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in the Chinese

Our Missionary What a glorious

and if he could not read, (the books were language,) he had at least got some paper. returned home, his soul filled with joy. report for the Missionary Society! what shining articles for the religious newspaper!

Three months after, six young Englishmen made this tour on the Pearl River; they also stopped at one of the villages, and went among the country people: but, alas! they all fell victims to the fanaticism of the Chinese, being murdered in the most horrible manner.

JUDGE JEFFERIES.

THE history of Judge Jefferies is a striking instance of retribution. His infamous prostitution of justice, his overbearing and intolerable tyranny, his disgusting and indiscriminate barbarity, when he visited the west of England after the unsuccessful invasion of the Duke of Monmouth, are too well known to need description here. The blood of those whom he had judicially murdered cried out for vengeance, and it was not likely that such a monster of venality, rapacity, perfidy, and cruelty should go unpunished to the grave.

A curious fact occurred to this unhappy man five years before his ruin and tragical end, in which the finger of Providence pointed out to him the certainty of his future destruction, and by which, with all his obduracy and pride, he was at the time utterly confounded.

A number of young men, in the town of Newcastle-uponTyne, were accustomed to meet together once a week, for the laudable object of their mutual improvement in religious and general knowledge; and they regulated the proceedings of their association by a number of laws, to which they all subscribed. One of them, for some unknown reason, and influenced by a spirit of malignant animosity against his brethren, took the paper, and laid it before Jefferies, when he presided at the assizes in 1683. This man, who instantly fabricated from this mean and detestable information, the charge of guilty and dangerous fanaticism, determined, according to custom in those unhappy times, to make them a public

example. They were all, therefore, taken into custody, were placed before his tribunal, and it will easily be credited that they were treated with his usual coarse and brutal buffoonery. Among them there was one whose deportment was by no means prepossessing, and whose working habiliments, in which he was taken, added to the general meanness of his appearance. The Judge singled out this man, whose name was Verner, no doubt anticipating an easy triumph over his presumed imbecility and ignorance.

"Can you read, sirrah?" cried Jefferies.

“Yes, my Lord," was the reply.

"Reach him the book," returned the Judge; and the clerk immediately handed over a Latin Testament. The young man opened it at the seventh chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, and began to read from the first verse,-" Ne judicate," &c.

"Construe it," thundered out Jefferies.

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'Judge not, lest ye be judged; for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with that measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

This extraordinary and applicable quotation reduced the unhappy and prostituted wretch who sat upon the bench to total silence; and, although the young men were sent to prison, where they were retained in confinement nearly a year, they were ultimately released, with this official reprimand, "Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto you."

How accurately the quotation was fulfilled, in the subsequent imprisonment and miserable death of Jefferies, remains to be related.

A scrivener of Wapping had a cause before Jefferies; and it was stated upon trial that he was a strange man, that he sometimes went to church, sometimes to conventicles; that none could tell what to make of him, and that he was universally thought to be a trimmer. "A trimmer!" said Jefferies: " come forth, Mr. Trimmer, and let me see your shape." And he then poured upon the unfortunate scrivener such a torrent of threatening and abuse, that when the man came out of the Court, he said that he had been in such

agonies of terror, that he should never forget the impression which the horrible expression of the Judge's face had made upon him so long as he lived.

When the Revolution took place when James II. was driven from his throne, and Jefferies knew that universal indignation would soon seize its devoted prey, he attempted to escape from the country. In the disguise of a sailor, he went to Wapping, and in his assumed character was drinking a pot of beer in a cellar, when the scrivener, just mentioned, casually entered. He instantly recognised the dreadful countenance he never could forget. With surprise and joy he instantly went out, and gave notice that he had discovered this obnoxious person, whom all were so eager to arrest. A crowd of people soon rushed into the cellar, seized the ex-Chancellor, carried him before the Lord Mayor, who sent him to the Lords of the Council. They transmitted him to the Tower, where, in mortal agony and hopeless remorse, he soon ended his days.—Christian Treasury.

THE TORTOISE.

THE tortoise of ancient fable was sufficiently sage, except when he prevailed on the eagle to give him a lesson in flying, and suffered accordingly. To say nothing of his race with the hare, he was eminently reflective as well as persevering. And though he was tempted to murmur at first, when he saw the lithe and leaping frogs clearing at a bound a space which cost him long and sore travel, as he dragged himself and his shell along upon the earth, when he saw the eel and King stork at work upon them, and how their unarmed bodies exposed them to the stones thrown by a mere child, he repented, and said, "How much better to bear the weight of this shielding shell, than to be subject to so many forms of wounds and death!" And when he beheld Io dancing a frantic hornpipe to the tune of a gadfly, did he not hug himself, and, glancing at his panoply, exclaim, "I don't care for flies?"

To be sure, he was at times more honest than polite; as when, on receiving Jove's command to meet the rest of

animated nature on the occasion of his nuptials with Juno, he returned the somewhat ungracious answer, Οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος äpiσtos; “ Home, sweet home; there's no place like home;”– a reply which so roused the ire of the father of gods and men, that the fiat went forth, "As his home is so dear to him, he shall never go out of it." This was rather shocking at first; but our philosophical tortoise bowed to the decree, observing that he much preferred carrying his house about with him to being a fixture, where he might be condemned to disturbance by the quarrels of his neighbours.

But why did Apelles paint his image under the feet of Aphrodite? Why did Phidias make the delicate foot of his chryselephantine statue rest upon this sedentary emblem?

As a hint to ladies to be quiet, and stay at home: excellent things in woman.

"Upon my word, Sir!"

The idea, Madam, I assure you, is not mine. You read Latin with the ease of a Roman matron. No? Then ask your husband, son, or brother to do the following into English:

"Alma Venus quænam hæc facies, quid denotat illa

Testudo molli quam pede, Diva, premis?

Me sic effinxit Phidias, sexumque referri
Fœmineum nostrâ jussit ab effigie.

Quodque manere domi et tacitas decet esse puellas,
Supposuit pedibus talia signa meis."

The women wore wooden images of the reptile to denote their silence and domesticity, as Laïs knew to her cost, when the Thessalian matrons assassinated her with such ornaments. Over-zealous worshippers were they of the celestial Venus, the good, the retiring, the personification of all that is amiable, beautiful, and modest.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world."

-Broderip.

VARIETIES.

CONVERSIONS TO PROTESTANTISM IN GERMANY.--According to official reports, 648 persons renounced Popery and embraced Protestantism in Silesia last year. Of these 648 persons, 269 were adults, and the remainder had already been confirmed. Independently of these, 466 Romanist parents had their children baptized in the Protestant Church in the year 1851. These figures are higher in comparison than in the previous year, 1850; for in the official list for that year only 308 converts were entered, of whom 159 were adults. In that year, also, only 187 children of Romish parents were baptized in the Protestant Church of Silesia. It appears that many persons who had joined the so-called German Catholic Churches are now going over to the Protestant Churches, on account of the great obstacles which have been put in the way of the German Catholics.

GERMAN BOOKS.-The last Catalogue of the Leipsic Easter Book-Fair contained, according to the German papers, 700 titles more than the previous Catalogue for the half-year ending with the Fair of St. Michael. The former included 3,860 titles of published books, and 1,130 of forthcoming publications. The latter Catalogue enumerates 4,527 published works, and 1,163 in preparation. These 5,690 books represent 903 publishers. A single house in Vienna contributed 113 publications. That of Brookhaus figures for 95.

ASSYRIA Col. Rawlinson, it is said, has opened out the entire place of sepulture of the Kings and Queens of Assyria. There they lie, it is said, "in huge stone sarcophagi, with ponderous lids decorated with the royal ornaments and costume, just as they were deposited more than three thousand years ago."

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VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.-By an accurate measurement of the enormous jet of glowing lava where it first broke forth on the side of Mauna Loa, it was ascertained to be five hundred feet high. This was upon the sup

position that it was thirty miles distant. We are of the opinion that it was at a greater distance: say from forty to sixty miles. With a glass, the play of this jet at night was distinctly observed, and a more sublime sight can scarcely be imagined. A column of molten lava, glowing with the most intense heat, and projected into the air to a distance of five hundred feet, was a sight so rare, and at the same time so awfully grand, as to excite the most lively feelings of awe and admiration, even when viewed at a distance of forty or fifty miles. The diameter of this jet is supposed to be over one hundred feet. In some places this river is a mile wide, and in others more contracted. At some points it has filled up ravines of one, two, and three hundred feet in depth, and still it flowed on. It entered a heavy forest, and the giant growth of centuries was cut down before it like grass before the mower's scythe. No obstacle can arrest it in its descent to the sea. Mounds are covered over, ravines are filled up, forests are destroyed, and the habitations of man are consumed like flax in the furnace. Truly, "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke." We have not yet heard of any destruction of life from the eruption now in progress. A rumour

has reached us that a small native village has been destroyed, but of this we have no authentic intelligence. Two vessels had sailed from Hilo, both filled to their utmost capacity with people who desired to witness this great eruption. The eruption seems to have broken out through an old fissure, about one-third down the side of Mauna Loa, on the northwest side, and not from the old crater on the summit, called Mocquoweoweo. The altitude of the present eruption is about ten thousand feet above the level of the sea, and from the Bay of Hilo (Byron's Bay) must be some fifty or sixty miles. If it succeed in reaching the ocean at the point supposed, after having filled up all the ravines, gulches, and inequalities of a very broken country, it will undoubtedly be one of the most extensive eruptions of modern times.Polynesian.

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