A MATCH BOX.-DISEASES AMONG FISH. A MATCH BOX.-MISS LESLIE. GET a very small tumbler, such an one as is generally sold for sixpence. Cover the outside with fine coloured paper, blue, pink, lilac, or light green, pasted on very smoothly and evenly. When it is dry, paste a border or binding of gold paper round the top or upper edge of the tumbler, and ornament it all over with small sprigs, stars, or spots, cut also out of gilt paper. 63 Then fill the box with paper-matches, and keep it on the mantel-piece. In pasting the colored paper on the tumbler, you can leave a vacant space, which may be occupied by a handsome little engraved picture, bordered with gold. In making matches, cut the paper into long straight narrow slips, an inch or two wide. Fold them two or three times, and stroke them down between your fore-finger and thumb, pressing them very hard with your thumb-nail, so as to make them firm and even. DISEASES AMONG FISH. IT is curious to find that wild animals are sometimes afflicted with disease. Fishes, and even clams and oysters, have occasionally been known to be sickly. In one instance, I have known every body made sick who ate oysters taken from a particular place in the sea. Mr. Eliot, the Indian apostle as he was called, who once lived in Roxbury in Massachusetts, in a letter to a friend, says, that in the year 1670 a great mortality took place among the fish at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, near Boston, in which not less than twenty cart loads of them died. What the cause was, it is difficult to conjecture. You must next have recourse to a color-box for some burnt-umber, and a fine camel's-hair pencil. The umber is a handsome brown color. Rub a little of it on a plate or saucer, and with the camel's-hair pencil trace a dark narrow line close under the lower edge of the gold border, and also along the righthand edge of every one of the spots or sprigs; but on no account continue the dark line round both sides of the gold ornaments, as that will destroy the effect. If properly done, the dark brown shade The sun is called Phoebus, the moon is called on one side of the gold, will make all the ornaments look as if they were relieved or raised from the surface. FINE NAMES FOR FINE THINGS. Phobe, In poems which Herbert will read very soon; A bright blooming damsel is often called Hebe, And Cynthia, too, is a name for the moon. Evening Spring Song. Furnished for this work by LowELL MASON, Professor in the Boston Academy of Music. ـط 1. Soft evening skies are gleaming, Cool streams are freely CET flowing Their murmuring praises sound; How faint the west is b THE Convent of the Great St Bernard leys, carrying trees and crags of rocks before them. is situated near the top of the mountain known by that name, towards one of the most dangerous passes of the Alps, between Switzerland and Savoy. In these regions the traveller is often overtaken by the most severe weather, even after days of cloudless beauty, when the glaciers glitter in the sunshine, and the pink flowers of the rhododendron appear as if they were never to be sullied by the tempest. But a storm suddenly comes on; the roads are rendered impassible by the drifts of snow; the avalanches, which are huge loosened masses of snow or ice, are swept into the val VOL. V. 5 The hospitable monks, though their revenue is scanty, open their doors to every stranger who presents himself. To be cold, to be weary, to be benighted, constitute the title to their comfortable shelter, their cheering meal, and their agreeable converse. But their attention to the distressed does not end here. They devote themselves to the dangerous task of searching for those unhappy persons who may have been overtaken by the coming storm, and would perish but for their charitable succour. most remarkably are they assisted. And They have a breed of noble dogs in memoration of his having saved the their establishment, whose extraordinary lives of twenty-two persons. sagacity often enables them to rescue the traveller from destruction. Benumbed with cold, weary in the search for a lost track, his senses yielding to the stupefying influence of frost, which betrays the exhausted sufferer into a deep sleep, the unhappy man sinks upon the ground, and the snow-drift covers him from human sight. It is then that the keen scent and the exquisite docility of these admirable dogs are called into action. Though the perishing man lie ten or even twelve feet beneath the snow, the delicacy of smell with which they can trace him offers a chance of escape. They scratch away the snow with their feet; they set up a continued hoarse and solemn bark, which brings the monks and laborers of the convent to their assistance. To provide for the chance that the dogs may succeed in discovering the unfortunate traveller, without human help, one of them has a flask of spirits round his neck to which the faint man may apply for aid; and another has a cloak to cover him. These wonderful exertions are often successful; and even where they fail of restoring him who has perished, the dogs discover the body, so that it may be secured for the recognition of friends; and such is the effect of the temperature, that the dead features generallly preserve their firmness for the space of two One of these noble creatures years. was decorated with a medal, in com THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD MORE PERHAPS there is not, my dear girls, a single failing, in the whole catalogue of human errors, that you are more liable to fall into, than that of vanity; and none, surely, more ridiculous. You may safely conclude that every vain person is a silly person, for, instead of being proud that we excel others, we should be humble that so many excel us. It may be said that every person is in a degree vain; but we must not excuse our errors because they are generally practised: for, depend upon it, however common vanity may be, it is much better to be humble, for there are people in the world more clever than we are. Never shall I forget my vanity when I was a young girl and at school. My schoolmistress was very old, and could scarcely see. Several of us were engaged in working samplers. The best sampler was to be entitled to a prize; and I was quite determined that mine should outdo those of my schoolfellows. My letters were done in marking stitch, in all the colours of the rainbow. I had a border an inch broad, full of eyelet holes, and as gay as a tulip. At every corner was a green yew-tree, and a parrot with a bunch of cherries in its mouth; and at the bottom was worked in large letters made my green yew-trees, my parrots, and cherries, half as big again as theirs: and my sampler looked so gay, that I felt sure it must be the very best in the school. My vanity was extreme, for I could talk of nothing but my sampler; and I showed it, when about half done, to a few around me. At last our tasks were finished, and our grand specimens of needlework were given to the old lady to decide which was best, when, to my dismay, it appeared that one of my schoolfellows, more cunning than myself, having seen the size of my yewtrees, parrots and cherries, had made "This Sampler is the Work of Barbara her's still larger than mine. Our old Newbury. When house and land are gone and spent, Then learning is most excellent." I had stolen a glance at some of the samplers of my schoolfellows, and in order to make sure of outdoing them, I schoolmistress looked the samplers over, one by one, and decided poor thing! in favor of the one she could see the plainest: so that my cunning schoolfellow got the prize, and I was deservedly punished for my vanity. |