and taunts? Be assured that God will hear and answer your earnest, simple prayers. Go to him with all your wants, for he careth for you, and his little ones will not be forgotten when he counteth up his jewels.

"CH

MINDING.

'HARLIE, come in, I want you," said a sweet, womanly voice to a little boy who was playing marbles on the sidewalk in front of a nice brick house.

Now Charlie was very busy, and in the midst of a delightful game. He was as happy as could be. To quit his play then was like quitting the table when half through dinner. Would he obey? We looked with interest to see what he would do. What would you have done?

Charlie replied, "Yes, mother," and picking up his marbles, started off with a smiling face and a bounding step up the side yard, and in at the end door of the house. A fine boy that, I thought, as I looked after him. I wonder who he is? What a beautiful thing it must be to have a little boy or girl that will mind at once, and with a happy, loving heart! I wondered what would become of that boy, and wished to see more of him, and learn his history.

I used to walk past that house every week, and always thought of that blue-eyed, light-haired boy. The thought of him made me happy. I saw a great many naughty children. Once I spent two or three days in trying to find a naughty boy who ran away from his home, and overwhelmed his parents with grief; and when I found him some one had stolen his coat and

hat, and bundle of clothes, and all the money

he had. Once I chased after a truant boy and girl for several hours, and at last, late at night, found them in the woods, wet through, cold, and frightened almost to death. They had disobeyed their mother, and gone to play instead of going to school, and both of them were sick for several weeks in consequence of their folly and exposure. A boy that minds-he is a jewel.

I had been in business a year or two, and in that time had had several boys; but it was next to impossible to find one that would mind. At last I was quite out of patience, and I determined that I would have no one who could not bring the best recommendation, and stand the closest test. Several applied for the place, but no one suited us. At last came a blueeyed, flaxen-haired youth of twelve years, with a bright, honest face. There was something engaging in his aspect. Had I seen him before? "What is your name ?"

"Charlie Warren, sir. I live in Franklinstreet. My father is a carpenter, but is lame now, and can not work, and I have got mother's consent to go into a store, if I can find a place." It was the very Charlie whom I had seen playing at marbles. I remembered the circumstance, and knew that he would mind. I did not need a recommendation for him, but gave him the place, and twice as much pay as I had proposed to give.

Charlie came to work on Monday morning. It seemed hard for him, the first week of work,. but he behaved like a man. The boys in the next store came in and made his acquaintance. One morning I heard two of them trying to persuade Charlie to go off with them down on the wharves in the forenoon and see a boat race that was to come off. "No," said Charlie, "mother told me to mind my business, and I am paid for staying here, and don't think it right to go off without my employer's knowing it."

That was a brave word, and I thought more of Charlie than ever. That was ten years ago. He has been with me ever since, and proved to be the best clerk I ever had. Yesterday we put up a new sign, and on it, in large gilt letters, was Charlie's full name. The store is his own. He is now a prosperous, promising young man, and if he lives will be a rich, honored man. And all this because one bright morning he minded his mother when she called him. From such little things do great results come. Always mind, and it will be always well with you.

THE SABBATH A LOVING DAY.

"MOTHER, I suppose the reason why they

call the Sabbath a holy day is because it is such a loving day," said a little boy as he stood by his father's side and looked up into his mother's face.

"Why, is not every day a loving day?" asked his mother. "I love father, and father loves me, and we both love you and the baby every day as well as Sunday."

"Well, but you have no time to tell us so on week-days," said the little boy. "You have to work, and father has to go off early to his work, and he is so tired when he comes home; but on Sundays he takes me on his knee and tells me Bible stories, and we go to God's house together, and O, it is such a loving day!"

"Yes, my child," said the father, "it is a holy, loving day. God gave it to us in love, that tired men might rest from their work, and fathers, who see but little of their children on other days, might teach and enjoy them on that day."

That lying is bound up in the hearts of children it would not become me to deny. But certainly it is often united. Indeed, there are few who will not tell lies the testimony of their parents to the contrary notwithstanding.

But of two facts I am reasonably sure. First, that children's falsehoods are often as much the parents' fault as their own; and, secondly, that children do not lie as much as grown-up people do, and seem to do so only from want of skill and long practice.

Lies are instruments of attack or of defense, and so may be classed as offensive or defensive. Children's lies are almost always defensive, and for the most part are employed in defending themselves against parents, nurses, elder brothers and sisters, and schoolmasters. Being weak and helpless, concealment is in their case, as in the animal kingdom, almost the only means of defense. Children's lies are in multitudes of instances mere attempts to hide themselves from sharp censure or sharper whipping. Take a case from life. Master Harry is sent to mill one day in Winter, but with strict injunctions not to stop and skate. But the pond was so inviting, the boys there were so merry, they so persuasively coaxed him, that it was not in his social little heart to refuse. Of course he skates longer than he intended. On reaching home he is questioned: "Why have you been so long, Harry?"

"O, the grist was not ground, and I had to wait." "Did you go on the pond?" "No, sir, I did n't."

Here is a pretty tangle of lies! The old gentleman runs his hand into the bag and finds the meal stone cold. He rides over to the mill to inquire about matters, and finds that the grist had been ground the day before; he rides home and calls up the urchin, who knew that a grist now was to be ground that would be hot enough! Here was disobedience first, then a lie, and next, upon cross-questioning, a secondary lie, explanatory and defensory of the first. Of course punishment was earned and deserved. But the boy did not lie because he liked to, or because he was indifferent to the truth. He was suborned by fear. He shrank from punishment, and tried to hide behind a lie. The refuge proved treacherous, as it ought to have done.

But, now, is there no lesson to parents in this thing? Shall they hastily place their children between such

instincts, in children, are relatively far stronger than moral sentiment. Conscience is weak and unpracticed, while fear is powerful, and at times literally irresistible.

The fear of pain, the fear of shame, the fear of ridicule, drive children into falsehoods. Those who govern them might, at least, remember how it was in their own cases, and so manage as to help conscience against fear, rather than by threats and sternness make the temptation irresistible.

Children are very delicate instruments. Their minds are undeveloped, ungoverned, and acutely sensitive. Men play upon them as if they were tough as drums, and like drums, made for beating. They are to be helped more than blamed. One in sympathy with their little souls will lead them along safely amid temptations to falsehood, where a rude and impetuous nature will plunge them headlong into wrong.

The one element of real manhood, above all others, is truth. A child should not be left to learn how to be true, how to resist temptations, how to give judgment in favor of right and virtue. Here is the place where help is needed-patience, sympathy, counsel, encouragement. Instead of these the one motive, too often, is the whip.

of doors; taken by removing parts of clothing too soon after coming into the house, or lying down on a bed or sofa when in a tired or an exhausted condition, from having engaged too vigorously in domestic employment. Many a pie has cost an industrious man a hundred dollars. A human life has many a time paid for an apple dumpling. When our wives get to work they become so interested in it they find themselves in an utterly exhausted condition; their ambition to complete a thing, to do some work well, sustains them till it is completed. The mental and physical condition is one of exhaustion, when a breath of air will give a cold, to settle in the joints to wake up next day with inflammatory rheumatism, or with a feeling of stiffness or soreness, as if they had been pounded in a bag; or a sore throat to worry and trouble them for months, or lung fever to put them in the grave in less than a week.

Our wives should work by the day, if they must work at all, and not by the job; it is more economical in the end to see how little work they can do in an hour, instead of how much. It is slow, steady, continuous labor which brings health and strength, and a good digestion. Fitful labor is ruinous to all.-Hall.

POPULAR WAYS OF COMMITTING SUICIDE-A medical contemporary thus enumerates the fashionable modes of doing it:

1. Wearing thin shoes and cotton stockings on damp nights and in cool, rainy weather. Wearing insufficient clothing, and especially upon the limbs and extremities.

2. Leading a life of enfeebling, stupid laziness, and keeping the mind in an unnatural state of excitement by reading trashy novels. Going to theaters, parties, and balls in all sorts of weather, in the thinnest possible dress. Dancing till in a complete perspiration, and then going home without sufficient over-garments, through the cool, damp night air.

3. Sleeping on feather beds in seven by nine bedrooms, without ventilation at the top of the windows, and especially with two or more persons in the same small, unventilated bedroom.

4. Surfeiting on hot and very stimulating dinners. Eating in a hurry, without half masticating the food, and eating heartily before going to bed, when the mind and body are exhausted by the toils of the day and the excitement of the evening.

5. Beginning in childhood on tea and coffee, and going from one step to another, through chewing and smoking tobacco and drinking intoxicating liquors; by personal abuse, and physical and mental excesses of other descriptions,

6. Marrying in haste and getting an uncongenial companion, and living the remainder of life in mental dissatisfaction; cultivating jealousies and domestic broils, and being always in a mental ferment.

7. Keeping children quiet by giving paregoric and cordials, by teaching them to suck candy, and by supplying them with raisins, nuts, and rich cake; when they are sick by giving them mercury, tartar emetic, and arsenic, under the mistaken notion that they are medicines and not irritant poisons.

8. Allowing the love of gain to absorb our minds, so as to leave no time to attend to our health; following an unhealthy occupation because money can be made by it.

THE ART OF HOSPITALITY.-Welcome the com

ing guest; welcome him with a few, simple, pleasant, easy words; without ostentatious cordiality; without gushing declarations of friendship; without paralyzing his arm by an interminable shaking of hands; without hurry or flourish, or due anxiety to have his trunk carried up to his room, or sandwiching between every sentence an anxious appeal to make himself entirely at home-an appeal which usually operates to make one feel as much away from home as possible. Constantly taking it for granted on the part of the host and his family that one is not comfortable, and that they must hurry about and take all responsibility-and self-helpfulness—from the guest, thus depriving him of the credit of common-sense, is something worthy of indignation; all the more so because politeness forbids the least sign of impatience. It is ill-bred-it is not decent. It is insulting to the guest, and he would serve the author of such treatment right if he cut him thereafter without ceremony. And yet how many of our well-meaning, and, in most things, well-bred people, fall into the error that unless they are constantly on the alert, unless they establish a kind of espionage over their guest, and watch his take a seat for himself, they will be wanting in courevery movement, lest he should brush his coat or tesy. The art of hospitality consists in putting the guest at his ease; and this does not mean telling him to be at his ease. It consists in making him forget that he is a guest, and not in constantly pushing the fact before his eyes. And it also consists in leaving to him the exercise of his senses and of responsibility, at least so far that, finding what he needs at his hand, he may help himself.

A CHEERFUL FACE-Carry the radiance of your soul in your face. Let the world have the benefit of it. Let your cheerfulness be felt for good wherever you are; and let your smiles be scattered like sunbeams, "on the just as well as on the unjust." Such a disposition will yield you a rich reward, for its happy effects will come home to you and brighten your moments of thought. Cheerfulness makes the mind clear, gives tone to thought, adds grace and beauty to the countenance. Joubert says, "When you give, give with joy and smiling."

Smiles are little things, cheap articles, to be fraught with so many blessings both to the giver and the receiver, pleasant little ripples to watch as we stand on the shore of every-day life. They are our higher, better nature's,responses to the emotions of the soul.

Let the children have the benefit of them; those little ones who need the sunshine of the heart to educate them, and would find a level for their buoyant natures in the cheerful, loving faces of those who lead them.

Let them not be kept from the middle-aged, who need the encouragement they bring.

Give your smiles to the aged. They come to them

like the quiet rain of Summer, making fresh and verdant the long, weary path of life. They look for them from you who are rejoicing in the fullness of life. "Be gentle and indulgent to all. Love the truth, the beautiful, the just, the holy."

SNIVELIZATION.-Whithersoever we go, we meet with the sniveler. He stops us at the corner of the street to intrust us with his opinion. He fears that the morals and intelligence of the people are destroyed by the election of some rogue to office. He tells just before Church that the last sermon of some transcendental preacher has given the death-blow to religion, and that the waves of atheism and the clouds of pantheism are to deluge and darken all the land. In a time of general health he speaks of the pestilence that is to be. The mail can not be an hour too late but he prattles of railroad accidents and steamboat disasters. He fears that his friend who was married yesterday, will be bankrupt in a year, and whimpers over the trials he will then endure. He is ridden with an eternal nightmare, and emits an eternal wail. Recklessness is a bad quality, and so is blind and extravagant hope; but neither is so degraded as inglorious and inactive despair. We object to the sniveler, because he presents the anomaly of a being who has the power of motion without possessing life. His insipid languor is worse than timid strength. Better that a man should run than whine. The person that has no bounding and joyous feeling in him, whose blood never tingles and fires at the contemplation of a noble aim, who has no aspiration and no great object in life, is only fit for the hospital or the bandbox. Enterprise, confidence, a disposition to believe that all good has been done-these are important elements in the character of every man who is of use to the world. We want no wailing or whimpering about the absence of happiness, but a strong determination to abate misery.-Whipple.

A LITERARY TASTE.-To a young man away from home, friendless and forlorn in a great city, the hours of peril are between sunset and bedtime; for the moon and stars see more evil in a single hour than the sun in his whole day's circuit. The poet's visions of evening are all compact of tender and soothing images. It brings the wanderer to his home, the child to its mother's arms, the ox to his stall, and the weary laborer to his rest. But to the gentle-hearted youth, who is thrown upon the rocks of a pitiless city, and "stands homeless amid a thousand homes," the approach of evening brings with it an aching sense of loneliness and desolation which comes down upon the spirit like darkness upon the earth. In this mood his best impulses become a snare to him, and he is led astray because he is social, affectionate, sympathetic, and warm-hearted.

A taste for reading will always carry you to converse with men who will instruct you by their wisdom and charm you by their wit, who will sooth you when fretted, and refresh you when weary, counsel you when perplexed, and sympathize with you at all times. Evil spirits, in the middle ages, were exorcised and

driven away by bell, book, and candle; you want but two of those agents, the book and the candle.

ADVICE TO A DYSPEPTIC.-You have asked me to prescribe for you. You expect medicine; perhaps you hope for whisky, just now the rage for chronic maladies; but I shall give you nothing to swallow; you have swallowed too much already. Of all the maladies, dyspepsia is the most distressing; to get rid of its horrors you would part with your right arm; I believe you; but will you part with a portion of your table luxuries? I fear not; but presuming you are in earnest I will prescribe for you:

1. Rise early, dress warm, and go out-if strong, walk; if weak, saunter; drink cold water three times-of all cold baths this is the best for the dyspeptic; after half an hour or more, come in for breakfast.

2. For breakfast eat a piece of good steak half as large as your hand, a slice of coarse bread, and a baked apple; eat very slowly; talk very pleasantly with your neighbors, read cheerful comments of journals, avoid hot biscuits and strong coffee, drink nothing.

3. Digest for an hour, and then to your work; I trust it is in the open air. Work hard till noon, and then rest body and mind till dinner, sleep a little; drink water.

4. For dinner-two or three o'clock-eat a slice of beef, mutton, or fish, as large as your hand, a potato, two or three spoonfuls of other vegetables, and a slice of coarse bread; give more than half an hour to this meal, use no drink.

5. After dinner play anaconda for an hour; now for the social, for pleasant games-a good time. 6. No supper-a little toast and tea even for supper will make your recovery very slow.

7. In a warm room bathe your skin with cold water hastily, and go to bed in a well-ventilated room before nine o'clock. Follow this prescription for three months and your stomach will so far recover that you can indulge for some time in all sorts of irregular and gluttonous eating; or if you have resolved, in the fear of Heaven, to present your bodies living sacrifices, holy and acceptable unto God, and will continue to eat and work like a Christian, your distressing malady will soon be forgotten.-Dio Lewis, M. D.

BEGINNING THE WORLD.-Many an unwise parent labors hard and lives sparingly all his life, for the purpose of leaving enough to give his children a start in the world, as it is called. Setting a young man afloat with money left him by relatives, is like tying bladders under the arms of one who can not swim; ten chances to one he will lose his bladders and go to the bottom. Teach him to swim and he will never need the bladders. Give your child a sound education, and you have done enough for him. See to it that his morals are pure, his mind cultivated, and his whole nature made subservient to the laws which govern men, and you have given what will be of more value than the wealth of the Indies; then if you leave him wealth he will know how to use it.

OUR MOODS OF UNSANITY.-We need, every one of us, to know that we live in moods and phases, working eccentrically, sometimes more unhinged and sometimes less; sometimes in better nature, and sometimes in irritable; sometimes more disposed to jealousy; sometimes more to conceit. Nothing looks fresh after a sleepless night; nothing true after an over heavy dinner. A touch of dyspepsia makes the soul barren and every thing else barren to it-even the finest poem it turns to a desert. Any mood of gloom, in the same manner, hangs a pall over the sun, and even the very bones will sometimes seem to be in that mood as truly as the eyes. Opinion is sometimes bilious, sensibility morbid and sore, and passion, tempest-sprung, goes wild in all sorts of rampages. At one time we can be captious toward a friend, at another generous toward an enemy, at another about equally indifferent to both.

Now a wise man is one who understands himself well enough to make due allowance for such unsane moods and varieties, never concluding that a thing is thus or thus, because just now it bears that look; waiting often to see what a sleep or a walk, or a cool revision, or perhaps a considerable turn of repentance will do. He does not slash upon a subject, or a man, from the point of a just now rising temper. He maintains a noble candor by waiting sometimes for a better sense of truth. He is never intolerant of other men's judgments, because he is a little distrustful of his own. He restrains the dislikes of prejudice because he has a prejudice against dislikes. His resentments are softened by his condemnations of himself. His depressions do not crush him because he has sometimes seen the sun and believes it may appear again. He revises his opinions readily because he has a right, he thinks, to better opinions, if he can find them. He holds fast sound opinions, lest his moodiness in change should take all truth away. And if his unsane thinking appears to be toppling him down the gulfs of skepticism, he recovers himself by just raising the question whether a more sane way of thinking might not think differently.

A man who is duly aware thus of his own distempered faculty, makes a life how different from one who acts as if he were infallible, and had nothing to do but just let himself be pronounced! There is, in fact, no possibility of conducting a life successfully on in that manner. If there be any truth that vitally concerns the morally right self-keeping and beauty of character, it is that which allows and makes room for the distempers of a practically unsane state, one that puts action by the side of correction, and keeps it in wisdom by keeping it in regulative company. Just to act out our unsanity is to make our life a muddle of incongruous, half-discerning states, without

either dignity or rest. There is no true serenity that does not come in the train of a wise, self-governing modesty.-Dr. Bushnell.

CLOUDS AND AFFLICTIONS.-Every cloud has two aspects. The earth-side is dark and cold, the heaven side is bright and warm. It is the same cloud, the same mass of vapor; but how different, whether we view it from below or above! From below, it is only a canopy of leaden gloom-it spreads its shadow like a mantle over all that is fairest about us. From above, it appears the very pavilion of light-it glows like burnished silver in the sun's broad beams. The cloud is an emblem of affliction. All affliction has both an earth and heaven side. Viewed from the earth, it is as gloomy, chilling, and repulsive as the grave. It comes we know not whence, nor why. It lays its withering hand upon all that is dear, and leaves nothing to supply the void. It desolates without consoling. It takes away the last and dearest hope, without a whisper of its reviving again. The pleasures of the world, the well-meant sympathies of friends, all that remains among the ruins of longcherished hopes, can not help us now. They only probe without healing the wounds. The heavens are one mass of leaden clouds, whose muttering thunderings and flashing lightnings bring only terror and dismay.

But to this cloud there is an upper, a heavenly side. There the Sun of Righteousness shines with healing in his beams. In these beams the cloud glows with light and joy. Here in plainest lines is read the mystery of affliction, and the ways of God are justified to the sorrow-stricken soul. Here the darkness becomes light, the curse a blessing, the wail a song of praise. The light of heaven shining upon our grief turns it into joy. We see all the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. We see it consenting to abase us now that it may afterward exalt us; wounding us that we may be the better healed; striking earthly hopes dead at our feet that we may not forget the heavenly; making us desolate now that we may on a future day rejoice in greater riches. O, blessed cloud, if we can only see the upper side of it; if all the glorious light which shines upon it from God's holy counsel be only reflected back upon the soul !

Child of sorrow! leave the earth. On the wings of faith fly, fly through the clouds, up to the lofty hight where the Sun of Righteousness is forever shining. There you will see sorrow not as you see it now-no hard necessity under which you must lie crushed; no strange mystery which you can not explain; no terrible curse, the burden of which you must forever bear; but only another pledge of that faithful promise, "I will be a father unto you." "If