made up of the hopes and joys of all the ransomed. It is a ship bound heavenward, and all the batteries of God will boom a greeting as we sail in and drop anchor in the still waters. Come aboard that ship; it is a safe craft! The fare is cheap! It is a certain harbor!

The men of Ahaziah were forbidden to come aboard the ships of Jehoshaphat, but all the world is invited to board this gospel craft. The vessel of Jehoshaphat went to pieces, but this craft shall drop anchor within the harbor, and mountains shall depart, and hills shall be removed, and seas shall dry up, and time itself shall perish, but the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him.

ALL ABOUT MERCY.

Benedict XIII. decreed that when the German: Catholics met each other, they should always give the following salutation, the one first speaking saying, "Praised be Jesus Christ," the other responding, "For ever, amen," a salutation fit for Protestants whenever they come together.

The word "mercy" is used in the Bible two hundred and fourteen times; it seems to be the favorite word of all the Scriptures. Sometimes it glances feebly upon us like dew in the starlight; then with bolder hand it seems to build an arched bridge from one storm-cloud of trouble to another; and then again it trickles like a fountain upon the thirst of the traveler.

The finest roads I ever saw are in Switzerland. They are built by the government, and at very short intervals you come across water pouring out of the rocks. The government provides cups for men and troughs for the animals to drink out of. And our King has so arranged it that on the highway we are traveling toward heaven, ever and anon there shall dash upon us the clear, sweet water that flows from the eternal Rock. I propose to tell you some things about God's mercy.

The sin of the soul is not, as some would seem to think, just a little dust on the knee or elbow that you can strike off in a moment and without any especial damage to you. Sin has utterly discomfited us; it has ransacked our entire nature; it has ruined us so completely that no human power can ever reconstruct us; but through the darkness of our prison gloom and through the storm there comes a voice from heaven, saying, "I will abundantly pardon."

Then think of His restraining mercy. I do not believe that it is possible for any man to tell his capacity for crime until he has been tested. There have been men who denounced all kinds of frauds, who scorned all mean transactions, who would have had you believe that it was impossible for them ever to be tempted to dishonesty, and yet they may be owning to-day the chief part of the stock in the Credit Mobilier.

There are men who once said they never could be tempted to intemperance. They had no mercy on the drunkard. They despised any man who became a victim of strong drink. Time passed on, and now they are the victims of the bottle, so far gone in their dissipation that it is almost impossible that they ever should be rescued.

So there have been those who were very hard on all kinds of impurity, and who scoffed at unchastity, and who said that it was impossible that they should ever be led astray; but to-night they are in the house whose gates are the gates of hell! It is a very dangerous thing for a man to make a boast and say, "Such and such a sin I never could be tempted to commit."

Think also of His guiding mercy. You have sometimes been on a journey, and come to where there were three roads—one ahead of you, one to the right and one to the left. It was a lonely place, and you had no one of whom to ask advice. You took the left-hand road, thinking that was the right one, but before night you found out your mistake, and yet your horse was too exhausted and you were too tired to retrace your steps, and the mistake you made was an irretrievable mistake.

You come on in life, many a time, and find there are three or four or fifty roads, and which one of the fifty to take you do not know. Let me say that there are forty-nine chances out of fifty that you will take the wrong one, unless God directs you, since it is a great deal easier to do that which is wrong than that which is right, our nature being corrupt and depraved.

Blessed be God, we have a directory! As a man lost on the mountains takes out his map and sees the right road marked down, and makes up his mind what to do, so the Lord, in His gospel map, has said: "This is the way, walk ye in it." Blessed be God for His guiding mercy!

No one escapes. If you are not wounded in this side, you must be wounded in that. There are foes all around about you. There is no one who has come up to this moment without having been cleft of misfortunes, without having been disappointed and vexed and outraged and trampled on.

The world comes and tries to solace us, but I think the most impotent thing on earth is human comfort when there is no gospel mixed with it. It is a sham and an insult to a wounded spirit—all the comfort that this world can offer a man; but in his time of darkness and perplexity and bereavement and persecution and affliction, Christ comes to him with the solace of His Spirit, and He says: "Oh, thou tempted one, thou shalt not be tempted above that thou art able." He tells the invalid, "There is a land where the inhabitants never say, 'I am sick.'" He says to the assaulted one, "You are no better than I am; they maltreated me, and the servant ought not to expect to have it easier than his Lord."

He comes to the bereaved one and says: "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." And if the trouble be intricate, if there be so many prongs to it, so many horns to it, so many hoofs to it, that he cannot take any of the other promises and comforts of God's word to his soul, he can take that other promise made for a man in the last emergency and when everything else fails: "All things work together for good to those that love God." Oh, have you never sung of the comforting mercy of God?

Blessed be God, this story of grief and trouble and perplexity will come to an end! There are twelve gates to heaven, and they are all gates of mercy. There are paths coming into all those gates, and they are all paths of mercy. There are bells that ring in the eternal towers, and they are all chimes of mercy. There are mansions prepared for us in this good land when we have done with the toils of earth, and all those mansions are mansions of mercy. Can you not now strike upon your soul, saying, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, for thy pardoning mercy, for thy restraining mercy, for thy guiding mercy, for thy comforting mercy, for thy enthroning mercy!"

UNDER THE CAMEL'S SADDLE.

Rachel had been affianced to Jacob, and one day while her father, Laban, was away from home she eloped with Jacob. Laban returned home and expressed great sorrow that he had not been there when his daughter went away, saying that he would have allowed her to go, and that she might have been accompanied with a harp and the dance and with many beautiful presents.

Laban started for Rachel and Jacob. He was very anxious to recover the gods that had been stolen from his household. He supposed that Rachel had taken them, as she really had. He came up in the course of a few days to the party and demanded the gods that had been taken from his house. Jacob knew nothing about the felony, but Rachel was secreting these household gods.

Laban came into the tent where she was, and asked for them. She sat upon a saddle of a camel, the saddle having been laid down at the side of the tent, and under this camel's saddle were the images. Rachel pretended to be sick, and said she could not rise. Her father, Laban, supposed that she told the truth, and looked everywhere but under the camel's saddle, where really the lost images were. He failed in the search, and went back home without them.

Do not let us, however, be too severely critical of Laban. He is only the representative of thousands of Christian men and women, who, once having espoused the worship of God, go back to their idols. When a man professes faith in Christ on communion-day, with the sacramental cup in his hand, he swears allegiance to the Lord God Almighty, and says, "Let all my idols perish!" but how many of us have forsaken our fealty to God, and have gone back to our old idols!

There are many who sacrifice their soul's interests in the idolatry of wealth. There was a time when you saw the folly of trying with, money to satisfy the longing of your soul. You said, when you saw men going down into the dust and tussle of life, "Whatever god I worship, it won't be a golden calf." You saw men plunge into the life of a spendthrift, or go down into the life of a miser, like one of old smothered to death in his own money-chest, and you thought, "I shall be very careful never to be caught in these traps in which so many men have fallen, to their souls' eternal discomfiture."

But you went down into the world; you felt-the force of temptation; you saw men all around you making money very fast, some of them sacrificing all their Christian principle; you felt the fascination come upon your own soul, and before you knew it, you were with Laban going down to hunt in Rachel's tent for your lost idols.

One of the mighty men of India said to his servants: "Go not near the cave in such a ravine." The servants talked the matter over, and said: "There must be gold there, or certainly this mighty man would not warn us against going." They went, expecting to find a pile of gold; they rolled away the stone from the door of the cave, when a tiger sprang out upon them and devoured them.

Many a man in the search of gold has been craunched in the jaws of destruction. Going out far away from the God whom they originally worshiped, they are seeking in the tent of Rachel, Laban's lost images.

There are a great many Christians in this day renewing the idolatry of human opinion. There was a time when they woke up to the folly of listening to what men said to them. They soliloquized in this way: "I have a God to worship, and I am responsible only to Him. I must go straight on and do my whole duty, whether the world likes it or don't like it;" and they turned a deaf ear to the fascinations of public applause. After a while they did something very popular. They had the popular ear and the popular heart. Men approved them, and poured gentle words of flattery into their ear, and before they realized it they went into the search of that which they had given up, and were, with Laban, hunting in Rachel's tent for the lost images.

The applause of this world is a very mean god to worship. It is a Dagon that falls upon its worshipers and crushes them to death. Alas for those who, fascinated by human applause, give up the service of the Lord God and go with Laban to hunt in Rachel's tent for the lost images!

There are many Christians being sacrificed to appetite. There was a time when they said: "I will not surrender to evil appetites." For a while they seemed to break away from all the allurements by which they were surrounded, but sometimes they felt that they were living upon a severe regimen. They said: "After all, I will go back to my old bondage;" and they fell away from the house of God, and fell away from respectability, and fell away for ever.

There are a great many also sacrificed by indolence. In the hour of their conversion they looked off upon the world, and said: "Oh how much work to be done, how many harvests to be gathered, how many battles to be fought, how many tears to be wiped away, and how many wounds to be bound up!" and they looked with positive surprise upon those who could sit idle in the kingdom of God while there was so much work to do. After a while they found their efforts were unappreciated, that some of their best work in behalf of Christ was caricatured and they were laughed at, and they began to relax their effort, and the question was no more, "What can I do for Christ?" but "How can I take my ease? where can I find my rest?" Are there not some of you who in the hour of your consecration started out nobly, bravely and enthusiastically for the Saviour's kingdom who have fallen back into ease of body and ease of soul, less anxious about the salvation of men than you once were, and are actually this moment in Rachel's tent hunting up the lost images?

Oh, why go down hunting for our old idols? We have found out they are insufficient for the soul. Eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, but, they hear not; and hands have they, but they handle not. There is only one God to worship, and He sits in the heavens.

How do I know that there is only one God? I know it just as the boy knew it when his teacher asked him how many Gods there are. He said, "There is but one."

"How do you know that?" inquired the teacher.

The boy replied, "There is only room for one, for He fills the heavens and the earth."

He is a mighty God. Have Him on your side, and you need not fear earth or hell. He can ride down all your spiritual foes. He is mighty to overthrow your enemies. He is mighty to save your soul. Ay, He is a loving God. He will put the arms of His love around about your neck. He will bring you close to His heart and shelter you from the storm. In times of trouble He will put upon your soul the balm of precious promises. He will lead you all through the vale of tears trustfully and happily, and then at last take you to dwell in His presence, where there is fullness of joy, and at His right hand, where there are pleasures for evermore. Oh, compared with such a wise God, such a mighty God, such a loving God, what are all the images under the camel's saddle in the tent of Rachel?

HALF-AND-HALF CHURCHES.

There is a verse in Revelation that presents a nauseated Christ: "Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth."

After we have been taking a long walk on a summer day, or been on a hunting chase, a draught of cold water exhilarates. On the other hand, after standing or walking in the cold air and being chilled, hot water, mingled with some beverage, brings life and comfort to the whole body; but tepid water, neither hot nor cold, is nauseating.

Now, Christ says that a church of that temperature acts on him as an emetic: I will spew thee out of my mouth.

The church that is red hot with religious emotion, praying, singing, working, Christ having taken full possession of the membership, must be to God satisfactory.

On the other hand, a frozen church may have its uses. The minister reads elegant essays, and improves the session or the vestry in rhetorical composition. The music is artistic and improves the ear of the people, so that they can better appreciate concert and opera.

But an unmitigated nuisance to God and man is a half-and-half church, with piety tepid. The pulpit in such a church makes more of orthodoxy than it does of Christ. It is immense on definitions. It treats of justification and sanctification as though they were two corpses to be dissected. Its sermons all have a black morocco cover, which some affectionate sister gave the pastor before he was married, to wrap his discourse in, lest it get mussed in the dust of the pulpit. Its gestures are methodical, as though the man were ever conscious that they had been decreed from all eternity, and he were afraid of interfering with the decree by his own free agency.

Such a pulpit never startles the people with the horrors of an undone eternity. No strong meat, but only pap, flour and water, mostly water. The church prayer-meeting is attended only by a few gray heads who have been in the habit of going there for twenty years, not because they expect any arousing time or rapturous experiences, but because they feel only a few will be there, and they ought to go.

The minister is sound. The membership sound. The music sound. If, standing in a city of a hundred thousand people, there are five or ten conversions in a year, everything is thought to be "encouraging." But Christ says that such a church is an emetic. "Because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth."

My friends, you had better warm up or freeze over. Better set the kettle outside in the atmosphere at zero, or put it on the altar of God and stir up the coals into a blaze. If we do not, God will remove us.

When God takes them up, the church here is better off. We mourn slightly to have them go, because we have got used to having them around, and at the funeral the minister says all the good things about the man that can well be thought of, because we want to make the funeral as respectable as possible. I never feel so much tempted to lie as when an inconsistent and useless Christian has died, and I want in my final remarks to make a good case out for the poor fellow. Still, it is an advantage to have such a man get out of the way. He is opposed to all new enterprises. He puts back everything he tries to help. His digestion of religious things is impaired, and his circulation is so poor that no amount of friction can arouse him.

Now, it is dangerous for any of you to stay in that condition. If you cannot be moved, God will kill you, and He will put in your place those who will do the work you are neglecting.

My friends, let all arouse! The nearness of our last account, the greatness of the work to be done, and the calls of God's word and providence, ought to stir our souls. After having been in the harvest field so long it would be a shame in the nightfall of death to go home empty-handed. Gather up a few gleanings from the field, and beat them out, that it may be found that Ruth had at least "one ephah of barley."

THORNS.

The Christian world has long been guessing what Paul's thorn in the flesh was. I have a book that in ten pages tries to show what Paul's thorn was not, and in another ten pages tries to show what it was.

Many of the theological doctors have felt Paul's pulse to see what was the matter with him. I suppose that the reason he did not tell us what it was may have been because he did not want us to know. He knew that if he stated what it was there would have been a great many people from Corinth bothering him with prescriptions as to how he might cure it.

Some say it was diseased eyes, some that it was a humped back. It may have been neuralgia. Perhaps it was gout, although his active habits and a sparse diet throw doubt on the supposition. Suffice to say it was a thorn—that is, it stuck him. It was sharp.

It was probably of not much account in the eyes of the world. It was not a trouble that could be compared to a lion or a boisterous sea. It was like a thorn that you may have in your hand or foot and no one know it. Thus we see that it becomes a type of those little nettlesome worries of life that exasperate the spirit.

One man has a rheumatic joint which, when the wind is northeast, lifts the storm signal. Another a business partner who takes full half the profits, but does not help earn them. These trials are the more nettlesome because, like Paul's thorn, they are not to be mentioned. Men get sympathy for broken bones and mashed feet, but not for the end of sharp thorns that have been broken off in the fingers.

Let us start out with the idea that we must have annoyances. It seems to take a certain number of them to keep us humble, wakeful and prayerful. To Paul the thorn was as disciplinary as the shipwreck. If it is not one thing, it is another. If the stove does not smoke, the boiler must leak. If the pen is good, the ink must be poor. If the editorial column be able, there must be a typographical blunder. If the thorn does not pierce the knee, it must take you in the back. Life must have sharp things in it. We cannot make up our robe of Christian character without pins and needles.

We want what Paul got—grace to bear these things. Without it we become cross, censorious and irascible. We get in the habit of sticking our thorns into other people's fingers. But God helping us, we place these annoyances in the category of the "all things that work together for good." We see how much shorter these thorns are than the spikes that struck through the palms of Christ's hands; and remembering that he had on his head a whole crown of thorns, we take to ourselves the consolation that if we suffer with him on earth we shall be glorified with him in heaven.

WHO TOUCHED ME?

There is nothing more unreasonable and ungovernable than a crowd of people. Men who standing alone or in small groups are deliberate in all they do, lose their self-control when they come to stand in a crowd. You have noticed this, if you have heard a cry of fire in a large assemblage, or have seen people moving about in great excitement in some mass-meeting, shoving, jostling and pulling at each other.

But while the Lord Jesus had been performing some wonderful works, and a great mob of people were around Him, shoving this way and that way, all the jostling He received evoked from Him no response.

After a while I see a wan and wasted woman pressing through the crowd. She seems to have a very urgent errand. I can see from her countenance that she has been a great sufferer. She comes close enough to put her finger on the hem of Christ's garment, and the very moment she puts her finger on that garment, Jesus says: "Who touched me?"

I would like to talk to you of the extreme sensitiveness of Jesus. It is very often the case that those men who are mighty, have very little fineness of feeling; but notwithstanding the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ was the King of glory, having all power in heaven and on earth, so soon as this sick woman comes up and puts her finger on the hem of His garment, that moment all the feelings of His soul are aroused, and He cries out: "Who touched me?"

At any rate, this woman spoken of in the text had spent her money on physicians, and very poor physicians at that. The Lord saw her poverty and destitution. He knew from what a miserable home she had come. He did not ask, "Who touched me?" because He did not know; He wanted to evoke that woman's response, and He wanted to point all the multitude to her particular case before her cure was effected, in order that the miraculous power might be demonstrated before all the people, and that they might be made to believe.

In this day, as then, the touch of poverty always evokes Christ's attention. If you be one who has had a hard struggle to get daily bread—if the future is all dark before you—if you are harassed and perplexed, and know not which way to turn, I want you to understand that, although in this world there may be no sympathy for you, the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ is immediately moved, and you have but to go to Him and touch Him with your little finger, and you arouse all the sympathies of His infinite nature.

When we are cast down with Asiatic cholera or yellow fever, we cry to God for pity; but in the ailments of life that continue from day to day, month to month and year to year are you in the habit of going to Christ for sympathy? Is it in some fell disaster alone that you call to God for mercy, or is it in the little aches and pains of your life that you implore Him? Don't try to carry these burdens alone. These chronic diseases are the diseases that wear out and exhaust Christian grace, and you need to get a new supply. Go to Him this night, if never before, with all your ailments of body, and say: "Lord Jesus, look upon my aches and pains. In this humble and importunate prayer I touch thee."

I remark further that the Saviour is touched with all bereavements. Perhaps there is not a single room in your house but reminds you of some one who has gone. You cannot look at a picture without thinking she admired that. You cannot see a toy but you think she played with it. You cannot sit down and put your fingers on the piano without thinking she used to handle this instrument, and everything that is beautiful in your home is suggestive of positive sadness.

Graves! graves! graves! It is the history of how many families to-night! You measure your life from tear to tear, from groan to groan, from anguish to anguish, and sometimes you feel that God has forsaken you, and you say, "Is His mercy clean gone forever, and will He be favorable no more?"

You may feel faint from your bereavements, and you may not know which way to turn, and all human solace may go for nothing; but if you would this night with your broken heart just go one step further forward, pressing through all the crowd of your perplexities, anxieties and sorrows, you might with one finger move His heart, and He would say, looking upon you with infinite comfort and compassion, "Who touched me?"

I remark that all our sins touch Him. It is generally the fact that we make a record only of those sins which are sins of the action; but where there is one sin of the action there are thousands of thought. Let us remember that God puts down in His book all the iniquitous thoughts that have ever gone through your souls. There they stand—the sins of 1820; the sins of 1825; all the sins of 1831; the sins of 1835; the sins of 1840; the sins of 1846; the sins of 1850; the sins of 1853; the sins of 1859; the sins of 1860; the sins of 1865; the sins of 1870; the sins of 1874. Oh, I can't think of it with any degree of composure. I should fly in terror did I not feel that those sins had been erased by the hand of my Lord Jesus Christ—that hand which was wounded for my transgression.

When we think of our sins, we are apt to think of those we have recently committed—those sins of the past day, or the past week, or the past year; those sins that have been in the far distance are all gone from our memory. You can't call a half dozen of them up in your mind. But God remembers every one of them. There is a record made of them. They will be your overthrow unless you somehow get them out of that book.

In the great day of judgment, God will call the roll, and they will all answer, "here!" "here!" "here!"

Oh, how they have wounded Jesus! Did He not come into this world to save us? Have not these sins been committed against the heart and mercy of our Lord Jesus? Sins committed against us by an enemy we can stand; but by a friend, how hard it is to bear! Have we not wounded the Lord Jesus Christ in the house of His friends?

Since we stood up in the presence of the great congregation and attested our love for Christ and said from this time we will serve the Lord, have we not all been recreant? Have we not gone astray like lost sheep, and there is no health in us? Oh, they touch Christ; they have touched Him on the tenderest spot of His heart.

Let us bemoan this treatment of our best friend. It seems to me Christ was never so lovely as He is now—the chief among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely. Why can't you come and put your trust in Him? He is an infinite Saviour. He can take all the iniquities of your life and cast them behind His back. Blessed is the man who has obtained His forgiveness, and whose sins are covered!