evening. I must begin to thinkCharles! lend me your watch for five minutes. It is seventeen minutes to eleven. Well, I will begin at the quarter.' O improbabilities; much better to make the most of the means one has. Scotch Betty had a common saying about a woman who took what she had, and she never wanted; old Betty made it an excuse for slovenliness, and putting things to a wrong use; but it has a good meaning too.' O, what an odd-looking man! his whiskers are almost like a beard; and such strange clothes! Charles, Charles, come here, and look at him; he is almost worth sketching. 'He is odd-looking; but it is rather rude in you to stare at him,' said Charles, after looking through the window for a moment. 'O, he is coming to our inn,' continued William, 'I wonder who or what he can be. The butcher has just run into the grocer's shop, and they seem to be both talking and laughing about him. Ah, that dog! the butcher sees him, but too late. A whole liver is dragged away through the mud; you had better have minded your shop, Mr Butcher. Well now, I am almost as bad; it is now only seven minutes to eleven. How much time I have lost! and I fear I have been rude and ill-natured. My uncle spoke about improving in habits and tempers. I fear I have got a bad habit of laughing at other people's oddities. It is also a bad habit to waste time. I have heard of a famous scholar, who was afterwards a bishop, and who beat all the other scholars at college, in all the branches of study by never wasting any odd minutes. I am a sad waster; I wish I had a saveall for ends of time. No! this is not to be done by any machine, but by getting into a right habit-that of wishing for 'Temper and knowledge, my uncle said!-my temper is too impatient-yes, I am sure it is! Have I been thinking for five minutes? O yes, for twelve, it appears. Well then, I will do something; now I will seek a book, and sit down till dinner-time.' The book he found was a Virgil, and he read and committed to memory the lines in the sixth Æneid, where the great men of Rome are mentioned. While he was engaged with The stern Torquatus with his bloody axe, Charles rang the bell to order dinner. 'Pray, sir,' said the waiter, after he had received directions for mutton chops and gooseberry tarts at three, are you or the other young gentleman able to speak French or German?' 'I cannot speak French,' said Charles gravely. I can only read it.' The waiter stared, thinking it was much easier to speak English than to read it; but William started up briskly, and said, 'I know French; what is wanted with it?' 'An old gentleman, sir, has been trying to make us understand him; but we cannot make any thing out; and he will not attend to any thing we say, though I STORY OF THE LOST DAY. spoke as loud as ever I could. The poor old soul has been walking never so long in the traveller's room, making such odd faces, and seeming so tired, it grieves one to see him; but he will neither rest nor eat till he finds somebody to speak to, and this being holiday time the schoolmasters are all out of town.' Charles smiled to see the eagerness with which William bustled away to put his knowledge of French to the proof. 'I think your going will be of little use, William; the old man will find the interpreter the harder to understand of the two; but if you cannot make noise and confusion enough, you can call me in; the waiter spoke of German, and you know I have learned the German verbs.' 'Well, Charles, one can at least fail after trying; and if one can be of any use-' Ay, said Charles to himself, William with all his impatience is often more useful than I am. I feel that I ought to be more forward in trying to do good, and less distrustful of my own powers. Perhaps I am too much afraid of the shame of failure to make the trial; this is very wrong, but I hope it will go off as I grow older. Poor William found it far more difficult to understand the foreigner than he had expected. The old gentleman seemed so harassed and affected, that he could only utter hurried broken exclamations and questions, in which the boy in vain endeavored to recognise intelligible words and phrases. William, who could only 37 express himself in French very slowly, had great difficulty in arresting his attention, and the more puzzled he looked, the more urgent and continued the Frenchman's complaints and interrogatories became. His gesticulations and inarticulate sounds, which plainly showed his anxiety and vexation, seemed for a long time the only means by which his sentiments could be communicated to the young interpreter. William, after a time, thought they might understand one another better in writing; and taking up a pen he wrote on a card a request that the stranger would explain his wishes in the same way. The old man's eyes glistened as he read the words, and paper being procured he wrote in a small hurried hand the inquiries which he wished to have answered. Here again William seemed as much at fault as ever; the writing was so cramped and blotted, the words so abbreviated and strangely spelt, that at first he hardly knew whether the language were French or not. By degrees however he learnt, as the old man became more tranquil, to pronounce the words he had written, singly and as distinctly as he could; and it appeared that the stranger was inquiring for a daughter, who was governess of the house of the prefect of the county of York, and lived three leagues from Ripon. From the landlord of the inn William now learnt, that a gentleman who had been high sheriff two years before lived between eight and nine miles from Ripon, in the very neighborhood of the fine wa- are sitting very quiet, and looking very terfall they had that day intended to visit, grave-what lessons have you learnt toand that he had a French lady governess day?” to his daughters. This information being translated into French, and put on paper, gave great pleasure to M. Querault, who, after abundance of unintelligible thanks to William, ordered by his means a conveyance to the house where he expected to find his daughter, and set off furnished by his kind interpreter with questions written on cards, that he might have no further difficulty in making his wishes understood by the Yorkshiremen. When Charles and William met their uncle in the evening, he kindly invited them to give an account of their employment during the day. William confessed that he had been much to blame in fretting about the rain in the morning, as he had found much more pleasure in having been the means of getting the old French gentleman out of his difficulties than he could have derived from seeing the finest cataract in the world. He looked so delighted,' continued William, 'grinning and bowing and clasping his hands, when he was fairly seated in the chaise, sure of soon meeting his dear daughter. I hope I have learned that no day should be called lost before it is come to a close; and even if the stranger had not been here I might have spent my time both pleasantly and profitably, either in learning more of Virgil, or reading the Bible, or some other of the books in my bag.' I have found out,' replied the boy, that my backwardness is very wrong, and that it prevents me from being of use when I might have been. Though I am generally better able to translate French than William, I made no attempt to assist him; and if he had not been in the way the old man might have been left to talk unintelligibly to the waiter without my making any attempt to help him. This I think must be wrong, and I suppose I ought to correct it; but my hope is that as I grow older, this mauvais honte may wear off.' "Do you find it wearing off?" said the uncle. “Were you less frank when you were William's age than you are now, Charles ?” 'No, uncle, I think I was then more inclined to ask questions, and to talk, and so put myself forward. I have since learned to know better, and to be more modest and diffident.' "Humility and modesty are very excellent qualities; but bashfulness more frequently proceeds from pride than real modesty; and such bashfulness we must resolutely struggle against, and do all we can to root out the pride which causes it. This, my dear Charles, I hope you will try to do, for it is never too early to set about removing bad habits and acquiring right ones." 'But, uncle,' said William, is it of Well, Charles,” said the uncle, “you much consequence to be precise about tri STORY OF THE LOST DAY. fles? If one be only right at heart, and kind and well-disposed, is not that of far more importance ?' "You cannot yet have learnt, at your Trifles make the sum of human things, 39 M. Querault had brought for William ; it was written in that gentleman's name, but evidently as William declared, not in his hand-writing, and contained, with many expressions of thanks for the timely assistance which had enabled him to find his daughter, an invitation to view the grounds round Mr D's seat, which were very beautiful, but not in general open to strangers. It may be easily understood that our friends availed themselves of this permission, and visited at the same time the waterfall in the neighborhood, which was rendered much finer than usual by the heavy rain which had fallen the day before. William declared that he had seldom made a greater mistake than when he pronounced it a lost day,' and Charles said that he hoped he should always remember the kind advice he then receiv ed, and the resolutions which he had formed in his own mind; in that case, far from proving a lost day, he should find it one of the most valuable of his 'But surely,' continued William, 'grown up men do not feel the same awkwardness and backwardness that boys and young people do? I always thought that they were quite above such difficulties, and that it then could make very little difference how one had felt when a child.' "There, William, you were decidedly under a mistake; vulgar, insolent children very seldom grow up into polite, well-bred men. Children who are passionate and domineering will find the same ill-tempers a plague to themselves and their friends in after life. In the same way, shyness and want of openness generally increase rather than diminish life.' as men grow older." 'I hope to remember this,' said Charles, and will certainly try for the future to be more ready to exert myself.' "That is right; we certainly ought to do all we can to assist others, and add to their happiness; we must all be aware, with very little reflection, how much we have been obliged by the kind assistance of friends." The waiter now entered the room with a note, which the postillion who drove |