"The master's in a hurry."

"Let him wait till his hurry's over."

"He'll murder me if I'm not back soon." "I'm glad to hear it."

While the postmaster went on with such provoking answers to these appeals for dispatch, Andy's eye caught the heap of letters which lay on the counter; so while certain weighing of soap and tobacco was going forward, he contrived to become possessed of two letters from the heap, and, having effected that, waited patiently enough till it was the great man's pleasure to give him the missive directed to his master.

Then did Andy bestride his hack, and in triumph at his trick on the postmaster, rattled along the road homeward as fast as the beast could carry him. He came into the Squire's presence, his face beaming with delight, and an air of self-satisfied superiority in his manner quite unaccountable to his master, until he pulled forth his hand, which had been grubbing up his prizes from the bottom of his pocket; and holding three letters over his head, while he said, "Look at that!" he next slapped them down under his broad fist on the table before the Squire, saying

"Well! if he did make me pay eleven pence, I brought your honor the worth of your money anyhow!"

From "Handy Andy." Adapted.

THE ISLES OF GREECE

BY LORD BYRON

Thirty-six short stormy years make up the life of George Gordon Byron. His life and personality were both marked by singular

contrasts. He was born of an old
but decayed English family, was
brilliant in mind although extremely
sensitive, inspired passionate loyalty
and devotion in his friends, yet at
times could be stubborn and change-
able with them. Lameness and in-
herited traits of character brought
him much unhappiness. Macaulay
says,
"He had a head which statu-
aries loved to copy, and a foot the
deformity of which the beggars in
the street mimicked." At seven he
inherited the title and estates of

Newstead Abbey. Next morning when the roll was called at school and he heard "Lord Byron," he was so startled he burst into tears. All his life he was quick to defend the weak. At school, Moore tells us, he said to a new boy, "Hamers, if any one bullies you, tell me and I'll thrash him." In manhood he threw heart and soul into the cause of the Greek revolution against Turkish rule. He was commander-in-chief of the army when he died of fever. The poem Don Juan was left incomplete. [Born in 1788-died in 1824 |

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,

I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

A king sat on the rocky brow

Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations; all were his!
He counted them at break of day--
And when the sun set, where were they?

And where are they? and where art thou,
My country? On thy voiceless shore

The heroic lay is tuneless now

The heroic bosom beats no more!
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine?

From "Don Juan." Abridged.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits

them all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

A BIRDSEYE VIEW OF EUROPE

BY JOHN RUSKIN

The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between northern and southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fullness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind.

Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a gray stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light; Syria and

Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange and plumy palm, that abate with their gray-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand.

Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts of gray swirls of raincloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands; and then farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight.

From "The Nature of the Gothic."