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LONDON:

GEORGE PALMER, 17, Brownlow Street, Holborn.

PREFACE.

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THE Fifteenth volume of the "Servants' Magazine is now complete, and we congratulate ourselves in so respectable a term of service; we feel assured that our labours for Fifteen years will at once recommend us to still more extended support; and if our Subscribers will more numerously patronize us we will endeavour to render our Magazine still more serviceable to them-if they will each increase their contributions, or recommend it to others, we shall indeed be encouraged and we promise to meet them again on the First of January, 1853, with renewed zeal.

It has been observed that it is of vast importance that what Servants read should be well adapted to promote their welfare, to render them more useful in

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their station in life, more contented with the arrangements of a kind Providence which has placed them in it, and more alive to those hallowed principles which alone can prepare them for the happiness of Heaven ; it was with the hope of directing their taste for reading into a useful channel that "The Servants' Magazine" was undertaken; and we are happy to find the effort has been successful.

The contents of the "Note-Book" department of the present volume have been selected with great care and will be found to contain many most valuable recipes for domestic purposes.

We have again to offer our sincere obligations to our respected correspondents for their valuable contributions to the present volume, which have, in the absence of a frontispiece, furnished our readers with many "pictures" on interesting subjects-subjects which may assist them in the formation of habits not only of economy and carefulness, but, by the blessing of our heavenly Father, favourable to the enjoyment of true religion.

THE SERVANTS' MAGAZINE.

THE FIRST OF JANUARY.

WHAT little dark form is that before the window? Oh, it is honest red-breasted Robin, petitioning for a few crumbs to keep him from starving in this snowy weather, for the fields are white, and the ground hard-frozen. Welcome little bird, you shall have some crumbs directly; Granny wren too, for she is peeping wishfully from out the loaded hedge. Sally, do not waste a single crumb; let them be all carefully put into a plate, and thrown to the poor shivering birds, who will come every morning before the door. What a company are already assembled. Robin, and Jenny Wren, as the country people call her, with a troop of sparrows, and two or three tomtits. How they hop, and peck, and look askance, then dart off for a moment, and come back again, and how perfect are the prints of their small steps on the soft yielding snow.

Sally, I must tell you a little about the birds, that you may know how to speak of them to the children, whom I often see with you in the green lanes and wood walks. Can you tell me what the Lord said concerning sparrows, and what He told His disciples, some of whom had been labouring men, to learn from those pretty feathered creatures?

"Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat,

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or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment ? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they eat, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not better than they?" Matt. vi. 25, 26.

Thus teaching us to put away all anxious thought, even if worldly things look dark, and to cast all our care on Him who loveth us. Beautifully has a poet, who wrote concerning the four seasons, spring and summer, autumn and winter, addressed those who are ready to doubt the goodness of their heavenly Father, and to mistrust His care for them.

"Look up, and smile away your low despair,
See the lone tenants of the barren air.

To them nor fields, nor granaries belong,
Nought but the woodland, and the pleasing song.
Yet their kind heavenly Father bends an eye
To the least wing that flits along the sky.
To Him they call in winter's dreariest reign,
To Him they sing when Spring renews the plain,
Nor is their call, nor yet their song in vain.”

You

Every one loves the robin, and the grey wren, they are both confiding birds, and though the wren will rarely venture within our doors, she waits patiently for the crumbs which some kind hand throws out. may often see both of these favourite birds peeping from some near bush, ready to start forth when the door or window opens; they also collect flies and spiders from barns and out-buildings, and are constant visitants to hayricks.

You have read the "Babes in the Wood," that affecting ballad, which often calls forth the first tear in young children; for who can hear unmoved the narrative, which tells how the innocent creatures were

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