begins with marriage. It is true the false impressions of life, which novel-reading is calculated to give, are soon corrected by active occupations, by intercourse with the world, and by habits of real business. But these impressions, even when eradicated, are apt, unless great care is taken, to engender a feeling more dangerous, because more unsettling—a feeling of envy for those above us in station, and of distaste for our surroundings, and for the position in life in which we have been placed. The clerk compelled to toil day after day and year after year in dingy offices, for small pay and increasing expenses, will long to change his lot with those high-born heroes of romance whose leisure and money are alike unbounded, and whose sole object in life seems to be to find out the means of enjoying both. The middle-class youth reads, for example, that passage in which Lothair, on his majority, is introduced to all the splendour and magnificence of Muriel Towers, and is put in possession of the accumulations of a long minority, and of a more than royal income; and a wistful envy will come upon him as he thinks of the life of labour on which he has entered, and which was the only inheritance into which he ever came. The struggling pro

fessional man who finds it hard to make out either time or means for a short annual holiday, thinks his case still harder as he reads how Mr. Phoebus, in the same book, is enabled by his earnings to maintain an entire island in the Mediterranean, wherein to pass his vacation, and a stately yacht in which to make his summer voyages. I might go on multiplying instances, but those I have given will sufficiently explain my meaning. Of course such feelings as I have referred to, are foolish and unreasonable, and illogical; but wisdom and sober judgment are not given to everyone. And such feelings will assuredly come with much novel reading, unless a determined check is put upon the rovings of the imagination, and unless all dissatisfied longings are kept down with a strong hand. So far as a character in fiction is concerned, the invitation given by Mr. Anthony Trollope in the title of one of his latest novels, should very rarely, if at all, be accepted. Believe me it will be the better for you if you do not try to "put yourself in his place."

But while the reading of novels brings the disadvantages and evils I have thus hastily touched upon, I should be sorry if you went away with the impression that they were wholly bad and by all means to be avoided. Even as a means of amusement, if they were nothing more, novels cannot be too highly valued. They take men out of themselves. They lift them for a time, at least, above the petty cares and hard realities of daily life. They fill up odd gaps of time with bright and

pleasant imaginings, which otherwise would be spent in dreamy and listless idleness. They have power, in Longfellow's words, "to soothe the restless feelings, and banish the thoughts of day." They can make the merchant for a while forget his business, and the doctor cease to think of his patients. They can make the clerk forget his daily drudgery, and I myself know their power to turn the attention of the lawyer away from his cases and his briefs. They can give new pleasure to us in health, and they can do much to soothe and lessen the pains of a bed of sickness. They can people a lonely journey or a desolate hearth with bright and pleasant companions. They can draw the captive for a while, at least, from his prison cell. They can bring solace to the wanderer and the exile, for they will speak to him of home and friends. To many a man, amid the snows of an Arctic winter, or in the midst of an Australian bush, or in the backwoods of America, an odd volume of Scott or Dickens has been a priceless treasure and resource. I read lately a small volume of poems by an American poet-Bret Harte--published under the fanciful title of That Heathen Chinee. The title is a most misleading one, for the volume contains some pieces of very rare beauty and pathos. One of the poems in the collection bears closely upon this branch of my subject. It is called "Dickens in Camp," and it describes the effect produced by the reading aloud of one of his stories in a camp of Californian miners. With your permission I will read some of the verses :

Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,

The river sang below,

The dim Sierras far beyond uplifting

Their minarets of snow.

The roaring camp-fire, with rude humour, painted
The ruddy tint of health

On haggard face and form, that drooped and fainted

In the fierce race for wealth.

Till one arose, and from his pack's scant treasure

A hoarded volume drew,

And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure

To hear the tale anew.

And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,

And as the fire-light fell,

He read aloud the book wherein the Master

Had writ of "Little Nell."

Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy, for the reader
Was youngest of them all;

But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall.

The fir trees, gathering closer in the shadows,

Listened in every spray,

While the whole camp, with "Nell" in English meadows, Wandered and lost their way.

And so, in mountain solitudes, o'ertaken

As by some spell divine,

Their cares dropped from them, like the needles shaken

From out the gusty pine.

(To be continued.)

ST. MONICA

No sweeter story, Monica, than thine,
Is left us in the annals of the years;
Of human things it speaks, and of divine,
Of rapture and of tears.

We see thee 'mid the glooms and lights of home,
And hear beloved voices once again,

We see thee lonely in the streets of Rome,
And feel thy exile's pain.

We see thee face to face with life and duty,

Winning to God thy husband's stubborn heart;

We see thee, clothed in thy mystic beauty,

Do well a mother's part.

Thy son is thine, who gavest him to earth,
And thine his heart, so tender and so human,
And he is thine by right of better birth,
O strong and valiant woman!

The early lights that shine upon his youth
Are but the radiance of thy motherhood,
And thine is every shaft of Christian truth
That warmed his pagan blood.

Thy voice unto his heart of Jesus spoke,

And cast that Name into its furrows deep,
And thine the rainfall of the tears that woke
The seedling from its sleep.

And thine the weary feet, that for his sake,

Trudged by him through the night-time of his dole,

And thine the eyes that saw the morning break
Upon his darkling soul.

And thine the heart that one with his in love
Once watched beside the Tyrrhene sea, at even,
And, soaring earth and purple sea above,
Beheld, one moment, Heaven!

And thine the life that in such rapture closes,
All mindless of the grave that holds the dust *
Which, far from home, in Christian hope reposes,
To rise with all the just.

A. W.

A MAY RHYME

MARY, my Mother, I have little skill

To link sweet words to tell my love for thee;
And yet my foolish tongue will not be still,

Straining to speak my thought once perfectly.

O Mother, Mother, look into my heart,
Read with thine eyes how very dear thou art,
Then tell thyself in thine own heavenly speech
What my weak phrase must ever fail to reach.

J. W. A.

* St. Monica died at Ostia, the sea-port of Rome, where she had come with St. Augustine on their journey to their home in Africa. Speaking of her burial-place, she said to Augustine: "Lay this body anywhere. Nothing is far to God; nor is it to be feared lest at the end of the world He should not recognize whence He has to raise me up." Her body was transferred to Rome during the Pontificate of Martin V, and is venerated in the Church of St. Augustine. Her feast-day is the 4th of May.

LITTLE ESSAYS ON LIFE AND CHARACTER

II. OF ANNIVERSARIES AND THE WINGS OF TIME

T

a healthy mind there is a mild charm in anniversaries and the variety of yearly commemorations with which we are blest. Some take a delight in centenaries and tercentenaries. I soar not so high-I limit myself to that natural measure of man's life, a year. To the child, indeed, a year is a century; to the old it is but an hour of a journey that grows in swiftness as it nears the end. But most people look at the twelvemonth as a period divided into four clearly marked seasons, each of which has its own pleasures, and into the dozen moons that bring to us the anniversaries which shine as gems in the "starry girdle of the year."

Ask an American what national holiday is best kept all over the world, and you will receive the emphatic answer, "The Fourth of July, sir, the date of the Declaration of Independence." And, doubtless, the patriotic assertion is not without foundation. All citizens of the United States celebrate the day with abundant feasting and oratory; and if a man were discovered in New York or Boston taking advantage of that time of pleasant leisure to mend his roof, he would find a few revolver bullets hopping playfully about the tiles to remind him that the day should not be desecrated by work. As an incident connected with Fourth of July festivities, I may mention the following quaint fact:

A little girl who once shed tears in the midst of rejoicings was asked why she cried, and she said that she had eaten so heartily of sweets and fruit she found herself quite unable to swallow a morsel more. As it was then exactly in the forenoon, she had to spend the rest of the day doing penance, while everyone else was feasting.

Within the golden circuit of the year we rejoice in the great religious festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide. Among days connected with the names of great benefactors or heroes of the race, there is none kept with such fidelity and enthusiasm as the festival observed each year by the millions of the sea-divided Gael in honour of their patron, St. Patrick. In addit en to public commemorations of various kinds, fam lies and individuals have domestic anniversaries of their own. The