can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to this earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and husbandmen who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew, and the water they draw, are better than the pine-forests that cover the mountain like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like His eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the Preacher, that though God "hath made everything beautiful in His time, also He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations in their struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the deliverance, the faith. But now when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other; and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem arising out of their rest-evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood, though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart, though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others, and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also-a fear greater than that of sword and sedition. that dependence on God may be forgotten because the bread is given and the water sure, that gratitude to Him may cease, because His constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law, that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfish

ness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to strength, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colours its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are torrenttossed and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty; but when the stream is silent and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them, and the lichen to feed upon them, and are ploughed down into dust.

And though I believe we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety in all matters, however trivial—in all directions, however distant. And at this time . . . there is need, bitter need, to bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to know Him, by whom we live, and that He is not to be known by naming His fair works, and blotting out the evidence of His influence upon His creatures, not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligence which He gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty; he did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might give the carved work of their poured out spirit to the axe and the hammer; He has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles; nor turned it up under, as it were, fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; He brings not up His quails by the east wind only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain

only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field

only for the oxen.

(From "Modern Painters," by permission of Messrs. Smith and Elder.)

KILLED AT THE FORD.

H. W. LONGFELLOW.

HE is dead, the beautiful youth,

The heart of honour, the tongue of truth,—
He, the life and light of us all,

Whose voice was blithe as a bugle call.

Whom all eyes followed with one consent,

The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word, Hushed all murmurs of discontent.

Only last night, as we rode along,
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,

He was humming the words of some old song:
"Two red roses he had on his cap,

And another he bore at the point of his sword."

Sudden and swift a whistling ball

Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill;
I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks
In a room where some one is lying dead;
But he made no answer to what I said.

We lifted him up on his saddle again,
And through the mire, and the mist, and the rain,
Carried him back to the silent camp,

And laid him as if asleep on his bed;
And I saw by the light of the surgeon's lamp
Two white roses upon his cheeks,

And one just over his heart blood-red!

And I saw in a vision how far and fleet
That fatal bullet went speeding forth,
Till it reached a town in the distant North,
Till it reached a house in a sunny street,
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry;

And a bell was tolled in that far-off town,

For one who had passed from cross to crown,— And the neighbours wondered that she should die

THE PIPER AND THE CHANGEABLE FAIRY.

(Versified from T. Crofton Croker.)

BY THE EDITOR.

Of all the strange doings and all the vagaries
Recounted at length about goblins and fairies,
There is nothing the fairy-lore student surprises
So much as their many and varied disguises.
The one I shall tell of had changes as many
As the great Mister Woodin, and he could beat any
That I ever read of who wasn't a fairy;

"Twas he who once frightened half fair Tipperary.
But first I must tell you there lived in that county
Larry Hoolan, a piper, a very great player,
Who lived by his piping, that is, on the bounty
Of those that he played to at wedding or fair.

In old times the fairies selected odd places

Which they kept to themselves: they were called "fairy-ground;"

The farmers all knew them because of the traces

They left where they'd danced in their circles around;

And these, in old times, they devoutly respected,

Because they believed that the fairies protected
Their crops from the vermin, their cows from the cramp,
Their pigs from the measles, their malt from the damp,
And goodness knows what! So the fairies and elves
Were left on each farm a snug spot to themselves.

Now, a farmer, it chanced, had some fairy-ground taken,
Which the elves for a season had held, then forsaken,
And when they came back there, for peace and for quiet,
His bulls and his cows all kicked up such a riot,
The fairies not only could get no repose,

But they couldn't go dancing whenever they chose;
And so they resolved that they would, come what may,
The farmer and all his men frighten away.

The herdsman he slept in the fields all the night,
And him they resolved they would first put to flight.
Their chief he came down from their home on the hill,
When the moon it shone bright and the winds they
were still,

The herdsman he pinched, just to keep him awake,
And the very first form he determined to take
Was a little lame man with the head of a bull,

And a tail-which he asked the poor herdsman to pull.
The herdsman objected-the fairy became

A dragon, with eyes like a forge in a flame,

And the herdsman he asked if he'd into them blow?
And the herdsman replied, very nervously, "No."
And then he changed into a horse with huge wings,
And asked him to ride and "lay hold of them things;"
And then, as the poor herdsman tried to escape,
He suddenly changed to a great hairy ape,

With the feet of a duck and a turkey-cock's tail,
And he asked him if he'd through the air take a sail?
And so he went on till the daylight appeared,
When he changed, yet again, to a cow with a beard,
And galloped away round the foot of the hill,
And left the poor herdsman, half dead, quaking still.