Lanarkshire; bituminous fire lay bedded in rocks there too, over which warriors and other contentious persons had fought out their bickerings and broils-let us hope not without result. But God said, 'Let the iron missionaries be;' and they were. Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges with their fire-throats, and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose into day;" and with them, let us add, the power and the riches of Britain. We have been made by Necessity, God's stern daughter. She has pressed us into what we are. Were we to stay in our progress, she would press us out of the world, and thence into nothing.

How much wisdom is to be learnt from the words in the old apologue or history of Samson, that out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness! Pushed forward by the force which nature puts upon him, man can and does arrive at wonderful results. The cruelties to which Nature or his fellow-man subjects him prove almost always the most bountiful kindnesses. The Protestants were persecuted for their faith, and driven from France; but, in a colder and a less fertile land, a land less rich in happy ingenuity and expedients, they found an industry which rivals that of France, and which supports them in honour and riches, while it adds wealth and importance to the country which had sheltered them. The very necessity of employment, which an active mind and body demand, not only keeps us in health, but really carries on the world. Sir Humphrey Davy had a mind of this sort-it was always at work. Had it not been well employed, he would have fallen to serious mischief, or have

gone mad. It is true that Davy was an apothecary's boy: to that profession he was apprenticed; but the necessity of employment for his active mind forced him to commence experimenting, and to manufacture his own apparatus. The commonest things served him for this purpose. Pots and pans, old cups and saucers from the kitchen, bottles and vials from his master's shop, formed the apparatus of the necessitous student; but that apparatus was self-made, and Davy was heard to say that it worked like none other. And behind this great man was pinching poverty. When twenty years of age he wrote this sentence in his note-book-“I have neither riches, nor power, nor birth to recommend me ; yet, if I live, I trust I shall not be of less service to mankind and my friends than if I had been born with all these advantages." That is precisely the case. If the reader will cast over in his mind the number of friends whom he knows, and public men he has heard of, who have started in life from small beginnings, he will find that they are chiefly the prosperous men; that the men who begin with every advantage in life do not progress, and are indeed happy if they keep and sustain their original position : whereas the men who make colossal fortunes, who found families, and transmit to their posterity an almost princely estate, are those who have begun in poverty, and who have worked upwards in the battle of life, urged on by necessity.

Everywhere the same rule obtains. Men who complain of fate, of position, of Providence are weak and foolish. Every man and every nation, like every flower, moss, lichen, tree, or animal, is fitted, beautifully fitted, for his or its place. Therein necessity is inexorable. A black man who

lives delightedly in the torrid zone, and who works with what energy he has under the rays of a burning sun, has little chance in Nova Zembla. Necessity fits him for his sphere as to climate and country, and, beyond that, it also urges him to make his land beautiful, his mind cultivated, his position dignified, his aspirations grand and heavenward. Let him, as men and nations too often do, neglect these urgings, and in a short time he will not hear them. The heart grows dulled, the brain torpid with indolence; the nation declines from its position; the man sinks to the savage. Still work must be done. Other men seize him and enslave him; he is bound to work: all nature is stirring; there is no pause, no let, no hinderance. The race of mankind has commenced; it is at its swiftest pace; let one fall, another takes his place, urged onward by that which is the mistress of us all, beautiful Necessity.

ON A NEW RACE OF OLD MAIDS.

HERE is, perhaps, no set of people in the world who live the Gentle Life so thoroughly as old maids; and yet, not only with women, but with

thoughtless young men, the title is full of reproach. All Little Pedlington, and the newspaper writers who “do” the Little Pedlington social articles and reviews, have been lately much up in arms about old maids. Marriage is an exciting subject to discuss, and now and then the writer can tenderly lift the veil from a forbidden inquiry and hint unutterable things. Men are soundly lectured and women are scolded: no one, it is said, marries now; and the registrar's returns for the "toiling millions," and the Times' and Morning Post's advertisements of marriages, are to be looked on as fictitious.

If we believe the croaking gentlemen and ladies who talk about these interesting social matters, God, like the deity whose priests howled and cut themselves with knives, has been pursuing, or peradventure sleeping; for the world has all gone wrong! We have too many women! What are we to do with these women? The better-half of man is posi

tively too abundant. They cannot marry; the men will not have them: what, therefore, is to be done? Little Pedlington is alarmed; it considers itself bound to set right the clock of the world; it talks loudly, and it proposes two methods of dealing with the superabundance.

1. Let us all become polygamists. Our travellers, and my friend Captain Mecca especially-slightly backed by a bishop, and patted on the back by a learned society-think polygamy the thing. The Mormons and the Turks are quoted as interesting guides in the movement.

Woman is

2. Let the women earn their own livelihood. no helpmeet; why should man do all the work? Open all the trades which man has absorbed to woman, and the redundancy of woman, if it does not disappear, will do no harm.

So that we are to have a new race of old maids! If the first of these propositions is established, and the men fight for the four per cent. awful redundancy of woman over man, it will soon be absorbed; or, by the slaying of man, increased. If, on the other hand, woman competes with man, man, poor creature! will find that he had better not have opened his mouth in Little Pedlington.

After all, one prefers to believe in old maids, and is apt to think that they will continue. Silly old maids there are, poor, nervous creatures, at once bores and victims; but they are the exception, not the rule-the artificial production of man, who will have woman brought up so innocent, "so fragile, and so fair." Negus and vanilla are all very well; but the truly healthy man has an innate longing for chops and porter, in moderation at least. And a sensible old maid