madly, "Man overboard !" and catch the rope, when I can see nothing again. The sea is too high, and the man too heavy for me. I shout, and shout, and shout, and feel the perspira tion starting in great beads from my forehead, as the line slips through my fingers.

6. Presently the captain feels his way aft, and takes hold with me; and the cook comes, as the coil is nearly spent, and we pull together upon him. It is desperate work for the sailor; for the ship is drifting at a prodigious rate; but he clings like a dying man.

7. By-and-by, at a flash, we see him on a crest, two oars' length away from the vessel. "Hold on, my man!" shouts the captain. "For God's sake, be quick!" says the poor fellow; and he goes down in a trough of the sea. We pull the harder, and the captain keeps calling to him to keep up courage, and hold strong. But, in the hush, we can hear him say, "I can't hold out much longer; I'm most gone !"

8. Presently we have brought the man where we can lay hold of him, and are only waiting for a good lift of the sea to bring him up, when the poor fellow groans out, "It's no use; I can't. Good-by !" And a wave tosses the end of the rope clean upon the bulwarks. At the last flash, I see him going down under the water. MITCHELL

W

65. THE FOUNT OF SONG.

HERE flows the fount whose living streams
Are heard in every clime-

Whose voice hath mingled with the dreams
Of far-departed time?

Is it where Grecian fanes lie hid

Among the olives dim,

Or the Nile beside the pyramid,

Sends up its ceaseless hymn?

2. Alas! by old Castilian wave

The muses meet no more,

Nor breaks from Delphi's mystic cave
The prophet voice of yore:

Old Egypt's river hath forgot
The Theban glory gone;

And the land of Homer knows him not,-
Yet still that fount flows on!

3. The sacred fount of song, whose source Is in the poet's soul,

Though living laurels crown its course
All-glorious to the goal;

Yet who can tell what desert part

Its earliest springing nursed? As from the glacier's icy heart The mightiest rivers burst!

4. Perchance the wind that woke the lyre
Was but a blighting blast

That sear'd with more than tempest's ire
The verdure where it passed.

Perchance the fire that seemed divine

On ruined altars shone,

Or glowed like that Athenian shrine,
For deity unknown.

5. It is not Fame, with all her spells,
Could wake the spirit's springs,

Or call the music forth that dwells
Amid its hidden strings;

For evermore, through sun and cloud,
To the first fountain true,

It flows but oh! ye soulless crowd,
It never sprang for you!

6. The wild-bird sings in forest far,
Where foot may never be;
The eagle meets the morning star,
Where none his path may see.
So many a gifted heart hath kept
Its treasures unrevealed,-

A spring whose depth in silence slept,
A fount forever sealed!

7. Woe for the silent oracles

That went with all their lore!
For the world's early wasted wells,
Whose waters flow no more!
Yet one remains no winter's wrath
Can bind, or summer dry;

For, like our own, its onward path
Is to eternity.

MISS BROWN

66. MONASTERIES.

[An extract from "Institutions, Manners, and Customs of the Middle Age," by Dr. Hurter, of Switzerland, one of the most profound, comprehensive minds, and erudite scholars of the day.]

ΟΝ.

N the ancestral grave-on the spot where a nobleman had selected the place of rest for his family-on the foundation of the modest church out of the wooden cell of the hermit -there, where the waves had given back to the afflicted father the child they had snatched away, arose the structure wherein daily were to ascend canticles of praise to the Eternal, and thanksgiving for redemption, or, which even sometimes were to expiate the murders and crimes of a former robber's cave, or convert the accursed place of execution into an abode of blessings.

2. That age considered it indeed as a glory and a happiness to put in force such pious resolutions; nay, vanity might often.

be tempted to purchase, by such donations, the praises of posterity. Yet the more pious sense of those times protested against any feelings of ostentation or ambition attaching to works which sprang from Divine inspiration, out of pure zeal for religion, from a regard to the perishableness of all earthly things, from the wish of sowing a seed in time for eternity, and of there laying up a portion of one's treasure, and obtaining one day a hundred-fold reward.

3. The prince believed that out of the transitory goods of this world he might procure for himself a mansion in heaven. One who had been rescued from imminent danger, sought to attest by such foundations his gratitude to the Almighty in a manner the most acceptable.

4. A nobleman who had wandered long amid the turmoils of an agitated life could better understand, in the evening of his days, the value of monastic quiet and seclusion. The service of her eternal Master offered to the noble lady greater charms than all the vanities of the world; and the baron sought, by means of such establishments, to reduce to subor dination the rebellious spirit of his vassals.

5. The sorrow of deeply-afflicted parents at the death of the loved ones of their heart, induced them to offer up to the Almighty a sacrifice of thanksgiving as soon as they were enabled to inter their bodies. HURTER.

67. CHARITY.

[The following is an extract from an eloquent appeal for the sufferers in the South, delivered in New York, in the winter of 1866-7.]

BUT

UT the age of Chivalry is gone. All things-kingdoms, cities, systems, habits-wear out and perish. So wrote. Edmund Burke in that noble passage where all the chivalry of his own high nature flashed out in anger at the insult that France, degraded into rationalism, had cast on a fair and innocent woman-Marie Antoinette. He was right. France

will never be able to cleanse from its escutcheon the stain of that murdered lady's blood. "The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded." Progress, the Juggernaut of our idolatry, crushes under its remorseless wheels many a harmless superstition, a kindly tradition, and gracious habit of the past.

2. Woman asks not loyalty now-a-days. The dignified sub mission, the tender regard for her sex and weakness, the hom age of the heart with which every man, not wholly debased, delights to regard her, she slights and repudiates, and demands instead liberty and equality. Be it so. The world does move. War acknowledges now no truce of God, no holydays; and, by a queer coincidence, many of the bloodiest battles of modern times have been fought on Sunday. There is small immunity for vine-dresser or olive-grower now, and we can fancy what short work a foraging party would make of the shepherd and his flock.

3. Our improved projectiles spare neither shrine nor spire; and modern reason would laugh at the superstition which would spare a foe because he had sought asylum by the altar or the cross. The world has moved. Relieved of ancient restraint, war has resumed all its pagan ferocity, with the additional improvements in the machinery for killing which modern inventiveness has devised. A more complete disregard of the immemorial rights of war, of courtesy, of chivalry, of Christianity-a harder insensibility to the waste of human life have never been shown than by the armies of the civilized nations within the last twenty years.

4. Witness the sack of Kertch, an unfortified, ungarrisoned city, in the Crimean war; the "loot" in China; the devilish vengeance wreaked on the Sepoys, blown into atoms from the cannon's mouth; the wholesale devastation of Poland; the atrocities inflicted on Crete to-day-these are some of the instances of superior civilization of which our nineteenth century—our golden age of knowledge and enlightenment-exhibits to an admiring world. Cromwell, the merciless hero of