as the days of Virgil was accepted as a sure concomitant of spring, and all the rest, in its first and tenderest green, looked indeed very good, seen through the silver-like haze of that fair morning.

I do not suppose our labourers thought much of all this though. Theirs was no position for sentiment, and their task was only a rough reality, to hew down one of the largest trees in the wood. But they set about it cheerfully and thankfully, as that which would bring bread for their children. When the trunk was rather more than half sawn through, just enough being left untouched to support it for awhile, they sat down to eat their dinners upon a mossy bank close by, on which the violets were very thickly clustering. beautiful to adorn an open grave. momentary whisper in the topmost boughs of the tree; then two or three leaves fell; the poor men saw it, and started to their feet; but already it had bowed and shivered, and with one awful crack it fell upon them both.

Flowers too There was a

"If the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north; in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be." Words significant alike of it and of them. The one was taken up dead, the other with the life so crushed out of him, that he died soon after in our Infirmary.

"From sudden death, good Lord, deliver us,"

meets a responsive echo in the depths of each heart; we connect something awful, even judicial, with an instantaneous, or a violent death. And survivors cling so desperately to the "last words" of the dying, as if there went virtue out of them, that these have come to be regarded as a necessary part of every religious biography, without which the rest would seem fragmentary and unsatisfying. However, it is remarkable what small account the Bible makes of the mode of any one's death. Some of its brightest characters died by violent, or as we should call them, horrible deaths. Huldah, the prophetess, foretold to Josiah that he should come to his grave "in peace;" and yet, strangest of paradoxes, he met a bloody death in battle! And of those who died, as we phrase it, "peacefully in their beds," some, like David, pass before us in something very like the dotage of old age. There are no death-bed scenes-no halo round the setting sun; and beautiful as the wish is, it was no prophet of the Lord who uttered it, "Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his." For not by momentary flashes of the expiring lamp shall we be judged, nor may we judge others; and therefore, putting far from us all heathenish notion of vengeance in connection with such as "those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell," may we pray in

the words of a Liturgy still older than our own, "From sudden and unprovided death, good Lord, deliver us." Living, or dying, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit;" and then certainly it will be all right, all just as it should be, whatever be the mode of our departing, in whatever manner we be taken home, whether by sickness we die the common death of all men, or be carried away as it were by a whirlwind into heaven.

There is a solitary spot in one corner of our churchyard, under the dank shadow of a tree, the knotted roots of which run below the road. It looked so cold and dark that no one would lie there, nor lay their friends underneath it. But now, by a sort of instinct, it was chosen as the fittest resting place for the two who had perished; and when, under its most sorrowful shadow, we think pitifully of them, still more earnestly do we repeat the petition for ourselves, "From unprovided death, good Lord, deliver us!"

CHAPTER IV.

AN EARLY ROSE.

Oh say not, dream not, heavenly notes
To childish ears are vain;

That the young mind at random floats,
And cannot reach the strain.

Dim or unheard, the words may fall,
And yet the heaven-taught mind
May learn the sacred strain, and all
The harmony unwind.

Christian Year.

"Catechism."

I HAVE often thought that of all religious duties, not

strictly domestic, that fall in one's way, that connected with the parish schools is by far the pleasantest. Of course one meets there with the average of childhood's faults, idleness, levity, and self-will; for children are not "little angels," as some persons fondly fancy; but still it is not like being with grown-up people. Their faces have not had time to gather blackness through long exposure to this world's foul and withering air: they have not repeatedly and deliberately sinned against all that they knew and felt to be God's will speaking within them; and they understand as none that

are sin-defiled can understand, what is holy and good, because they come nearer to it; "for in heaven their angels do always behold the face of our Father which is in heaven."

To my school it was a long, but very pleasant walk, leading for about a mile through a succession of fields that were intersected by hedges, and here and there studded by giant elm trees. Those fields were always beautiful, from the warm spring days when they sheltered the first blue bells of the year, onwards through the fragrant weeks of May blossom and briar roses, till the russet leaves fell and made rapid way for the pure calm snow to cover them like a pall of innocence. And yet that glistering snow used to call up in my mind very painful thoughts about the little ones to whom I was going, for all through the fields it lay in one unbroken sheet of stainless white, like their baptismal state of grace and blessedness; but as soon as ever I passed the last rustic stile, and approached the habitations of man, man, (alas that it should be so!) became as usual associated with guilt,— many footsteps had broken the smoothness and sullied the purity of my way; and when I looked on the coarse fierce faces that swarmed all round, my heart would often die within me as I traced the sad likeness to what my poor children must soon be exposed to, and waywardly reverse our holy