Thrift.

damaged by an earthquake in 1184. The arena is oval in form, 248 feet in length, and from it rise, one above another, forty-five rows of seats, calculated to have seated 22,000 spectators. The arcades are let to dealers in all sorts of wares, while the interior is still used as an open-air theatre.

This and many other structures of the city are built of Verona marble. The streets of Verona are wide, with four principal squares, richly adorned with bronze and marble statues of celebrated natives of the city, including Pliny the Younger.

There are about forty churches, all of them, in a greater or less degree, celebrated either for their architectural beauty or for the fine paintings which they contain. The most important of these is the cathedral, said to have been built in the time of Charlemagne, the interior of which with its long range of red Verona columns is singularly beautiful and impressive. The church of San Zenone, supposed to date from the ninth century, possesses a beautiful campanile or bell-tower, quite detached from the church and built of alternate courses of brick and marble.

Besides ecclesiastical edifices, Verona contains many magnificent palaces, theatres, hospitals, and other public buildings. It is also celebrated for its dye-works, woollen and cotton factories, and silk mills.

From its vicinity to the Alps the climate of Verona is somewhat cold, but healthy. The floods of the river Adige are tremendous, both from their volume and rapidity, and often do great damage to the district all round the city. The population is upwards of 60,000.

D. B. MCKEAN.

THRIFT.

HE way to happiness is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on three words-frugality, industry, and religion. Make the best use of all three-that is, neglect none. Without industry, frugality, and religion, nothing will do, and with them everything.

Men must prepare in youth and middle age the means of enjoying old age pleasantly and happily. There can be nothing more distressing than to see an old man who has spent the greater part of his life in well-paid-for labour reduced to the necessity of begging for bread, and relying entirely on the commiseration of his neighbours, or upon the bounty of strangers. Such considerations as this should inspire men in early life with a determination to work and save for the benefit of themselves and families in later years.

We measure most things in money, and hence the idea has sprung up that thrift means merely the saving of money. This is by no means the case. Thrift has a far deeper signification. We can be thrifty in the use of all things-time, dress, food, in the management of our strength, in the arrangement of our duties-and, in short, thrift can, and indeed should, underlie the whole of our work. The real aim of thrift must always be not only to teach us how to save, but how to spend. Spending well is far more difficult than simply saving.

IT

OVER THE ORCHARD-FENCE.

seemed to me I wasn't no use out in the field to-day,

I somehow couldn't swing the scythe nor toss the new-mown hay, And so I thought I'd just sit here among the apple-trees,

To rest awhile beneath their shade and watch the buzzing bees.

Well, no! I can't say I'm tired, but I felt that I wanted rest,
To be away from everything seemed somehow to be best;
For every time I go around where there is human kind,
I seem to hunger after what I know I cannot find.

It's sing'lar how in nature the sweet apple-blossoms fall,
The breeze, it seems to know and pick the prettiest of them all;
It's only rugged ones, perhaps, can stand against the blast-
The frail and delicate are made too beautiful to last.

Why, right here in the orchard, among the oldest there,
I had a bright young apple-tree just starting out to bear,
And when the equinoctial storm came tearing 'cross the farm,
It tore that up, while to the rest it didn't do no harm.

Well, how is things in town?
To take it up and down,
see you're looking spry.

And so you've been away a spell?
I reckon it's getting close and hot.
I like the country best. I'm glad to
No! Things don't go just right with me; I scarcely can say why.

Oh, yes! The crop is looking fair, I've no right to complain;
My corn runs well, and I have got a tidy stand of grain;
My hay is almost made, and-Well, yes! Bessy? She's so-so-
She never is as hearty as she ought to be, you know.

The boys? They're in the meadow lot down by the old mill-race;
As fine a piece of grass-ground as I've got upon the place;
It's queer how, when the grass grows up, and gets to looking best,
That then's the time to cut it down. It's so with all the rest

Of things in nature, I suppose. The harvest comes for all
Some day, but I can't understand just why the best fruit fall;
The Lord knows best. He fixes things to suit His own wise laws;
And yet it's curious oftentimes to figure out the cause.

Mirandy? Yes, she's doing well; she's helping mother now
About the house. A likely girl to bake, or milk a cow,
And-No! I'm not half the man I was ten years ago;
But the years will tell upon the best of us, you know.
Another? Yes, our Lizzie was the best one of them all;
Our baby, only seventeen, so sweet, and fair, and tall,
Just like a lily; always good, yet cheerful, bright, and gay-
We laid her in the churchyard, over yonder, yesterday.

That's why I felt I wasn't no use out in the field to-day:

I somehow couldn't swing the scythe nor toss the new-mown hay;
And so I thought I'd just sit here among the trees and rest:

These things come harder when we're old; but then the Lord knows best.

Free Press.

THE HUMAN EYE.

ROM what I know of the structure of lenses and of the human eye, I do not believe that any amount of Evolution, extending through any amount of time, consistent with the requirements of our astronomical knowledge, could have issued in the production of that most beautiful and complicated instrument, the human eye. The most perfect and, at the same time, the most difficult contrivance known, is the powerful achromatic objectglass of a microscope; its structure is the long-unhoped-for result of the ingenuity of many powerful minds, yet in complexity and in pertion it falls infinitely below the structure of the eye. Disarrange y one of the curvatures of the many surfaces, or distances, or densities, or, what is worse, disarrange its incomprehensible selfadaptive power, the like of which is possessed by nothing of human handiwork, and all the opticians in the world could not tell you what is the correlative alteration necessary to repair it, and still less, how to improve it.'-Professor Pritchard.

FOUR FAMOUS ENGLISH FABLERS.

NGLAND can boast a long list of eminent story-tellers; a list, perhaps, more brilliant than any other country can show.

To the minds of our readers the names of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, and others will occur, writers whose delightful works have often beguiled an otherwise weary hour. Many ideal characters created by these princes in fiction land (Dickens especially), are quite as well known and as much believed in as if they had been real. We can hardly fancy that Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller never did live and move, but are mere creations of the cunning artist-pictures and nothing more.

There was a group of novel-writers some century and a half ago, who seem to have been the leaders of this sort of composition. These were, in order of birth, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett. The stories which these men wrote are not much read now-a-days, but they were household words to our great-grandfathers, and often moved those old gentlemen to laughter and tears.

Richardson was born in Derbyshire, of parents in a humble condition. His father had been in some way connected with the unhappy Duke of Monmouth, and was in reduced circumstances, so that the future novelist had to be content with a common village school. But industry and genius made up, as they always will, for this deficiency. His apprenticeship to a printer gave, probably, the turn which his energies were to take, for he often wrote prefaces to the books he printed.

Fielding was a very differently placed man. He was connected with a duke and an earl. He enjoyed the advantages of an Eton education. He was, however, extravagant and poor, and at the age of twenty was compelled to write plays for a piece of bread.

Sterne could boast of an Archbishop of York for a great-grand

Four Famous English Fablers.

father. His own father, however, was a soldier, and Sterne was born at Clonmell, where the regiment was stationed. His early education was much neglected; but he had the good fortune afterwards to be under an excellent master at Halifax, and thence he went to Cambridge and became a clergyman.

Smollett was a Scotchman of good family, and a Glasgow surgeon. The surgery was, however, much neglected for other employments more suited to the bent of his mind; and, after making a voyage as surgeon's mate in a line-of-battle ship, he threw up the profession in disgust, and devoted his energies to satires, plays, and novels.

Richardson's first novel was Pamela. It was wonderfully popular, especially with the humbler folk. Then came Clarissa Harlowe, his crowning work. This soon appeared in a French and German dress, and the author found himself famous over Europe. Sir Charles Grandison is a more tedious book, but it has noble passages in it.

Fielding's reputation as a writer rests on his novels, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. He is more truly the inventor of the modern English novel than Richardson, whose books are more like spun-out French romances. Tom Jones is said to be Fielding's best book. Full of coarse expressions these works are, but in the main they promote morality and virtue.

Sterne's great work is Tristram Shandy. The first volumes of this book were published when the author was about forty-six years of age. They made him a famous man at once. Other volumes succeeded, and he became rich and prosperous. He does not seem to have written any other novel, strictly speaking. His other important work is the Sentimental Journey. He travelled abroad a great deal, and died poor, if not in debt. Tristram Shandy is Tristram Shandy is a very clever novel, full of humour and wit.

Smollett's best novel was his first. It is called Roderick Random. It is coarse and vulgar, and full of laughable incidents. Then came Peregrine Pickle; after which the novelist went to Bath, and set up as Dr. Smollett. Nobody, however, fancying his pills and potions, he returned to London, and resumed the pen, writing the Adventures of Count Fathom, and several other works, among which we may notice the favourite and amusing one of Humphrey Clinker's Expedition. Smollett's novels are hardly suitable for modern readers.

Richardson was by far the best of the four fablers, and his quiet, well-ordered mode of living, was rewarded with affluence and length of days. Twice married, he had five sons and a daughter by his first wife, and five daughters and a son by his second. He was buried in St. Bride's Church.

Fielding died abroad at the early age of forty-seven. He had gone to Lisbon as a last remedy for various ailments. Sterne died in London, aged fifty-seven; and Smollett ended his days near Leghorn in his fifty-first year.

Thus, of the four English fablers, two died in London and two far away from their native land. Richardson was free from vice, and regular in all life's duties. He was, however, rather vain, and somewhat disposed to run down other authors. Fielding was in his earlier years dissipated and extravagant, and his irregular habits sowed the seeds of various disorders which brought him to a comparatively early

Short Sermon.

grave. Sterne, too, was a lover of pleasure and sport, and was what we should now consider unclerical in his habits and pastimes. Smollett was the most boisterous and irritable of the quartette. He was always falling foul of somebody or other. Even in his boyish days he was a writer of satirical verses against his schoolfellows. In after life he abused and ridiculed every one who did not agree with Tobias Smollett, or who offended his vanity.

Our first English novels, then, we owe to four men, none of whom were literary men by profession; Richardson being a printer, Fielding a barrister and justice of the peace, Sterne a Yorkshire parson, and Smollett a Glasgow doctor. G. S. O.

Short Sermon.

BY JOSEPH FOXLEY, M.A., VICAR OF MARKET WEIGHTON,

Acts, xvii. 28.

AND RURAL DEAN.

A LIVING TELEGRAPH.

'In Him we live and move and have our being? ET me begin with a strange story, which has been recently published.

Many years ago a Mrs. Broughton woke her husband one night at Edinburgh, and insisted on telling him what she had seen while she had been awake. First there was a carriage accident, which she did not actually see. She saw, however, the result-a broken carriage, a crowd collected, a person gently raised and carried into the nearest house; and then a person lying on a bed, which person she then knew to be the Duke of Orleans. Gradually friends were gathering round the bed; among them several members of the French royal family, to which the Duke belongedthe French queen, then the king; all silently, tearfully watching the evidently dying Duke. One man (she could see his back, but did not know who he was) was a doctor. He stood bending over the Duke, feeling his pulse, his watch in the other hand. And then all passed away; she saw no more. As soon as it was daylight she wrote down in her journal what she had seen. It was before the days of the electric telegraph, and two or more days passed before the Times newspaper announced the death of the Duke of Orleans. Visiting Paris a short time afterwards, Mrs. Broughton saw and knew the place of the accident, and received an explanation of what she had seen at Edinburgh. The doctor who attended the dying Duke was an old friend of hers; and, as he watched by the bed, his mind had been constantly occupied with her and her family. The reason of this was the extraordinary likeness-a likeness which had often caused amusement-between several members of the Broughton family and members of the French royal family who were present in the room. 'I spoke of you and yours when I got home,' said the doctor, and thought of you many times that evening.'

I suppose it must be five hundred miles from Paris to Edinburgh in a direct line, and yet, if this story is true, here was a