Emigrant Isle " because it is so beautiful and green; the principal occupation of the people of Austria is gathering austrich feathers; the two famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrow. In civil government: The first consciencious congress met in Philadelphia; the constitution of the United States was adopted in order to secure domestic hostility.

A man of middle age, who sometimes occupied the pulpit, but who was not well up in worldly wisdom, was, sometime since, an applicant for a teacher's certificate. He had not observed that China is sometimes called "The Celestial Empire." When, in the written examination, he found the question, "Who inhabit the Celestial Empire ?" he said to his desk-mate, "Now that question is just in my line." So, spreading out hist elbows till they almost pushed his companion from the seat, he wrote this answer: "The Celestial Empire is inhabited by the angels of God, and by the spirits of just men made perfect." I will say this of his answer: it is good English.

attendance was large, and the occasion resolved itself into a tribute to the character and personality of the head-master.

No doubt some of Dr. Aughinbaugh's boys were there also, and here and there upon the crowded campus was one whose gray hairs and advancing years marked him as a Higbee student. Dr. Irvine or some of his boys may have happened upon one of these old fellows straying around with a sober demeanor and preoccupied air; but all this must not be attributed to feelings of indifference nor as an unfavorable reflection upon present conditions. Scratch a Higbee student and you will find an enthusiastic friend of the new Mercersburg, but on this occasion he may have been only gazing afar off and mingling the joy of the present with pathetic memories of past years at Mercersburg.

Perchance he had wandered back in

memory as far as the time of the genial Dr. Harbaugh, who appreciated as much as any one the home-like and informal life on college hill. After working in the garden or among his fruit trees at south cottage he would sometimes stray over to the north cottage in time for breakfast, and not finding the professor of church history about, would inquire seriously of Mrs. Higbee. "Where is Eliphalet this morning? I never can remember those long names of his." (Dr. Higbee's name was Elnathan Elisha.) From the seminary building across the town to one of the recitation halls there was a short way by a path through the fields. One warm day an industrious student paused under a friendly shade tree along this particular path to compare his lesson in Homer with a few leaves of a docile "pony" that one of his fellow students had kindly loaned him, just for this once. He had no reason to suppose that any one was near to molest him in this not altogether new, but perhaps questionable method of preparing a lesson. Ere long, however, he was startled by a quiet step in the grass, and a familiar voice that said in passing: "Taking the near cut, are you?"

By the time the young Greek scholar had looked up from his work, Dr. Higbee had passed and was on his way to the college. It has been an open question to this day whether the words "near cut" referred to the way of reaching the recitation room or the recitation. Chances were in favor of the latter construction, inasmuch as Dr. Higbee was proverbially far sighted; and this view was further sustained a short time after when the same student visited the president's study and found him playing the flute, with a piece of music stuck in the toe of his boot, as an improvised music rack.

The last year of Mercersburg college was peculiarly trying to teachers and students alike. No one connected with the institution gave it more heroic and self-sacrificing service than Prof. Jacob B. Kerschner. As the holidays approached, the boys, though they loved him well, had mingled considerable mischief with their impatience. A petition, numerously signed, asked that recitations be abandoned a day earlier than usual. This petition had received unfavorable and rather hasty consideration at the hands of the faculty, and the feelings

of resentment took tangible form in repeated thrusts at Prof. Kerschner. Never had Greek prose been so stoutly denounced. The German vocabularies, always poorly rendered, were in these latter days blundered and stumbled through in a way that was simply unbearable. The common verb "dulden" had gone the rounds of the class in fruitless an

less quest of an English equivalent; then

the pale, careworn face of Professor Kerschner dropped upon his hand, and in the most pathetic, discouraged, utterly tired-out tone of voice he exclaimed: "Ich dulde!" (I suffer). The many long years now gone have failed to dim the picture or to dull the meaning of those two soft words so sadly uttered.

Prof. Bretschneider, an eccentric and peculiar product of German university life, was teacher of German at Mercersburg for a short while. His inability to adapt himself to things practical, and his custom of having his beer however and whenever he wanted it, open and above board, gave the faculty some concern, and was so demoralizing to the students that Dr. Higbee was compelled to retire him. The cold weather and imperfect heating facilities worried Prof. Bretschneider very much. He one day came into recitation room with a big telescope in his hand, opened the stove door and gazed through the glass into the stove deliberately for a while. He then announced that he could detect no signs of fire, and that the class would be dismissed for that hour. This was regarded by the students as an imported joke from the Vaterland.

Dr. Higbee was more persistent and practical. Under like conditions one morning, he said: "Boys, we have no fire and nothing at present with which to make one; let us carry these benches out into the campus and turn our backs to the sun." On another occasion while he was lecturing, a cold draft of air from a broken window annoyed him very much. He walked over to the window, stuck his slouch hat into the open place and then proceeded with the lecture.

How the incidents do crowd upon us of this former occupant of north cottagethe scholarly gentleman-the impassioned preacher who in the denunciation of wrong and unbelief could hurl forth the two-edged sentences of scorn and biting sarcasm; and yet in the next moment might allude in child-like sim

plicity to the lilies of the field and the grace and sweetness of childhood as typical of the true, the beautiful and the good!-Cor. Chambersburg Public Opinion.

THE ATHLETIC CULT.

might say on college athletics or celANYTHING that Dr. S. Weir Mitchell

lege life would have value simply because he said it, and his remarks on athletics in modern college life have additional force because everybody must recognize the essential truth of his criticism. Let no one underestimate the value of athletics as a means of recreation and as a method, as Dr. Mitchell says, of making the body sound and of keeping it sound, but the excesses of athletics, the betting, the professionalism, the conversion of so fine a game as football, with its mass plays, into an engine for the infliction of the greatest possible amount of permanent personal injury, and the exaltation of athletics into the aim and end of the college existence, as the one thing needful, receive the deftest and most effective strokes from Dr. Mitchell, who says ironically:

"It is needless to insist on what we missed and what, in consequence, my generation failed to be and to do-it is sadly interesting to speculate on what we might have been-for by this time you must all be aware that, without college athletics, no nation can long survive. Who can doubt that the discipline of the football field must have been terribly missed at the 'Bloody Angle' and on Cemetery Hill?

"We played hard in my college days, but we talked of our sports less than you do. On the other hand, we were enthusiastic concerning the rising literary lights. of Tennyson and Carlyle, and had, as I take it, a keener interest in the intellectual life of the world and of the college than exists to-day."

It is undeniable that athletics do have too large a place in the life and talk" of the college men of to-day. The desperate desire to win has obliterated to a large extent the true sportsmanship, and has had the unhappy result of defeating the very aim of athletic pursuits, which is to afford amusement and healthful exercise to the great body of the students. Under the present system the average student's welfare is largely overlooked,

and the interests of the students and of the college are concentrated on the few in the eleven, on the nine or in the crew. The general student body, which should be taking part in the healthful exercise, concentrates its attention in feverish manner upon the score or so of champions, or would-be champions, who can scarcely be distinguished from the baldest professionals.

Then, too, it should not be forgotten that, after all, the true object of the higher education is to create and strengthen the intellectual life-the things of the spirit; and the exaltation of athletics to-day tends to the exclusion, or total obscuration, of those better and more important things. Fortunately, there is a reaction against the excesses of athletics, and the better colleges and universities are using their influence to abate the evils of which Dr. Mitchell so justly and forcibly complains.-Ledger.

I

BOSTON, APRIL 16, 1813. DEAR AUNT: I am much obliged to you for your kind letter. I mean now to give you an account of what I commonly do in one day, if that is what you meant by givwhat you meant by giving an account of one single day in my life. Friday, 9th, I choose for the day of telling what I did. In the morning I rose, as I commonly do, about five minutes before six. I then help Wm. in making the fire, after which I set the table for prayers. I then call mamma about quarter after six. We spell as we did before you went away. confess I often feel an angry passion start in one corner of my heart when one of my brothers gets above me, which I think sometimes they do by unfair means, after which we eat our breakfast; then I have from about quarter after seven till eight to play or read. I think I am rather inclined to the former. I then go to school, where I hope I can say I study more than I did a little while ago. I am in another book called Virgil, and our class are even with another which came to the Latin School one year before us. After attending this school I go to Mr. Webb's private school, where I write and cipher. I go to this place at eleven and stay till one o'clock. After this, when I come home I eat my dinner, and at two o'clock I resume my studies at the Latin School, where I do

the same except in studying grammar. After I come home I do mamma her little errands if she has any; then I bring in my wood to supply the breakfast room. I then have some time to play and eat my supper. After that we say our hymns or chapters, and then we take our turns in reading Rollin, as we did before you went. We retire to bed at different times. I go a little after eight, and retire to my private devotions, and then close my eyes in sleep, and there ends the toils of the day. . . . Give my love to Aunt Haskins and Aunt Ripley, with Robert and Charles and all my cousins, and I hope you will send me an answer at the first opportunity, and believe me, I remain your most dutiful Nephew,

R. W. EMERSON.

INDEPENDENCE AND INTERDEPENDENCE.

FROM ADDRESS BY DR. TUPPER TO GRADUATES UNIVERSITY OF PENNA.

HERE are two distinct ideas set forth

THERE

in the two succinct texts: "Every one of us shall give an account of himself to God," and "No one of us liveth to himself." We live in an age when, as never perhaps in all the world's history, personality is being lifted up and glorified. We make emphatic the fact that the Gospel individualizes men, developing in each of us the sense and power of individualism. We urge the right and the duty of every human being to possess and to cultivate a deeply wrought personality, a sharply defined, clearly accentuated individuality.

And yet, while all this is true, profoundly and gloriously true, it is equally true that absolute independence is an impossible relation; that the law of intimate connection and mutual dependence binds the whole human family in an inseparable unity. The tragic death back in the years of Sir Robert Peel's daughter, and the more recent failure of the Baring Brothers, indicate how true it is that the law of the text is the law of society, industry, commerce, all human relations. The great lesson of to-day to be learned is the lesson which Lowell impresses in his "Vision of Launfal:"

Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare. Who giveth himself with his alms feeds threeHimself, his hungering neighbor and Me.

And it is one of the glories of our day that this great truth is being gradually apprehended and propagated by thinking

men and women. We are beginning to see, as Maurice puts it so well, that we must either socialize Christianity or Christianize socialism. We are realizing as never before that power is not so much a gift as it is a trust; that to live for others is not so much a gratuity as it is a discharge of a debt. Hence it is that arbitration, and not war, is being emphasized at present; that when Russian barbarity would suppress Semitic liberty all humanity becomes aroused and hurls thunderbolts of indignation; that when Servia's King and Queen are assassinated sorrow comes to all lands.

We are recognizing to-day, as never before, that we are members one of another and debtors one to another; that neither languages nor customs, widely as they may vary, interfere with the strange oneness of communities and nations. Even we of this splendid twentieth century of enlightenment and progress are acknowledging our indebtedness to faraway nations to Rome for the principles that underlie our systems of laws, to Greece for our ideals of art and to Judæa for the inspirations of our highest faith. It is the great truth of universal dependence and interdependence, no man living to himself, no nation living to itself.

It is a fine thought of Jeremy Taylor, the philosophic writer, that every member of the human family holds in his hands the lines of an interminable web work, on which is sustained the future of multitudes of his successors. This must impress all that study the question of heredity. We are each the resultant of ancestors, the product of a thousand factors gone before. Every person present this morning has had within the last twenty-nine generations no fewer than 120,000,000 of direct ancestors, and these have most potentially affected us. Traits of ancestors far back in the years are revealing themselves to-day in our vicious or virtuous tendencies, and in the coming twenty-fifth or thirtieth century of our era, men and women will be maimed in moral fibre because of defects in us, or will reap the benefit of some fine grace of manhood or womanhood which we are striving to develop. It is this that makes life both so awful and so glorious-that no man lives to himself; that to live at all is to be a link in the great chain that binds the whole human race in indissoluble bonds.

And there is need to-day for the con

stant and sympathetic reiteration of this great truth, not only in relation to the individual life, but also in connection with the larger realm of society. Microcosm and macrocosm are strangely one. The whole social fabric, from base to apex, is a compact and finely-knitted organism. Labor and capital are mutually interdependent, and should be harmoniously co operative. Mr. Carnegie cannot run his mills at Homestead without workmen, and workmen cannot pay house-rent without Mr. Carnegie or some other capitalist. The railway magnates cannot operate cars without switchmen and dispatchers, and switchmen and dispatchers cannot support themselves without railway magnates. It is the law of society, of industry, of commerce, of all human relations-the law of intimate connection and mutual dependence.

Young men of the graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania, enter into life with a realization of the great truth of the text, that no man lives to himself. Let there rest upon you as a mantle the spirit of Him who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for others. Seek to actualize the ideal of Charles Kingsley, when he pleads that we "do noble deeds, not dream them all day long," and forget not the ideal of the Quaker poet, when he sings:

Follow with reverent step the good example
Of Him whose whole life was doing good;
So shall the whole world be our Father's temple,
Each loving life a song of gratitude.

The graduates were asked to meditate on the following:

"One of the things that earnest people learn very slowly is that they cannot afford to devote all their time and strength to one work, no matter what it is. Without change and rest and a variety of interests we sap the very sources of our strength and skill. The average man, who is earning a living and counting for something in the life and work of his time, labors too long and too hard. What he needs is frequent respites. Do not be influenced by the chatter about what our grandfathers did, never taking a vacation from one year's end to the other. Of course not. They did not need it. They did not go to their offices daily on a railroad. They had no telegraphs, and, still less telephones. They did not need vacations. They pretty nearly had one all the time. The best of them never

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE.

MERSON was born in what has become one of the busiest sections of Boston; but when the future poet and thinker opened his eyes in this world, on the 25th day of May, 1803, it was in a Congregational parsonage, "in the silence of retirement, yet in the centre of the territory of the metropolis," where, to continue the words of his father,

we may worship the Lord our God." That was the lifelong occupation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it is interesting to note that from the beginning it was singularly free from conventions and forms of every kind. Nature is, to most men, a middle term between God and man; to Emerson it was a common ground over which the Universal Spirit always brooded, and where the openhearted might happen upon inspiring hours. He felt the sublimity of the Psalms of David, and the noble swell of the Te Deum, the ancient hymn which the centuries have sung in antiphonal worship, never left him cold; but his highest thoughts came to him in the broad silence of summer afternoons in the fields, or when the stars kept up the ancient splendor of the wintry heavens. "Boys," Dr. Holmes reports him as saying to two youths who were walking with him as they entered the wood, "here we recognize the presence of the Universal Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d'ye do? How d'ye do? and we have already our hats off and are answering it with our own How d'ye do? How d'ye do? And all the waving branches of the trees, and all the flowers and the field of corn yonder, and the singing brook, and the insect and the bird-every living thing and things we call inanimate, feel the same divine universal impulse while they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the salutation of the Universal Spirit." In the life of the author of "Wood-notes," as in that of the author of the great ode on “Intimations of Immortality," Nature was background so intimately and reverently lived with that the work of both poets was not only colored but penetrated by it.

a

Favorable conditions conspired in Emerson's ancestry, birth and childhood to make him peculiarly sensitive to the influence of star and field and wood, by familiarizing him with the simplest habits (of life, and

contering his interest in the things of the mind. He was a child of a long line of highly educated and poorly paid ministers;

men who had the tastes and resources of scholars, but whose ways of living were as frugal as the ways of the poorest farmers to whom they preached. "We are poor and cold, and have little meal, and little wood, and little meat," wrote his father at the close of his Harvard pastorate and on the eve of his removal to Boston, "but, thank God, courage enough."

The moral fibre of the stock was as vigorous as its life had been self denying and ab. stemious; but it must not be imagined that the long line of ministers behind Emerson were pallid ascetics. When his father was on the edge of death, he wrote to a relative, "You will think me better, because of the levity with which this page is blurred. Threads of this levity have been interwoven with the entire web of my life." This touch of gayety could hardly be called levity; it was, rather, the overflow of a very deep spring in the hearts of a race of men and women who kept their indebtedness to external conditions at the lowest in order that they might possess and use freely the amplest intellectual and spiritual means. Again and again, in the simple but noble annals of the family, whose name was on the college roll in every generation, one comes upon the fruit of this kind of frugality of appetite in the fine use of common things, and, above all, in an intimate sense of access to Nature and the right to draw freely on her resources of beauty and power.

This ancestral heritage of simple fare and good books first comes to light in the little community with which the greatest of the long line of scholars and teachers is so intimately associated that to think of “Nature" and "Wood-notes," is to see Concord lying in quiet beauty in a tranquil New England landscape. There were Emersons in the pulpit in Ipswich and Mendon, but it is upon Peter Bulkeley, grandfather at the seventh remove of Ralph Waldo, that attention rests as typical ancestor. He was descended, one of the oldest of the colonial chronicles tells us, from an honorable family of Bedfordshire; educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, of the rich tone of whose second quadrangle Ruskin spoke with glowing enthusiasm; was given a goodly benefice, but found himself later unable to conform to the services of the English Church; came to New England in 1635, and after a brief stay in Cambridge, "carried a good number of Planters with him up farther into the Woods, where they gathered the Twelfth Church, then formed in the Colony, and call'd the Town by the Name of Concord.”

The pioneer scholar is described as a wellread person, an exalted Christian, who had the reverence not only of his own people, but of all sorts of people throughout the