an accident-at least 'most all of it, and I don't think it's manly for a man to stand by and see a sister shake a fellow that isn't half her size, and especially when he never supposed that anything was going to happen to her even if it did break.

When Aunt Eliza came to our house the last time, she brought a steam chair; that's what she called it, though there wasn't any steam about it. She brought it from Europe with her, and it was the queerest sort of chair, that would all fold up, and had a kind of footstool to it, so that you put your legs out and just lie down in it. Well, one day it got broken. The back of the seat fell down, and shut Aunt Eliza up in the chair so she couldn't get out, and didn't she just howl till somebody came and helped her! She was so angry that she said she never wanted to see that chair again, And you may have it if you want it, Jimmy, for you are a good boy sometimes when you want to be.'

So I took the chair and mended it. The folks laughed at me, and said I couldn't mend it to save my life; but I got some nails and some mucilage, and mended it elegantly. Then mother let me get some varnish, and I varnished the chair, and when it was done it looked so nice that Sue said we'd keep it in the back parlour. Now I'm never allowed to sit in the back parlour, so what good would my chair do me? But Sue said, 'Stuff and nonsense that boy's indulged now till he can't rest.' So they put my chair in the back parlour, just as if I'd been mending it on purpose for Mr. Travers. I didn't say anything more about it; but after it was in the back parlour I took out one or two screws that I thought were not needed to hold it together, and used them for a boat that I was making.

That night Mr. Travers came as usual, and after he had talked to mother a while about the weather, and he and father had agreed that it was a shame that other folks hadn't given more money to the Michigan sufferers, and that they weren't quite sure that the sufferers were a worthy object, and that a good deal of harm was done by giving away money to all sorts of people, Sue said:

'Perhaps we had better go into the back parlour; it is cooler there, and we won't disturb father, who wants to think about something.'

So she and Mr. Travers went into the back parlour, and talked very loud at first about a whole lot of things, and then quieted down as they always did.

I was in the front parlour, reading Robinson Crusoe, and wishing I could go and do likewise-like Crusoe, I mean; for I wouldn't go and sit quietly in a back parlour with a girl, like Mr. Travers, not if you were to pay me for it. I can't see what some fellows see in Sue. sure if Mr. Martin or Mr. Travers had her pull their hair once the way she pulls mine sometimes, they wouldn't trust themselves alone with her very

soon.

I'm

All at once we heard a dreadful crash in the back parlour, and Mr. Travers said Good something very loud, and Sue shrieked as if she had a needle run into her. Father and mother and I and the cook and the chambermaid all rushed to see what was the matter.

The chair that I had mended, and that Sue had taken away from me, had broken down while Mr. Travers was sitting in it, and it had shut up like a jackknife, and caught him so he couldn't get out. It had caught Sue too, who must have run to help him, or she never would have been in that fix, with Mr. Travers holding her by the wrist, and her arm wedged in so she couldn't pull it away.

Father managed to get them loose, and then Sue caught me and shook me till I could hear my teeth rattle, and then she ran up-stairs and locked herself up; and Mr. Travers never offered to help me, but only said, 'I'll settle with you some day, young man,' and then he went home. But father sat down on the sofa and laughed, and said to mother:

I guess Sue would have done better if she'd have let the boy keep his chair.' I'm very sorry, of course, that an accident happened to the chair, but I've got it up in my room now, and I've mended it again, and it's the best chair you ever sat in.-Harper's Young People.

THE CANOE AND THE CAMERA.

By MYRON ADAMS, ROCHESTER. The canoe and the gun we know, and the canoe and fly-pole: but what is this new combination? It is, all

things considered, one of the best copartnerships yet made. Canoe and camera come sweetly together in every way. I thought,' says Judd Northrup, author of charming vacation books, 'shooting and fishing had exhausted or engaged all my latent enthusiasms of the boyish sort, but amateur photography has gone down deeper than all the rest.'

A camera tucked conveniently in your pocket (or carried like a field-glass in a leather case), with the legs of the same packed in the compass of an umbrella, is a fishing tackle with which the canoeist can catch anything, from clouds and mountains down to a glimpse of a little lake with a string of speckled trout hung in the foreground.

The reader, cherishing, perhaps, fond recollections of summer tramps in woods, with rod and gun, or possibly, if a lady, with sketch-book and plant-case, begs to know how the thing is done; and the writer begs the privilege of telling how, principally in order that many others may share a delightful recreation in which he has had a little experience. The outfit consists of (1.) a camera, which with lens and legs weighs not more than two pounds; (2.) say half a dozen boxes of prepared dry plates; the boxes each about three inches square by one deep, and containing in all seventytwo plates; (3.) three (or better four) plate-holders. The plate-holder is a very compact and ingenious contrivance for the exposure of the plates, and holds two, for separate exposures. (4.) Avery small ruby lamp.

Suppose, gentle reader, you are spending your summer leisure in the North woods. Enchanted with the views which abound, you are determined to get them 'to have and to hold' from that time on. Accordingly, at night, by the light of your ruby lamp (if in the day-time, you adjourn to some dark cellar, of rig a small and light-tight tent of blankets), you transfer half a dozen plates from one of the boxes to the plate-holders. Stepping into your canoe in the morning the early part of the day is preferable-you row, or a guide rows you, to a spot of the right sort; you go ashore, set up the camera in a twinkling, focus upon the scene you admire until it is clearly defined upon the screen, then you put its small cap upon the lens, insert the diaphragm in its place, draw the slide of the plate-holder, remove the

cap, deliberately count three (or more or less, according to conditions), replace the cap, thrust the slide to its place in the plate-holder, and you have that scene. This operation you repeat in various localities until you have exhausted your supply of plates, which are returned to their boxes, and when your vacation is over you go home with about the best part of it in your carpet-bag.

When you have leisure-there need be no hurry; any time will answer except the 30th of February-you go into a dark closet with your plates, and your developer,' and a pitcher of water, light the ruby lamp and lock the door, take a plate from a box, put it in the developing pan, pour the compound ferous oxalate over it, gently wave the fluid to and fro over the plate, and shortly the beautiful summer scene which charmed you grows out on that plate: as by magic, the familiar trees, lakes, mountains and camps, distinct even to a leaf, are there before you. The process of 'fixing' follows, and is simple; and afterward the printing from the negative. Taken altogether, that is an amuse ment fit for the nineteenth century! It gives abundant opportunity for the cultivation of artistic taste; it stimulates the faculty of observation; and it gives you a most graphic record of your vacation days. Moreover, it is very inexpen

sive.

You will probably make some mistakes at first; but if you begin in the right way, carefully following the printed directions, they will be few.

The writer hopes that some of the readers of this magazine will find as much, or half as much, genuine recreation and enjoyment in amateur landscape photography as he has had, and he will feel sure he has helped somebody a little.-Christian Union.

The foreman of a Montreal paper is in trouble. In making up his forms, he mixed an article on Catholic advances in Africa with a receipt for making tomato catsup, and the following is the combination: The Roman Catholics claim to be making material advances in Africa, particularly in Algeria, where they have one hundred and eighty-five thousand adherents and a missionary society for Central Africa. During the past three years, they have obtained a firm footing

in the interior of the continent, and have sent forth several missionaries into the equatorial regions. They are accustomed to begin their work by buying heathen children and educating them. The easiest and best way to prepare them is to first wipe them with a clean towel,

then place them in dripping-pans and bake them till they are tender. Then you will have no difficulty in rubbing them through a sieve, and will save them by not being obliged to cut them in slices and cook for several hours.'

Studies in the Life of Christ. By the Rev. A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D.D., Principal of Airedale College, Bradford. New York: D. Appleton; Toronto: N. Ure & Co., 1882.

IT

T is, unfortunately, so rare to find in a volume of Sermons anything possessing the slightest literary or philosophical value, that we are apt to forget, what is, nevertheless, perfectly true, the paramount importance to our literature of a few great sermonwriters. It is true that these may be counted on the fingers of one hand; but with John Henry Newman, for beauty of diction and charm of logical force; with Robertson, of Brighton, and Dean Stanley, for broad human sympathies, and a spirit of fair play to opponents, we are disposed to rank the author of this very remarkable book. The object of these sermons, or rather philosophical essays, is to enable us to see Christ as others saw Him during His human life on earth. The conditions of that life are fully investigated, and the true position of the various sects or parties which then entered into the national life of Judæa are expressed in terms of modern thought, with vivid picturesqueness, but always in a manner earnest, loving, and reverent. The author shows the marvellousness of the Central Figure in the Gospel, and argues that none of the conditions or surroundings of His time or people can in any way account for this. The reasoning is convincing, it has been urged by Canon Liddon, in his Bampton Lectures, and is applied with much force, and with the fittest

variety of illustration, in the volume before us.

Principal Fairbairn is well versed in German theology of the sceptical and rationalistic schools, whose arguments he handles in a spirit of fair-play, and with an appreciative, philosophic insight only too rare in orthodox writers. For Dr. Fairbairn is orthodox; he sees that Christianity cannot be rationalized by paring away here and there a prophecy or a miracle; that it must stand or fall with its central miracle of the Resurrection.

The Life of the Founder of Christianity, he shows to be too profoundly human to be sublimated into a myth; he proves also that it is an essentially supernatural life, not that of a mere dead Prophet, on whose grave the Syrian stars look down. Assuming, what Strauss and Renan grant, that never man spake like this Man,' that in Jesus Christ we possess the supreme religious ideal, Dr. Fairbairn reasons that none of the conditions under which Jesus lived are adequate to explain the mystery of His character and His teaching. We quote a passage from the Sermon on the Historical Condition.

'Contrast Christ's day with ours. We are free, the children of a land where a man can speak the thing he will, but He was without freedom, the Son of a people enslaved and oppressed. We are educated, enlightened by the best thought of the past, the surest knowledge of the present; but His were an uneducated people, hardly knew the schoolmaster, and when they did, received from him instruction that stunted rather than de

veloped. We live in a present that knows the past, and is enriched with all its mental wealth, the treasures of India, from its earliest Vedic to its latest Puranic age-of China, of Egypt, of Persia, of Assyria; the classic treasures of Greece and Rome, the wondrous stores accumulated by the Hebrews themselves and deposited in their Scriptures-all are ours, at our feet, in our heads, there to make the new wealth old wealth never fails to create. But Jesus lived in a present closed to all the past, save the past of His own people.'

We greet these sermons as a valuable contribution to literature as well as to theology. In Canada, there is no disguising the fact of a growing alienation between pew and pulpit, especially in a Church in which, as a rule, the priesthood, magnifying the thaumaturgical functions of their office, care little about the humbler, but to the laity more important, work of pulpit efficiency. It was different in the old Evangelical days, it is different now with the Broad Church minority. But in general it may be said that the clergy of the Episcopalian denomination are no exceptions to the law that intellectual excellence is in inverse ratio to the growth of ecclesiasticism. It were devoutly to be wished that, instead of the dismal and often second-hand pietistic dulness dealt out to us from certain pulpits, a good reader, lay or cleric, could be induced to read to one of our city congregations such sermons as those of Dr. Fairbairn. The proposal is, it is true, as old as Sir Roger de Coverley, but it is one which the laity, at least, would approve.

Mary Stuart: a Tragedy. By ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. New York: R. Worthington; Toronto: Willing & Williamson.

In this the concluding drama of the series of three in which, after the model of Greek tragedy, Swinburne has treated the story of Mary Stuart, the poet rises to an elevation of tragic power and to a well-developed ascending series of dramatic situations which he has not attained in either of the former dramas, rich as they were in poetic beauty. In Chastelard, he had described the court of Mary Stuart in the full moon of its vo

luptuous indulgence. Chastelard, the noble French knight and poet, is won from his allegiance to the Queen by the truth and purity of Mary Beaton's love. He dies on the scaffold, Mary Beaton praying that his blood may not be unavenged. In Bothwell the tragedy of Mary Stuart's life deepens. The death of Rizzio is followed by the murder at the Kirk i' the Fields, the dark clouds cling heavily over the sunshine. Mary Stuart begins with the conspiracy of Babington, with the discovery of Mary Stuart's implication therein by the evidence of her secretaries under the torture. Meanwhile, Elizabeth, dreading the effect on public sentiment of the fall of a royal head on the scaffold, hesitates to execute her rival, and unsuccessfully endeavours to get Sir Amyas Paulet to connive at assassination. Meanwhile, in a scene of striking power, Mary Beaton who all those years had followed the Queen's fortunes, is so stung by the exceeding heartlessness with which Mary Stuart speaks of the dead Chastelard, that she half resolves to send to Elizabeth a letter in Mary's handwriting in which the virgin Queen's flirtations are roughly handled. Beaton then sings a song-it is a French ballade, exquisite as any lyric of De Musset or Victor Hugo, which Chastelard wrote in the days when he loved Mary Stuart. But the selfish Queen had forgotten the very name of the writer. So the fatal letter is sent to Elizabeth. The result is, of course, the execution at Fotheringay, which is described in a scene, the power and pathos of which, we think has been surpassed in no English drama, not excepting the last scene of the Cenci. But not the least remarkable in this work is the care with which a great poet has investigated the historical character both of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth. All the details of Elizabeth's unchastity, as described in the fatal letter, are fully borne out by the account lately made public in an article in Les projets de Mariage d'une Reine d'Angleterre,' by M. de La Ferriere, in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

Mary

O Domine Deus
Speravi in Te!

O care mi Jesu!

Nunc libera me !

O Lord my God

I have trusted in Thee!

O Jesus, my dearest One, ¡ Now set me free.

In durâ catenâ, in miserâ pænâ
Gemendo, petendo et genuflectendo
Adoro, imploro, ut liberes me !

In direst oppression, in sorrow's obsession,
I adore thee, I implore thee,
Deliver thou me.

The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics. By J. B. STALLO. The International Scientific Series. New York Appleton & Co.; Toronto: N. Ure & Co. 1882.

This work is a two-fold criticism, from the point of view first of physics, then of metaphysics, of what the author calls the Mechanical Theory of the Universe. It is thus an attack on the first principles of the modern evolution philosophy, which, in the part the book devoted to physical science, is of a kind to be fully appreciated only by scientific experts. When the physical speculation is such as to be within the scope of ordinary observation, we fail to find Professor Stallo's reasoning conclusive. For instance, when he argues that the 'mechanical theory' must necessarily regard the elementary unit of a mass as inelastic, 'because elasticity involves motion of parts,' and then proceeds from the Kinetic theory of gasses (i. e., the theory that gas'consists of innumerable solid particles whose velocities and directions are changed by mutual encounters) to argue that the atoms must be elastic. Surely elasticity does not in its simplest form 'involve the motion of parts. ticity is potential motion, and, one would think, must be regarded as an inalienable attribute of the primitive atoms by the advocates of the 'mechanical theory.' In a similar manner Professor Stallo attacks every point in the evolution system, especially the atomic cosmical theory, and Laplace's, or rather Kant's, Theory of the Heavens. The second portion of Professor Stallo's work is more available for the non-scientist. author accuses the mechanical theory of being a revival of medieval realism, of

Elas

The

putting thoughts for things, of mistaking concepts for realities. He reasons from the on-all-sides admitted relativity of human thought against evolutionists, who, he asserts, unintelligibly, we must confess, to us, hold the cognizability of the absolute. We always thought the reverse, remembering Spencer's remarks on that subject in his 'First Principles.'

There is an interesting chapter on that strangest phase of mathematics, 'transcendental geometry,' which tells of the finiteness of space and the universe, of a point at which parallel lines, if produced, meet, Euclid to the contrary notwithstanding; and of beings with more than these three dimensions. The animals we know, have three dimensions only, length, breadth, and thickness; and some of these beings' of three dimensions are quite as much as we can manage. A being of four dimensions might be awkward as a partner in business or in matrimony, and we are thankful that these are banished to a land where the propositions of Euclid are untrustworthy and where parallel lines meet.

To many of the older readers of Canadian periodical literature, Mrs. Leprohon's name must be well and favourably known. She was a valued contributor to the Literary Garland, the pioneer magazine of Canada, which was owned and published by Messrs Lovell & Gibson, Parliamentary Printers, and edited by Mr. John Gibson, of that long-familiar firm. The collection before us is published as a memorial volume of a gifted and patriotic woman, who did much in her day to aid the intellectual life in Montreal circles, and to promote the love of letters thoughout the country. Mrs. Leprohon was of Irish birth, and had all the qualities of head and heart that give distinction to Irishwomen of culture, and which so frequently find er pression in song. Montreal, in Mrs. Leprohon, Isidore G. Ascher, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Charles Heavysege, and John Reade, has had representatives of the muse of more than local fame, and whose productions the chief city of Canada would be ungrateful indeed were she readily to let die. In this beautiful little