pain; all he wishes is to be able to torment you; what he will aim at all your lives, is to make and keep you naughty that you may be for ever miserable, and in pain with him in hell; and where too he will laugh and mock at you for having listened to him, and come with him to that dismal place, of shrieks, and cries, and darkness, and eternal fire. God's pleasure on the contrary, is to make every thing happy; and if we wish to resemble him, we must have the same desire also; and then when we die, we shall go to heaven to God, and enjoy there pleasures and happiness, of which we cannot here have even an idea. You ought always to recollect that God made every thing, the meanest creature, as well as yourself; that when you wilfully kill and torment worms, flies, or chaffers, that you are killing your fellow-creatures, and shedding innocent blood. Has not God told you that a sparrow does not fall to the ground without his knowledge? Think you not then, that he goes along with you every spring, when you cruelly go a bird's nesting, destroying for no end but your own idle cruelty, hundreds of poor little birds, who would soon have fled about happy, and gay, and sat singing upon every branch? Some animals injure us, and these we think we have a right to kill, and to a certain degree we have, but

then we must kill and not torment them. And I believe we kill many more of these than there is any occasion for, and if we used them more kindly, it would be still a better means of escaping any injury from them. To prove to you that this would generally be the best method, I will tell you two stories of hornets, an insect like a wasp, only bigger, and with a worse sting, and I know them both to be fact. The one happened in a village near Bridgnorth, in Shropshire; and the other in the neighbourhood of Cambridge. In the Shropshire village, some hornets made their nest in the innerside of the thatched roof of a cottage, where without taking off the roof, it was impossible to destroy them. They came in at a broken pane of the labourer's window, made a regular path from which they never were observed to turn aside, across the floor of the chamber, and thence up the side of the wall, and never stung either the poor man or his wife, who are the only inhabitants of this little dwelling.

The instance near Cambridge, of what I must call the gratitude of this supposed mischievous insect, for toleration and protection, is still more remarkable. This cottage was inhabited not only by a man and woman, but likewise by several children; and the hornets who had built their

nest here also in the inside of the thatched roof, entered the house, I think under the door, and though they were continually passing and repassing through the common room, in which the whole family lived during the day, in no instance did they sting any one of the inhabitants; nay, they proved not only harmless to those who thus kindly entertained them, but in the end repaid them liberally for their lodging, for many of the gentlemen in the university, hearing of this circumstance, went to the spot, in order to ascertain the truth of it, and gave the poor cottagers many a sixpence or a shilling for indulging their curiosity.

We seldom act well in this life but God rewards us for it, even here. Had these cottagers endeavoured to destroy all the hornets, they must have been terribly stung, and they never would have had the advantage of so many gentlemen coming to see the circumstance. So if the children had been disobedient to the parents, and foolishly, and cruelly tormented any of these insects, they would have suffered much pain; nor would the story from not being remarkable, have excited that attention from which the profit arose to the family. I wish my little stories may make any impression upon your minds; and that when you are going to hunt, tease, or torment

any thing, however small, however ugly it may appear to you, and however injurious even you may think it, that you may recollect what you have here read. Consider that God made it as well as you'; that he bids you be kind to it, and has told you in his word, that he hates them who sheds innocent blood. Be ye therefore merciful even as he is merciful.

When we came to the ground where the sheep should have been, there was not one of them above the snow. Here and there, at a great distance from each other, we could perceive the heads or horns of stragglers appearing; and these were easily got out: but when we had collected these few, we could find no more. They had been lying all abroad in a scattered state when the

storin came on, and were covered over just as they had been lying. It was in a kind of sloping ground, that lay half beneath the wind, and the snow was uniformly from six to eight feet deep. Under this the hogs were lying scattered over at least one hundred acres of heathery ground. It was a very illlooking concern. We went about boring with our long poles, and often did not find one hog in a quarter of an hour. But at length a white shaggy colly, named Sparkie, that belonged to the cowherd boy, seemed to have comprehended something of our perplexity, for we observed him plying and scraping in the snow with great violence, and always looking over his shoulder to us. On going to the spot, we found that he had marked straight above a sheep. From that he flew to another, and so on to another, as fast as we could dig them out, and ten times faster, for he sometimes had twenty or thirty holes marked beforehand.

We got out three hundred of that division before night, and about half as many on the other parts of the farm, in addition to those we had rescued the day before; and the greater part of these would have been lost, had it not been for the voluntary exertions of Sparkie. Before the snow went away (which lay only eight days) we had got out every sheep on the farm, either dead or alive, except four; and that these were not found was not Sparkie's blame, for though they were buried below a mountain of snow at least fifty feet deep, he had again and again marked on the top of it above them. The sheep were all living when we found them; but those that were buried in the snow to a certain depth, being, I suppose, in a warm, half-suffocated state,