FACTS, HINTS, GEMS, AND POETRY. Facts, Hints, Gems, and Poetry. Facts. There were 16,889 persons banished from Russia to Siberia between May and October last; 1,080 women and children over fifteen years of age, with 1,269 young children, voluntarily accompanied the exiles. The trade in sardines amounts to nearly £200,000 in value per annum. The curing principle is quite simple. After being carefully washed and salted, they are dried in the sun or wind. They are then put into boiling oil, after which they are placed in boxes, the lids are soldered on, and the whole affair exposed to the action of steam. According to a recent census, the population of Vienna is 1,001,999 which is 170,000 more than that of Berlin. The yield of the wheat crop in South Australia is 10,000,000 bushels, leaving a surplus of 183,000 tons for export. The yield in Victoria is 5,000,000. Cotton seed is becoming one of the principal exports of Egypt. In 1860, 1,090 cwt. only were exported from that country, while last year 3,490,080 ewt. were exported, the value being £770,000. England took nearly the whole of this quantity. Hints. THREE HINTS WORTH KNOWING. 1. Never attempt to do anything that is not right. Just so surely as you do, you will get into trouble. Sin always brings sorrow sooner or later. If you even suspect that anything is wicked, do it not until you are sure that your suspicions are groundless. 2. When you do attempt anything that is right, go through with it. Be not easily discouraged. Form habits of perseverance. Yield not to sloth and sleep and fickleness. To resist all these will not be easy; but you will feel that you have done right when you get through. 3. Do not waste your money. Perthe more care of it. Besides helping haps you have very little. Then take to spread the gospel, buy some good books and read them well. book is one of the best things in the A good world. If you cannot buy as many return them safe and sound. Never as you need, borrow from others and let a book lie where it may be injured. Gems. Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life, in firmness of mind, and mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk, and to make our words and actions all of a colour. It was a storm that occasioned the discovery of the gold mines in India. Hath not a storm driven some to the discovery of the richer mines of the love of God in Christ? To-morrow may never come to us. We do not live in to-morrow. We cannot find it in any title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of to POETIC SELECTIONS.-THE CHILDRENS' CORNER. And there is happiness for those who work Such as ne'er enters in the idler's breast. Father, I'm Thine alone; take Thou head, hands, and heart; All to Thy work alone gladly I'll set apart! Teach me to speak, O God! teach me to speak, Wisely and well, with tact, as best beseems One who has faults and failings, yet doth seek Oft to light up dark hearts with heavenly beams. Fain would I learn, O Lord! that which so much I need, Like Thee, to speak the word suited to every need. Teach me to learn, O God! teach me to learn All that I need in order thus to live; Courage, faith, firmness, gentleness in turn, Just as I need, do Thou be pleased to give; And that I may not fail in aught to which I turn, Teach me, O God! for Christ's sake, all I need to learn. WITHOUT. THE summer sunshine softly falls The flowers smile, the robins sing, Ask the bright sun which shines for them High noon is on the dial's face, And shortest shadows tell That many hours must wing their way The trees are rich with leafy bloom, The distant hills are softly blue, This morn I prayed the same old prayer, Of those who never weep; And only His tired children know "I WILL GIVE THEE A CROWN OF LIFE." A CROWN of life I know Prefer earth's trifling toys, To walk in wisdom's way; Cheer'd with the thought that Thou The Childrens' Corner. SIR M. HALE ON THE SABBATH. -J. Dore. HERE is a simple verse, written by Sir Mathew Hale, a great and good man, who was Lord Chief Justice of England two hundred years ago: "A Sabbath well spent Brings a week of content, And health for the joys of to-morrow; But a Sabbath profaned, Whate'er may be gained, Is a sure forerunner of sorrow." I advise you all to commit these lines to memory. They may help you some day to resist a temptation to break God's holy day. CHRISTIAN LOVE. LOVE cannot be produced by a direct action of the soul upon itself. You cannot love by a resolve to love. That is as impossible as it is to move a boat by pressing it from within. The reaction is exactly equal to the action. You force backwards exactly as much as you force on. There are religious persons who when they feel their affections cooled, strive to warm them by self-reproach or by an unnatural effort, or by trying to work themselves into a state of warm affection. There are others who hope to make feeble love strong by using strong words. Now, for all this they pay a price. Effort of heart is followed by collapse. Excitement is followed by exhaustion. They will find that they have cooled exactly in that proportion in which they warmed, and at least as fast. There are, however, two methods by which we may cultivate this charity. 1. By doing acts which love demands. It is God's merciful law that feelings are increased by acts done on principle. If a man has not the feeling in its warmth, let him not wait till the feeling comes. Let him act with such feeling as he has; with a cold heart, if he has not got a warm one; it will grow warmer while he acts. You may love a man merely because you have done him benefits, and so become interested in him, till interest passes into anxiety, and anxiety into affection. You may acquire courtesy of feeling at last, by cultivating courteous manners. The dignified politeness of the last century forced men into a kind of unselfishness in small things, which the abrupter manners of to-day will never teach. And say what men will of rude sincerity, those old men of urbane manners were kinder at heart with real good will than we are with that rude bluffness which counts it a loss of independence to be courteous to anyone. Gentleness of manner had some influence on gentleness of heart. So, in the same way, in things spiritual. If our hearts are cool, and we find it hard to love God and be affectionate to men, we must begin with duty. Duty is not Christian liberty, but it is the first step towards liberty. We are free only when we love what we are to do, and those to whom we do it. Let a man begin in earnest with, "I ought;" he will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with the free blessedness of, "I will." Let him force himself to abound in small offices of kindness, attention, affectionateness, and all those for God's sake. By-and-by he will feel them become the habit of his soul. By-and-by, walking in the conscientiousness of refusing to retaliate when he feels tempted, he will cease CHRISTIAN LOVE. to wish it; doing good and heaping kindness on those who injure him, he will learn to love them. For he has spent a treasure there: "And where the treasure is, there will the heart be also. 2. The second way of cultivating Christian love is by contemplating the love of God. You cannot move the boat from within; but you may obtain a purchase from without. You cannot create love in the soul by force from within itself; but you may move it from a point outside itself. God's love is the point from which to move the soul. Love begets love. Love believed in produces a return of love; we cannot love because we must. "Must" kills love; but the law of our nature is that we love in reply to love. No one ever yet hated one whom he believed to love him truly, We may be provoked by the pertinacity of an affection which asks what we cannot give; but we cannot hate the true love which does not ask, but gives. Now this is the central truth of Christ's gospel: we love him because he first loved us. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." "God is love." 66 It is the one, almost only, struggle of religious life to believe this. In spite of all the seeming cruelties of this life; in spite of the clouded mystery in which God has shrouded himself; in spite of the pain, and the stern aspect of human life, and the gathering of thicker darkness and more solemn silence round the soul as life goes on, simply to believe that God is love, and to hold fast to that as a man holds on to a rock with a desperate grip when the salt surf and the driving waves sweep over him and take the breath away-I say that is the one fight of Christian life, compared with which all else is easy. When we believe that, human affections are easy. It is easy to be generous and tolerant and benevolent, when we are sure of the heart of God, and when the little love of this life, and its coldnesses, and its unreturned affections are more than made up to us by the certainty that our Father's love is ours. But when we lose sight of that, though but for a moment, the heart sours, and men seem no longer worth the loving; and wrongs are magnified, and injuries cannot be forgiven, and life itself drags on, à mere death in life. A man may doubt anything and everything, and still be blessed, provided only he holds fast to that conviction. Let all drift from him like seaweed on life's So long as he reposes on the assurance of the eternal faithfulness of the Eternal Charity his spirit at least cannot drift. There are moments, I humbly think, when we understand those triumphant words of St. Paul," Let God be true, and every man a liar."F. W. Robertson. 'ocean. A NOBLE BELGIAN INSTITUTION. A NOBLE BELGIAN INSTITUTION. DESCRIBING some recent local festivities in Brussels, a correspondent of the Times says: "One of the most interesting ceremonies of the fetes was the distribution of State rewards for acts of courage, devotion, and humanity, at which the King and Queen and the Princess Louise were present. In Belgium there is no trusting to private benevolence and to private societies to reward or recognize the saving of life from drowning, from fire, or from calamity in the streets. This duty is undertaken by the State, and is under a State department. The ceremony was held in the Temple des Augustines, a fine old church which stands in the middle of the roadway in the new boulevards. The body of the building, which is of great size, was crowded in every part, and the Minister of the Interior presided. The seats on the sides of the platform were filled by officers of the State in uniform, by officers of high rank, and by members of the court. When the royal family came, the whole audience arose with the greatest enthusiasm, and cheered their majesties the King and Queen and her Royal Highness the Princess most warmly. The first to be honoured was a little fellow twelve years of age, whose achievement brought tears into the eyes of the Queen and Princess. It seemed, from the account read to the audience, that three children, of whom the boy was the eldest, were playing in their room by themselves when the little sister pulled over a paraffin lamp, and set herself on fire. The brave little fellow, fearless of burns, did the best he could to extinguish the flames, and was so horribly burnt himself that he was three months ill, and will bear the mark of his achievement to the grave. The sister died; but the boy's act was recognized by his being awarded the medal of the first class a large gold medal, surmounted with the royal crown. The second was a boy who rescued a child from the broken ice in a canal last winter, and the gold medal was also given to this little hero. The third was a nun who rescued, at the risk of her life, an infant from a burning house. After the boy and the nun came two members of the Chamber of Representatives-M. D'Andrimont, the deputy of Liege, well known to the English volunteers who visited that city in 1869, and to the members of the Iron and Steel Institute, who were there a short time ago, and the Comte de Borchgrave d'Altena, deputy of Tongres and burgomaster of Marlinne. M. D'Andrimont saved the lives of two bathers on two different occasions. The Comte exposed his life on two occasions in preventing public |