cannot read Italian, are you so foolish as to buy Dante merely because you know him to be a great poet. And in the same way, if you know nothing about matters of art, it is equally foolish in you to buy statues and pictures, to insinuate, by this chaotic profusion of rich and rare objects, that you are a cultivated, and a tasteful man.

"Mr. Paul Potiphar, it is one thing to have plenty of money, and quite another to know how to spend it. In Sennaar, a man is literally the master of his own house. He is not surrounded by what he does not understand."

How

Now I told him that this kind of talk may do very well in Sennaar, but it is absurd in a country like ours. are people to know that I am rich unless I show it?

One day Mrs. P. says to me, "How about the library >" "What library?" inquired I.

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Why, our library, of course."

"I haven't any."

"Do you mean to have such a house as this, without a library?"

"Why," said I, plaintively, "I don't read books; I never did and I never shall; and I don't care any thing about them. Why should I have a library?

"Why, because it is part of a house like this."

"Mrs. P are you fond of books?

"No, not particularly; but one must have some regard to appearances. Suppose we were Hottentots; you don't want us to look so, do you?"

"Is it the looks of the thing, Mrs. P.?" said I. "That is all," she answered.

"O, well, I'll arrange it, then."

So I had my shelves built, and my old friends Matthews and Rider furnished me with complete sets of elegant gilt covers to all the books that no gentleman's library should be without, which I arranged carefully on the shelves, and had the best looking library in town.

It is a good investment, for it brings me in the reputation of a literary man, and a patron of literature.

Well, the Sennaar minister has been recalled, I hear. I am glad. It is enough to be uncomfortable in my own house, without knowing exactly why; but to have a philosopher of the Sennaar school show me why I am so, is rather humiliating.

I am gradually getting resigned to my situation. I have got one more struggle to go through next week, in Mrs. Potiphar's musical party. These parties are about over for the season, and Mrs. P. begins to talk of the watering places. O dear me! I do wonder if this is the "Home, sweet, sweet home," the girls used to sing about.

LABOR AND PERSEVERANCE.

THIS is a land for labor. Our whole country is one vast workshop. Here it is honorable to toil; it is necessary to toil, and we are proud of it; we all work either with the strong hand or the busy mind.

Here we have no titled nobility, no privileged orders. The jewelled garters and the starred badges which our nobility wear, have been won, woven, forged, and fashioned among the hills and valleys, in sunshine and in storm, at the loom and the forge, in the counting-house or the mart.

When our mightiest councils meet, voices are listened to, that have been heard behind the plough or among the reapers; and toil-hardened hands are uplifted in the solemn acts of suffrage. Our great charter of liberty bears the signature of hands that have worked the printing press and taken up the lapstone.

It is a mistaken impression which limits the term “working men" to a particular class. The epithet does not belong solely to those who use the spade or the hammer. All who toil, either with the hand or the head, are working men. The man who raises the corn that we eat, who weaves the

fabric that we wear: those that minister to our bodily diseases, or spiritual wants; those who preside at the bar of justice or instruct the young, are all working men. Labor is honorable, labor is necessary, labor is essential; and if so, industry and perseverance are duties which every young man owes to himself and society. As he stands upon the threshold of life, various avenues open before him, any one of which he may take; but, when it is taken, he must be a working man.

If he would be honored, independent, and happy, he must be industrious, and practise the virtues which accompany diligent labor. If he would be successful, he must concentrate his efforts upon some one pursuit, and he must persevere.

Perseverance is the mainspring of some of the most important results that man has ever accomplished. By it he has discovered continents, bridged cataracts, tunnelled rivers, and scaled mountains. By it he has linked distant regions with bands of iron, and has channelled a pathway of intercourse through solid granite.

By it he has attempted and failed, and tried again; has dared, suffered, and triumphed. And in this he has had lessons from objects around him. He has seen the water-drops, one by one, wearing away the solid rock; and the minutest insect rearing its coral island, atom by atom, in the midst of the sea.

The exercise of this principle is one of the main elements of success. A young man must practise perseverance, or he will be likely to fail in any pursuit upon which he may enter. He may toil unremittingly until life ends; but if he labor first upon this, then upon this, and then upon this, just long enough to become discouraged with each, and to give up in despair, he will accomplish nothing, and his labor will be in vain.

He must not give up at the first stone upon which he strikes the bar; he must repeat the blows, he must remove

the obstruction, he

it out of his way.

must break the stone to pieces, and get Great minds have always acted thus,

and they owe to their conduct much of the admiration which honors their memory.

The world respects the dauntless courage, the moral bravery, of a persevering soul, as it throws by obstacle after obstacle, and surmounts barrier upon barrier, and presses onward, right onward, to the accomplishment of its purpose.

THE QUIET MAN.

"WHAT a quiet man your husband is, Mrs. Smith !

"Quiet! a snail is an express train' to him! If the top of the house should blow off, he would just sit still and spread his umbrella.

"When he comes in at the front door, he moves as if the entry were paved with eggs, and sits down in his easy chair, as if there were a nest of kittens under the cushion. O, he will be the death of me yet. I read to him all the horrid accidents, dreadful collisions, murders, and explosions, and he takes it just as easy as if I were repeating portions of Mother Goose's Melodies to little Tommy.

"If a cannon ball should come through the window where he was sitting, I do not believe he would move an eyelash. Why, if I were to make a voyage round the world, and return some fine morning, he'd take off his spectacles, put them in the case, fold up the newspaper, and adjust his dickey, before he'd be ready to say, 'Good morning, Mrs. Smith.' O, I do wonder if all the rest of the Smiths are like him. If he had always lived on poppies he could not be more soporific. I tell you what, he is the very expressed essence of chloroform."

"Now, Mrs. Smith, if you could only see my husband,

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Solomon Stillweather, you would never say another word about chloroform. It is my firm conviction he will be the death of me. I am naturally a happy, bright, energetic, impulsive woman; I have the most capacious heart that ever throbbed under a silken bodice; I can love and be grateful to one who is kind to me. S-o-l-o-m-o-n is a perpetual calm. Nothing ruffles him, nothing disturbs him; Mount Vesuvius couldn't make him hurry. A stream of red-hot lava could not move him.

“He does every thing by rule, square, and compass. When the proper time comes, then he starts, but not a fraction of a second before. Were the house on fire, he would stop to take the lint off his coat, and brush his teeth before starting. If I ask him a question at breakfast, I never get an answer before tea. He walks about the house with a noiseless, velvety tread, as if his feet were made of glass, and he was afraid of snapping off some of his toes.

"Should the children, in their play, knock over the tea table and its contents, he looks quietly up from his book, and drawls out, A-i-n-t y-o-u r-a-t-h-e-r n-o-i-s-y, c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n?'

"One summer evening, in the country, as he sat on the grass smoking his cigar, it occurred to me whether any thing short of an earthquake would start him up ; so I placed a whole string of crackers directly behind him, and touched them off; and sure as I am a living woman, he never much as winked.

SO

"I never saw S-o-l-o-m-o-n excited. I never saw him laugh. For the sake of a little variety, I have tried to get up a domestic squabble; but it was of no use. I have tried to stir him up on politics; but he is on the fence, and would as readily jump one way as the other.

“I have put on the sulks, and been distant and dignified ; I tell you he likes it; besides, you could not freeze him colder than he is. I have been loving, and petted him ; it is all a waste of ammunition; he can't be thawed out.