and the laws of Nature are one. By them are the industrious benefited. By them are the idle condemned. The laws of Nature ever reward obedience to God's legislation, ever punish disobedience to the Divine Lawgiver. Do nothing and thou shalt rot. Lie still and the vultures shall hover over thee as over a corpse. But, up and be doing! and thy shadow shall grow long. That road which thou treadest shall remember thy full stature. That silvery-leaved larch may darken thy shadowy shape for a while; but while that stayest thou shalt go on. Each step that thou takest into the purple evening from that golden noon shall make thy shadow grow more vast until black night comes.

Prayer is not confined to words. The true liturgy is daily effort. That rubric of every-day virtuous endeavours is the brightest page of thy missal. Prune and train that buddy vine aright upon the sunning wall, and thou actest a prayer for grapes in purple clusters. Thy wine-vats full and richly flavoured, and thy goblets for thee and for thy friends, bubbling up bright red beads to the brim, shall be God's answer to thy rightly prayed prayer. Go also into that garden and dig. Every spadefull that thou diggest shall thus pray :

Oh, Divine Seedsman! Grant by this effort that the seed which may be here may flourish; that it may swell and pulp ; that it may sprout and grow; that its plumula may rise upward, and its radicle tend downward; that its leaves may open to daylight; that it may bud and blossom, and that it may seed again, and supply all thy children with bread, oh, Common Parent!"

Such is the true and beautiful prayerfulness of industry. They who can receive this can understand the grand affirmation of those old monks who established agriculture throughout EuropeLaborare est orare. To labour is to pray."

While musing on the religion of industry, I saw a vision as in the sky. There seemed first one reading a Bible, and one came to him begging, yet he raised not his eyes from the book to give to him that begged. And I heard a voice exclaim, "The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."-" Faith without works is dead." And a dull leaden cloud passed over. There appeared again in the sky like one in a market-place giving to a beggar, while many looked on. And I heard a voice exclaim, "Thou thief, thou art giving that which is not thine, but which thou hast stolen from that beggar. Justice before charity!" And a light vaporous cloud flitted past. And once more I saw in the sky a company as of one family, brothers and sisters, working together

in a garden without hedge or pale, and eating together of the fruits of the garden. And there was no beggar, nor thief, nor selfish one. And I heard a voice exclaiming, "This is the Paradise of works; these are my beloved in whom I am well pleased." And the sun arose and shone in splendour over all the earth.

GOODWYN BARNSBY.

Belfast.

MARIANA RESTORED.

AGAINST the marble balustrade,

The peacock dipped his purple train;
The fountain o'er its basin made
A gentle shower of cooling rain;
Through pleasant bowers, with jasmine starred,
Blue spaces oped, to glance and wink ;
And here and there, with merry chink,
The blithe grasshopper thrilled the sward.
Each day the chambers of the hall,

With light and frequent step she trod;
The portraits on the panelled wall
Seemed greeting her with friendly nod;
To lick her hand, as she pass'd by,
The greyhounds left their sunny nook,
And not a thing she touched but took
A beauty from her company.

The window, where at eve she leaned,
Lay open to the crimson west,
Where hills of noble outline screen'd
The broad sun as he sunk to rest;
The turrets of a busy town-

The tall tops of a forest nigh-
And a bounding river met her eye,

When from her window she look'd down.

Yet sometimes she would live, in sleep,
The whole life of her sorrows o'er-
Would see the poplar's shadow creep
Athwart the grange's moonlit floor;
And watch the morn, with sickening light,
Weigh'd with her long day's store of grief;
And wake-to find that day too brief
For the notation of delight!

M.

369.

THE HEDGEHOG LETTERS.

CONTAINING THE OPINIONS AND ADVENTURES OF JUNIPER HEDGEHOG, CABMAN, LONDON; AND WRITTEN ΤΟ HIS RELATIVES AND ACQUAINTANCE, IN

VARIOUS PARTS OF THE WORLD.

LETTER XXVII.--TO ELIHU BURRITT, BLACKSMITH, OF WORCESTER, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

FRIEND BURRITT, -Whether it was one of your Manchester friends, or whether, indeed, it was nothing less than a dove from your own American woods that dropt one of your Olive Leaves in my cab,-I won't stop to consider. It's enough that I've read the Leaf again and again, and can't help thanking you for it. Can't help admiring how that you, "a poor man not worth a dollar in the world,' as you say of yourself, should be scattering thousands and thousands of these healing Leaves about AmericaLeaves in their meaning and intention worth all the laurels that ever grew out of dead men's graves, made so foul and rank with dead men's blood.

Your Leaf fell into my hands just after I'd read Mr. Adams's speech in Congress, where he stands upon the Bible for his right to Oregon, and would cut throats according to his notion of Genesis! Foolish old gentleman! he can't have many years' mortal breath in him, and therefore it is sad to see him puffing and puffing to blow the embers of war into a blaze- to see him, as I may say, ramming down murderous bullets, and wadding muskets with leaves from the Bible! But there's a sort of religion that would sharpen the sword itself on the stone tables of Moses.

However, this is an old trick. There's a good many of these pious lovers of gunpowder who, somehow or the other, will insist upon turning up the regimental uniform with pages of the Bible and Testament. To make a man particularly the care of Heaven, they think it only necessary to dress him in red clothes, put a feather in his cap, ball-cartridge in his cartouche-box, and a musket in his hand. And these folks-they 've been doing it in

the House of Commons only a week or two ago—always give the glory of slaughter to "HIS ARM that gives all battles! And so, according to these people, the Army of Martyrs should be an army with forty-two pounders and a rocket brigade. Their Christianity is Christianity humbly firing upon one knee. Their incense for the altar is not myrrh and frankincense, but charcoal and saltpetre. Our Sir Robert Harry Inglis, for instancewho in the House of Commons speaks for pious Oxford-he was quite delighted that the Governor-General of India had put so much religion into the bulletin that published the slaughter of nine thousand Sikhs, as they call 'em. They were all killed— according to Sir Robert not by the cold iron of the English infantry, but by a heavenly host; the bayonet, in truth, did not do the work; no, it was the fiery swords of the angels, and praises were to be sung to them accordingly. And this is the Christianity of the Gazette; though I can't find it in the New Testament.

And, poor Mr. Adams makes a very lame case out of Genesis : somehow or the other he reads his Bible upside down; for he declares

"If our controversy respecting Oregon had been with any other than a Christian nation, I could not quote from that book; if we were in dispute with the Chinese about the territory it would be a different question. So it is a different question between us and the savages, who, if anybody, have now the rightful occupation of the country; because they do not believe the BOOK.”

And because Mr. Adams believes "The Book" and the Red Man does not, he Mr. A. has not scrupled to countenance the wholesale robbery of the Red Man's lands. Thus, either wayit is the custom with some very devout people-Mr. Adams makes profit of his Bible! And thus a war for Oregon would be no other than a Holy War-a war declared upon the strength of sacred texts. Christians would blaze away at one another on the authority of the Scriptures; with perhaps, to tickle Mr. Adams, "Peace on earth, and good-will to men painted on American

cannon.

And Mr. Adams, friend Elihu, will go to his Bible to settle this matter of disputed land. Now the first dispute of the sort mentioned in "The Book" was arranged, certainly not after the fashion of Mr. Adams: for here's the original "Oregon question"

disposed of in Genesis in a manner quite forgotten by the Adams of America :

"And there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abram's cattle and the herdsmen of Lot's cattle, and the Canaanite and Perezzite dwelled then in the land.

"And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen, for we be brethren:

"Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself I pray thee from me if thou wilt take the left hand then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand then I will go to the left."

And so, Elihu, Gunpowder Adams is answered out of his own Genesis!

But we shall have no fighting for Oregon. Mr. Adams's speech is like one of the wooden cannon mounted for cheapness by the Dutch; it looks warlike and dangerous, but sound it, and there's no true ring of metal in it-it's only wood thickly painted. Besides, your Olive Leaves-copied as they are in the American papers, which as you say "enables you to bring the principles of peace before a million of minds every week,"-your Olive Leaves must go to cool the glory fever, smacking its lips for blood.

You've been some time known among us Britishers, Elihu, as the "learned blacksmith ;" but your Olive Leaves are getting for you a still better name. It's a fine thing, a glorious thing, no doubt, to get at the heart of a dozen languages and more-as they say you have done-and so be able to make, I may say, a speaking acquaintance with the Greeks and the Romans, and so on; but it's nobler work to have made yourself "the head of the periodical peace publications" of America, and so to preach quiet and goodness to tens of thousands of men, that otherwise, like bull-dogs, might be patted on to tear one another to pieces.

It's a fine thing to think of you, Elihu Burritt, Blacksmith. To see you, working all day-making your anvil ring again with glorious labour (how I should like just a set of shoes for my mare of your own making), to see you forging anything but swords and bayonets, and then, when that work is over, to think of you sitting down, with your iron pen in your hand, working away, to weld men's hearts together-to make the chain of peace, as your own Red Men say, between America and England,—and to keep it bright for ever. When I think of this work of yours I'm pretty