quickly on, and his tremulous voice was lost in the violence of the storm.

Again that heavy chill struck through his frame, and his blood seemed to stagnate beneath it. He coiled himself up in a projecting doorway and tried to sleep. But sleep had fled from his dull and glazed eyes. His mind wandered strangely, but he was awake and conscious. The wellknown shout of drunken mirth sounded in his ear, the glass was at his lips, the board was covered with choice, rich food; they were before him; he could see them all; he had but to reach out his hand and take them—and, though the illusion was reality itself, he knew that he was sitting alone in the deserted street, watching the rain-drops as they pattered on the stones; that death was coming upon him by inches, and that there were none to care for or help him.

Suddenly he started up in the extremity of terror. He had heard his own voice shouting in the night air, he knew not what or why. Hark! a groan! another! His senses were leaving him; half-formed and incoherent words burst from his lips, and his hands sought to tear and lacerate his flesh. He was going mad, and he shrieked for help till his voice failed him.

He raised his head and looked up the long, dismal street. He recollected that outcasts like himself, condemned to wander day and night in those dreadful streets, had sometimes gone distracted with their own loneliness. He remembered to have heard, many years before, that a homeless wretch had once been found in a solitary corner, sharpening a rusty knife to plunge into his own heart, preferring death to that endless, weary wandering to and fro.

In an instant his resolve was taken; his limbs received new life; he ran quickly from the spot, and paused not for breath until he reached the river side. He crept softly down the steep stone steps that lead from the commencement of Waterloo Bridge down to the water's level. He

crouched into a corner, and held his breath, as the patrol passed. Never did prisoner's heart throb with the hope of liberty and life half so eagerly as did that of the wretched man at the prospect of death.

The watch passed close to him, but he remained unobserved; and after waiting till the sound of footsteps had died away in the distance, he cautiously descended, and stood beneath the gloomy arch that forms the landing-place from the river.

The

The tide was in, and the water flowed at his feet. rain had ceased, the wind was lulled, and all was, for the moment, still and quiet-so quiet that the slightest sound on the opposite bank, even the rippling of the water against the barges that were moored there was distinctly audible to his ear. The stream stole languidly and sluggishly on. Strange and fantastic forms rose to the surface and beckoned him to approach; dark, gleaming eyes peered from the water and seemed to mock his hesitation, while hollow murmurs from behind urged him onward. He retreated a few paces, took a short run, a desperate leap, and plunged into the water.

Not five seconds had passed when he rose to the water's surface, but what a change had taken place in that short time in all his thoughts and feelings! Life-life-in any form, poverty, misery, starvation, any thing but death! He fought and struggled with the water that closed over his head, and screamed in agonies of terror. The curse of his own son rang in his ears. The shore, but one foot of dry ground, he could almost touch the step. One hand's breadth nearer and he was saved, but the tide bore him onward, under the dark arches of the bridge, and he sank to the bottom. Again he rose and struggled for life. For one instant, for one brief instant, the buildings on the river's banks, the lights on the bridge through which the current had borne him, the black water, and the fast-flying clouds were distinctly visible; once more he sank, and once

more he rose. Bright flames of fire shot up from earth to heaven and reeled before his eyes, while the water thundered in his ears and stunned him with its furious roar.

A week afterwards the body was washed ashore some miles down the river, a swollen and disfigured mass. Unrecognized and unpitied, it was borne away to the grave, and there it has long since mouldered away.

-Charles Dickens.

LVI. SHORT SELECTIONS.

DECEIT.

THINK'ST thou there are no serpents in the world
But those who glide along the grassy sod,
And sting the luckless foot that presses them?
There are who in the path of social life

Do bask their spotted skins in fortune's sun,
And sting the soul,-ay, till its healthful frame
Is chang'd to secret, fest'ring, sore disease,
So deadly is the wound.

LABOR.

-Joanna Baillie.

"LABOR is worship," the robin is singing;

Labor is worship," the wild bee is ringing.

Listen! that eloquent whisper upspringing,

Speaks to thy soul out of nature's great heart.
Labor is life! 'Tis the still water faileth;

Idleness ever despaireth, bewaileth;

Keeps the watch wound or the dark rust assaileth!
Labor is rest from the sorrows that greet us;
Rest from all petty vexations that meet us,
Rest from sin-promptings that ever entreat us,
Rest from world-syrens that lure us to ill.
Labor is health! Lo! the husbandman reaping,
How through his veins goes the life-current leaping!
How his strong arm in its stalwart pride sweeping,
True as a sunbeam the swift sickle guides.

-Mrs. Osgood.

DEATH.

LIKE other tyrants, death delights to smite;

What, smitten, most proclaims the pride of pow'r,
And arbitrary nod. His joy supreme,

To bid the wretch survive the fortunate,

The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud,
And weeping fathers build their children's tomb.

A GENTLEMAN.

SEE, what a grace was seated on his brow;
Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury,
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;

A combination, and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man.

-Shakespeare.

LVII. THE EXISTENCE Of a God.

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Go out beneath the arched heavens, at night, and say, if you can, 'There is no God." Pronounce that dreadful blasphemy, and each star above you will reproach the unbroken darkness of your intellect; every voice that floats upon the night winds will bewail your utter hopelessness and folly.

Is there no God? Who, then, unrolled the blue scroll, and threw upon its high frontispiece the legible gleamings of immortality? Who fashioned this green earth, with its perpetual rolling waters, and its wide expanse of island and of main? Who settled the foundations of the mountains? Who paved the heavens with clouds, and attuned, amid the clamor of storms, the voice of thunders, and unchained the lightnings that flash in their gloom?

Who gave to the eagle a safe eyrie where the tempests dwell and beat the strongest, and to the dove a tranquil abode amid the forests that echo to the minstrelsy of her moan? Who made thee, O man, with thy perfected elegance of intelligence and form? Who made the light pleasant to thee, and the darkness a covering and a herald to the first flashes of the morning?

There is a God. All nature declares it in a language too plain to be misapprehended. The great truth is too legibly written over the face of the whole creation to be easily mistaken. Thou canst behold it in the tender blade just starting from the earth in the early spring, or in the sturdy oak that has withstood the blasts of fourscore winters. The purling rivulet, meandering through downy meads and verdant glens, and Niagara's tremendous torrent, leaping over its awful chasm, and rolling in majesty its broad sheet of waters onward to the ocean, unite in proclaiming, "There is a God!" "Tis heard in the whispering breeze and in the howling storm; in the deep-toned thunder and in the earthquake's shock; 't is declared to us when the tempest lowers, when the hurricane sweeps over the land, when the winds moan around our dwellings and die in sullen murmurs on the plain, when the heavens, overcast with blackness, ever and anon are illuminated by the lightning's glare.

The truth is not less solemnly impressed on our minds in the universal hush and calm repose of nature when all is still as the soft breathings of an infant's slumber. The vast ocean, when its broad expanse is whitened with foam, and when its heaving waves roll mountain on mountain high, or when the dark blue of heaven's vault is reflected with beauty on its smooth and tranquil bosom, confirms the declaration. The twinkling star, shedding its flickering rays so far above the reach of human ken, and the glorious sun in the heavens, all, all declare there is a universal First Cause.