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with a psaltery, a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them, and they shall prophesy. And the Spirit of the Lord will coine upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them." Many other instances might be cited of this union of music and prophecy. But perhaps the most striking example of the custom practised by the prophets of tranquilizing their minds, and exciting in themselves divine inspiration, by means of music, is in the 2nd Book of Kings. The three sovereigns of Israel, Judah, and Edom, marching with their armies through a wilderness, were all upon the point of being destroyed by thirst, as there was no water to be found in their passage either for man or beast.

"And the King of Israel said, Alas! that the Lord hath called these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab. But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the Lord, that we may enquire of the Lord by him? And one of the King of Israel's servants answered and said, Here is Elisha, the son of Shaphat."

In this extremity they had recourse to the prophet of Israel, the son of Shaphat, and went down to him. And Elisha said, "Bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him, and he said, Thus saith the Lord, Make this valley full of ditches:" &c. "The Chaldean paraphrase," says Burney, derstands by prophesying, adoring God and singing praises unto him."

(To be continued.)

THE EARLY CHRISTIANS.

BY MARY CHEETHAM,

They knelt beneath the purple arch
Of Heaven, far overhead;
And like the bright victorious march
Of hosts, the stars were spread;
And from their nightly solitude,
Watching o'er earth and seas,
Beheld the people's prayerful mood,
Immortal witnesses!

The patient eloquence of wrong,
Of spirits sternly tried

In daily martyrdom so long,

And known to none beside

Was it not poured, at that still time,
Upon the ear of heaven,
When suffering was past its prime,
And the full heart was shriven?

The sword was on the pleasant hearth,
Their homes were desolate;

The brightness that had walked the earth
In dust and ashes sate!

Did not a bitterness like death,
Beneath that midnight sky,
O'ermaster hopefulness and faith
With its appealing cry?

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Heard not the sacred Syrian air

A murmur of lament,

Of pale and passionate despair

All human sufferings blent? Were there no restless hearts, that bowed Beneath the cross they bore, And sicken'd in the present cloud For quiet days of yore?

There was no sorrow in the sound
Of their rejoicing hymn-
The breath of Faith, whose echo found
Response from Cherubim !

The solemn strains, whose anthem rose
On Syria's lonely hills,

Till earth's divinest spots are those
That its calm music fills!

"For the love untiring

Life amid the dead-
For the strong aspiring

That thy love hath shed-
For the peace unspoken,
Limitless and free-
For the heart unbroken
By its work for Thee,

We bless thee, O our God!

"For the path of trial

Where thou erst hast led,
Through sorrows and denial
Those thy spirit fed-
For the glory given

To the head unbowed,
For the light of Heaven
Shining through the cloud,
We bless thee, O our God!"

Not the strong cry of human woes,
Echoed from race to race,
Blighting earth's beautiful repose
With an unseemly trace-
Not the deep voice of sin and wrong,
Of crime, and blood, and death,
Could silence the immortal song
Of an immortal faith!

It was that small and trampled band
Sought out of man's deep hate,
That reared a standard in the land
For truth inviolate:

And in the shadows that fell cold
Upon their pilgrim way,
Unmurmuringly their hands could fold,
Beside the grave, and pray.

Their blood has sunk in eastern plains, Their ashes found no bed;

The shadowy grass has kept no stains From them inherited.

The church is robed and crowned to-day; And shall her sons forget

That on the faith of such as they

Her pillared weight is set?

August 28th, 1848.

7

THE EMBROIDERED HANDKERCHIEFS.

BY MRS. ABDY.

A small evening party had assembled in the pretty little drawing-room of Mrs. Hatfield, a widow of a certain age. The locality was in Bloomsbury; consequently the guests were not denizens of what Jean Paul Richter denominates "the cold Mont Blanc of aristocratic life," but they were just as heartless and selfish as if they had been born and bred in May Fair. They were talking with great animation and eagerness on a subject of unusual interest.

Alice Dorien and Charles Cranfield were the friends of half the persons in the room, and the intimate acquaintance of the rest. Alice Dorien and Charles Cranfield had been engaged for three months; the wedding-day had been fixed; lawyers and milliners had done their best in their behalf, and now--the engagement was suddenly, strangely, inexplicably broken off, and Alice Dorien and Charles Cranfield "desired to be better strangers!" No wonder, then, that words flowed free and fast; no wonder that the whist-tables were unoccupied, and that the chessmen stood in undisturbed possession of their snug quiet squares. One very deaf old bachelor, indeed, silently laid hold of a pack of cards, and ostentatiously and repeatedly shuffled them; but when he found that no notice was taken of his manœuvre, he resigned himself to the absence of sympathy, drew his chair to the card-table, and speedily became absorbed in the "pleasing perplexities" of Patience.

Had any ostensible reason been assigned for the quarrel of the lovers-had they differed in opinion about pin-money, pug-dogs, or the Polka, the subject would have gradually worn itself dry, and the four aces would have come in for their customary share of attention; but the mystery was as puzzling to solve as the deepest of conundrums or most contradictory of charades. Alice Dorien and Charles Cranfield were both remarkable for placidity and evenness of temper; they never quarrelled with other people; why, then, should they quarrel with each other? It could not be that there was any difficulty about the marriage-settlement," said the lady of the house, seizing upon the most popular cause of broken engagements; it was drawn by Mr. M'Tavish, of Chancery-lane, and signed and witnessed last Thursday. I had this fact from undoubted authority. Mr. M'Tavish's nephew by marriage is intimate with a gentleman who is paying his addresses to my first cousin."

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"What could an engagement possibly go off about, if it did not go off about money matters?" said a wrinkled, eager-looking old man, who had been privately sketched by an intimate friend in the character of Arthur Gride in Nicholas Nickleby!

"Perhaps it went off about some love dispute,"

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said a very young girl hesitatingly; "perhaps Mr. Cranfield was jealous, and thought that Miss Dorien showed some preference for a favoured rival."

"Why," said her father, a plain downrightlooking man, "I must say that I never saw anything in Miss Dorien's manner that could excite a lover's jealousy; I think she was a model to all young ladies in the prudence and propriety of her deportment."

"Did you never, Mr. Jameson," said a lady next him, "hear a song which sets forth how a young lady may contrive to

Peep through the sticks of her Indian fan,
And flirt on a quiet plan'?

"Well," said Mrs. Hatfield, "quiet coquetry is my abhorrence; I like a flirtation, I acknowledge, but I like it to be carried on in an honest, open, undisguised way."

Mrs. Hatfield had propounded such a selfevident fact, that her guests could not do otherwise than express an unqualified assent to it.

"But," said Miss Jameson," who appeared to take a deep interest in the subject, "nobody can tell us on which side the engagement was broken off. Why do you not speak, Mary Moreton? you are an intimate friend of Alice Dorien's, and I dare say can tell us more about the affair than any one else.".

Mary Moreton had not hitherto mingled in the conversation for two reasons-she really liked Alice, and therefore had no pleasure in talking over the details of her desertion; and she had for some time been carrying on a covert attack on the heart of the deaf old bachelor, who was a man of considerable property; she had therefore drawn her chair in loving propinquity to his own, and was watching in apparently deep interest the progress of his first game of Patience. "I am enabled," she said, “to assure you that the fault was entirely on the side of Mr. Cranfield. Alice Dorien has always conducted herself in the most exemplary manner, and she cannot recall to her mind even the shadow of a dispute with her lover. Yesterday morning Mr. Dorien received a short note from Mr. Cranfield, saying that he was convinced the dispositions and tastes of Miss Dorien and himself were so dissimilar that nothing but unhappiness could be expected in an union, and that he therefore considered that for the sake of both parties it was better to part for ever."

And Mary Moreton, having delivered her short speech, turned round to the card-table just in time to condole with the deaf old bachelor on the loss of his game of Patience.

"I never could have supposed such a thing of Cranfield," said Mr. Jameson. "I should

have imagined him much too well principled to have done anything without a good reason."

"Perhaps there may have been a good reason for his conduct," said Mrs. Hatfield. "I have heard of matches going off because insanity has been discovered in a family. I always thought there was something very particular in Alice Dorien's eyes."

"Particular brightness and beauty, I allow," said Mr. Jameson.

"After all," said the old man who resembled Arthur Gride, “it appears to me that none of you have hit on the real reason which has caused the marriage to go off."

"What is it?" exclaimed a general chorus, all evidently hoping that a ray of light was about to penetrate the dim obscurity of Mr. Cranfield's inconstancy.

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"The young women of the present day," said the old miser, are noted for their extravagance; many a worthy man has been ruined by the expenditure of his wife. Doubtless, Mr. Cranfield saw evidences of a wasteful disposition in Miss Dorien, and wisely thought that he would escape the danger of peeping through prison bars for the greater part of his natural life."

A silence ensued; little of kindness or good feeling existed in the party; but even they could not find out the remotest cause for accusing Alice Dorien of extravagance.

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"I must say," remarked Mrs. Hatfield reluctantly, that Alice Dorien managed her father's house prudently and economically; 1 think she understands the value of money."

the hand of wastefulness would soon scatter and

annihilate.

Usually speaking, men in the middle class of life do not entertain any particular apprehension of extravagant wives, because, in that line of society, extravagance is by no means a common vice, and many a man has passed through life blessed with a mother who piques herself on the smallness of her weekly bills; a wife who, although, like Mrs. Gilpin," on pleasure bent," like her, possesses "a frugal mind;" and daughters who turn their dresses, revive their ribbons, and walk on foot to little friendly parties; till, satisfied with the prudent management of his own "womankind," he quite forgets that there are any families extant, where it appears to be the sole part of the wife to squander, and that of the husband to withhold. Such, however, had not been the blissful ignorance of Cranfield; his mother had been a pretty, elegant, sweet tempered girl, who had suffered under the misfortune of being adopted by a rich, fashionable aunt with a large life-income. At the death of her aunt she became the wife of a man of moderate property, quite ignorant of the duties that she was undertaking, quite unconscious of the kind of life on which she was entering; she was thoroughly oblivious of the simplest doctrines of ways and means; in short, she laboured under a kind of monomania which made her believe that an income of eight hundred a year was fully competent to provide carriages, parties, watering-place visits, an elegant house, full of well-trained servants, jewellery, millinery, and various other necessaries of life. She acted on this principle till she drove her husband to the perilous step of selling out part of his capital, a financial operation which she was not in the slightest degree able to comprehend. She died when her son was twenty years of age, her husband soon followed her to the grave, and Cranfield's birthright of eight hundred a year was reduced to less than a fourth of that sum. He had been too fondly attached to his gentle and affectionate mother to deem her a peculiar example of folly and prodigality; he made up his mind that extravagance was the besetting sin of women, and when his legal gains, conjoined with the interest of his little independence, enabled him to begin "a search for a wife," he felt that he should be almost as difficult to be suited as Celebs in a similar quest. When he Clever conjectures, like many other things in was introduced to Alice Dorien, he was not only this world, do not always meet at the time with delighted with her accomplishments and amiathe appreciation they deserve; everybody had bility, but thoroughly satisfied with the prudence repelled the idea that Cranfield could possibly of her character. I have shown that even her have broken off his engagement on account of particular friends could not utter a depreciating Alice Dorien's extravagance, but yet such was word when her abilities for thrift and manageindeed the case; such was the solution of the ment were canvassed in their presence; and mystery; such was the "blue chamber" to Cranfield, who thoroughly agreed with Dr. which the uninitiated had hitherto been denied Fordyce that "economy in a wife is the surest a free admission. Cranfield, from a very early way to rivet the affections of a husband," properiod of life, had felt a perfect horror of extra-posed, was accepted, and revelled in happy vagant women; he was in the law, and his small patrimonial fortune and moderate professional gains amounted to an income which, prudently managed, would secure every comfort, but which

"And she dresses with a good deal of taste and very little expense," added little Miss Jameson.

Mary Moreton, who had just enticed the deaf old bachelor into a game of Piquet, gave brief but decided evidence, between the deals, that Alice Dorien was an excellent accountant and admirable manager; and the miser's conjecture having thus completely fallen to the ground, nobody seemed disposed to hazard a new one, and the company soon separated. Some of them dreamed that night about faithless lovers and forsaken maids; the deaf old bachelor dreamed of piques, repiques, and ear-trumpets; and Mary Moreton dreamed of playing a long protracted game of Patience, which she won at last, the stake for which she played being a plain gold ring!

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anticipations of carefully disbursed sovereigns, and regularly receipted weekly bills. Alice's little fortune was secured to herself; her modest and tasteful trousseau was provided, the pretty

presents of her friends and relations were received and admired, and so happy was she that she forgot to lament over one solitary cause of dissatisfaction.

Alice had a distant_kinswoman-a rich old lady, who had given her many wax dolls and picture-books in her childhood, and work-boxes and annuals in her girlhood, but who had never taken notice of her for the last two years, because Alice had thought proper to refuse a greyhaired, ill-tempered invalid, thrice her own age, who, in consequence of possessing a town and country house, and two carriages, had obtained the favour and recommendation of the aforesaid old lady. Alice had written to her, telling her of her intended marriage, and hoping for a kind answer, or perhaps (for human nature will be human nature still) hoping for a present, but neither letter nor present arrived. A week, however, before the day appointed for the wedding, Mrs. Rebecca Dorien, either inspired by benevolence or ostentation (for charity's sake we will hope the former), sent a few lines of congratulation to the bride-elect, accompanied by an enclosure of a fifty pound note, requesting that she would expend it in the purchase of any wedding present most agreeable to her own taste. Cranfield anxiously waited to notice how Alice would employ this unexpected donation. Alice had hitherto been an economist; but then her father's income was small, and the money allotted for her trousseau very moderate; it remained to be seen how she would act when a sum that must to her appear a large one was unexpectedly placed at her command. I would not have my readers suppose that Cranfield, with all his veneration for pounds, shillings, and pence, expected his affianced one to purchase her wedding gift into the savings' bank; but he certainly expected that it would be laid out in something of tangible value, something that might descend to a future generation as a mark of Mrs. Rebecca Dorien's solitary act of generosity to her young kinswoman. Two days elapsed; Alice had mentioned nothing relative to the fifty pounds, and Cranfield at length resolved to inquire whether she had expended it.

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| the Moravians themselves were unequal to such an undertaking-it must have been the work of the fairies! So would a lady spectator have said; but men are singularly indifferent to the niceties of satin-stitch and eyelet-holes; and Cranfield, so far from giving way to any raptures on the beauties of these works of art, exclaimed with a look of mingled dismay and derision, "And do you actually mean to say that you gave a fifty-pound note in exchange for these two pieces of tortured cambric, which would have been dear at as many shillings?"

Alice faltered forth an affirmative, and Cranfield was about keenly to denounce her folly and extravagance, when morning visitors were announced, and the disenchanted lover hastily returned to his apartments, feeling truly grateful that he was the solitary possessor of them. It would have been impossible for Alice to have laid out fifty pounds more to the dissatisfaction of her admirer: he spoke truly and candidly, not under the influence of momentary irritation, when he said that he considered fine needlework as nothing better than a means of torturing cambric. Then too, he reflected that the flimsy fabrics, scarcely more substantial than the banknote which had been exchanged for them, would not long remain even as they were; they would be surrendered to the tender mercies of the laundress, dropped on staircases at crowded parties, and perhaps, horror of horrors! replaced from his own limited income. Yes, it was clear that extravagance was the natural characteristic of Alice; it had lain dormant for want of circumstances calculated to develop it, but it had now burst forth with additional force from having been so long kept under restraint; doubtless the mornings of Alice's married life would be spent at Howell and James's, and her evenings in the gay scenes where she might exhibit her ruinous purchases. Cranfield, to do him justice, was benevolent and kind-hearted, and his economical habits had never prevented him from relieving the wants of the poor to the full extent of his means. Had Alice, seduced by an Utopian advertisement, bestowed her fifty pounds on a newly founded charitable asylum; or had she even, in the effervescence of youthful credulity, given it to a begging-letter impostor, Cranfield would have admired her generosity, although he might have wished to have seen it exercised on a smaller scale; but could anything be more utterly, more contemptibly selfish than the purchase she had made? Othello himself was not more haunted by the fatal vision of a handkerchief than was Cranfield; his dreams that night constantly depicted to him Alice employed in the act of dissolving pearls in vinegar, and lighting tapers with bank notes, and in the Alice left the room, and after wearying Cran-morning he resolved on sending to Mr. Dorien field's patience by her protracted stay, she returned, bearing with her a sheet of tissue paper, from whence she drew two of the most exquisitely embroidered cambric handkerchiefs that had ever figured in a ruination shop! The accurately raised satin-stitch leaves, the delicate eyelet-holes, the highly-wrought tendrils surely

"I laid it out this morning," replied Alice, with more uncertainty and timidity of manner than was natural to her; for, although perfectly modest, she was generally collected and selfpossessed.

"And you laid it out in something very elegant and ingenious, I have no doubt," said Cranfield gallantly.

"In something very elegant and ingenious?" echoed Alice, looking exceedingly embarrassed. "May I not hope to have the pleasure of seeing your purchase?" asked her lover.

the letter of which the substance was related by Mary Moreton at Mrs. Hatfield's party.

Mr. Dorien, fond of his daughter, and proud of her, lavished divers uncomplimentary epithets on Cranfield, and said that "his insolent letter was not worth the honour of a reply," and that "it would be best to treat him with silent con

tempt." Alice Dorien shed bitter tears in private, but she had much quiet self-control; she exerted herself to seem cheerful and composed before her father and friends, and in a few weeks the sudden and dangerous illness of her kind father gave her a legitimate cause for sorrow, and she felt that it would be lawful to appear publicly with red eyes without giving her own little world room to assert that her heart was breaking under the infliction of her willow garland.

Two years had elapsed since these events; Alice Dorien had lost her father after an illness of some months' duration, through which she had attended on him with the most patient and unremitting devotion. After his death, which did not affect her pecuniary resources, she | complied with the request of some relatives, that she would take up her abode in the retired and beautiful country village where they resided.

Cranfield still remained unmarried, yet he was very tired of his single blessedness, and had made several ineffectual attempts to fall in love, but none of the objects of his pursuit presented such a combination of attractions as Alice Dorien had done. Economical housewives did not touch the piano, accurate accountants | did not care for picture galleries, and the students of cookery books were quite at fault in talking of the modern poets and novelists. Accomplished, elegant girls were as plentiful as roses in summer; but although all of them were evidently capable of spending an income, none of them seemed properly versed in the way of economizing it. When Cranfield heard of the death of Mr. Dorien, he fully imagined that Alice, after giving a few months to seclusion, would start upon the world in the character of a dashing fashionable, spending the capital of her little fortune in a twelvemonth, and either ensnaring some wealthy dolt at the end of it, or retiring into obscurity, perhaps as the pensioner of the rich spinster whose fifty pound present had developed the latent extravagance of her

nature.

About a year and a half after Mr. Dorien's death, Cranfield met with an old friend of his childhood, whom he had not seen for many years, and who it appeared was residing with his family in the same village as Alice Dorien. Cranfield inquired after her, but merely as he would have done of a common acquaintance, and his friend (an old married man, and therefore an impartial judge) spoke of her in the highest terms; her goodness, steadiness, consistency of character, self-denial, and kindness to the poor, rendered her, he said, a pattern to all young women. Cranfield heard this character in silent surprise; such indeed was the Alice Dorien of former days, but the embroidered handkerchiefs-those tremendous, although tiny ensigns of prodigality, seemed perpetually to unfold themselves and wave before his startled sight; true, they appeared to be a solitary instance of extravagance, but then should not this transgression have been followed by repentance? |

Why had not Alice written to him, confessed her fault, and "taken the shame with joy"?

About this time, Cranfield received a letter from a friend of his own age, a young clergyman who had lately become a married man, and was all anxiety to introduce to Cranfield the model of feminine perfection in the person of his wife. "She had not wealth, or position in society," he wrote; "she occupied the station of an humble companion when I first met with her; but my income is sufficient for every moderate comfort of life, and my dear Isabel is a paragon of good management and frugality; come and stay a few days with me, and judge for yourself of the attractions of my pretty vicarage and delightful wife." Cranfield accepted the invitation; he was desirous of again seeing Darnley, and felt an instinctive persuasion that he should like his chosen Isabel. His expectations were fully realized; Isabel was not only lady-like, sensible and prudent, but although far inferior to Alice in personal charms, there was something in her manner and deportment which seemed to recall the latter to his mind.

Cranfield, since the adventure of the embroidered handkerchiefs, had felt an increased dislike for the "busy idleness" of fancy work. Isabel, during the first three days of his visit, was engaged in working for a poor family, and her employment met with his cordial approbation; but the homely garments were at length finished and sent away, and Isabel produced an elegant little work-box, and drew forth from it a delicately filmy and elaborately ornamented piece of cambric. Cranfield looked at it; the satin-stitch leaves and miniature eyelet-holes awakened painful associations in his mind. Isabel was working a handkerchief very similar to those purchased by the imprudent Alice!

"Perhaps, Mr. Cranfield," said Isabel, “you will think that I am wasting my time in this minute and tedious work (Cranfield allowed her supposition to pass uncontradicted), but to embroider a handkerchief must always be a tempting occupation to me, since I connect the idea of it with the most interesting period of my life."

"How so?" inquired Cranfield listlessly, supposing that Isabel was about to tell him of the brilliant success of some of her exquisite needlework at a charity bazaar.

"I feel much inclined to tell you the story," said Isabel, "for it is a pleasing though a sad one."

Somewhat relieved by hearing that it was to be a sad one, Cranfield expressed his thankfulness, and Isabel proceeded.

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Family troubles can have little interest for a stranger, and I will therefore briefly say that the death of my father left my mother and myself entirely dependent on a small income ceasing with her life, quite insufficient for even the moderate wants of two persons. My mother's health became impaired; she wrote to a rich uncle, requesting his assistance; he enclosed her a bank-note of small value, and hinted that it would be desirable if I were to seek for some means of maintaining myself. This I could not

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