heaven are opened, and thence comes forth a blessing. The gray, wintry sky unlocks her treasures; and softness, and whiteness, and warmth, and beauty float gently down upon both the evil and the good.

3. Through all the long night, while you sleep, the work goes noiselessly on. Earth puts off her earthliness; and when the morning comes, she stands before you in the white robes of a saint. The sun hallows her with baptismal touch, and she is glorified. There is no longer on her pure brow anything common or unclean.

4. The Lord God hath wrapped her about with light as with a garment. His divine charity hath covered the multitude of her sins; and there is no scar or stain, no "mark of her shame," no "seal of her sorrow."

5. The far-off hills swell their white purity against the pure blue of the heavens. The sheeted splendor of the fields sparkles back a thousand suns for one. The trees lose their nakedness and misery and desolation, and every slenderest twig is clothed upon with glory. All the roofs are blanketed with snow; all the fences are bordered. Every gate-post is statuesque; every wood-pile is a marble quarry. Harshest outlines are softened. Instead of angles and ruggedness and squalor, there are billowy, fleecy undulations.

6. Nothing so rough, so common, so ugly, but it has been transfigured into newness of life. Everywhere the earth has received "beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." Without sound of hammer or ax, without the grating of saw or the click of chisel, prose has been sculptured into poetry. The actual has put on the silver vail of the ideal.

7. Will you look more closely? A part is, if possible, more beautiful than the whole. On the texture of your coatsleeve one wandering snow-flake has alighted. Gaze at it before it vanishes from your sight. What a world of symmetry

it discloses to you! What an airy, fairy, crystalline splendor! What delicate spires of feathery light shoot out from the center, with tiny fringes, and rosy, radiating bars!

8. In all your life you have never seen anything more beautiful, more perfect; and you may stand "breast-high" in just such marvelous radiance. Talk of robbers' caves and magic lamps! No Eastern imagination, rioting in "barbaric pearl and gold," can eclipse the magnificence in which you live and move and have your being.

9. And there is a deeper beauty than this. It is not only that the snow makes fair what was good before, but it is a messenger of love from heaven, bearing glad tidings of great joy. Hope for the future comes down to the earth in every tiny flake. Underneath the deep and wide-spreading snowdrifts, as they span the hill-side and lie lightly piled in the valleys, the earth-spirits and fairies are ceaselessly working out their multifold plans.

10. The grasses hold high carnival safe under their crystal roof. The roses and lilies keep holiday. The snow-drops and hyacinths and the pink-lipped May-flower wait as they that watch for the morning. The life that stirs beneath thrills to the life that stirs above. The spring sun will mount higher and higher in the heavens; the sweet snow will sink down into the arms of the violets; and, at the word of the Lord, the earth shall come up once more as a bride adorned for her husband.

11. "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Gail Hamilton.

WORD ANALYSIS AND DEFINITIONS.

Car'ni val (carni, flesh or meat; val, farewell), a festival celebrated at the commencement of the Lent fasts.

Crys' tal line, consisting of crystal; clear like glass.

Mul' ti fold (multi, many), manifold; various.

Squa' lor, foulness; filthiness.

Stat u esque' (-esk), like a statue.

Sym'me try (sym, together; metry, measure), a due proportion of parts taken together; beauty.

Trans fig' ure (trans, across; figure, form), to transform; to change the form of.

Wōld, a wood; a forest.

LESSON LXV.

UNWRITTEN MUSIC.

1. There is a melancholy music in autumn. The leaves float sadly about with a look of peculiar desolateness, waving capriciously in the wind, and falling with a just audible sound that is a very sigh for its sadness. And then, when the breeze is fresher, though the early autumn months are mostly still, they are swept on with a cheerless rustle over the naked harvest-fields, and about in the eddies of the blast; and though I have, sometimes, in the glow of exercise, felt my life securer in the triumph of the brave contest, yet, in the chill of evening, or when any sickness of mind or body was on me, the moaning of those withered leaves has pressed down my heart like a sorrow, and the cheerful fire and the voices of my merry sisters might scarce remove it.

2. Then for the music of winter. I love to listen to the falling of the snow. It is an unobtrusive and sweet music. You may temper your heart to the serenest mood by its low murmur. It is that kind of music that only intrudes upon your ear when your thoughts come languidly. You need not

hear it, if your mind is not idle. It realizes my dream of another world, where music is intuitive like a thought, and comes only when it is remembered.

3. And the frost, too, has a melodious "ministry." You will hear its crystals shoot in the dead of a clear night, as if the moonbeams were splintering like arrows on the ground; and you would listen to it the more earnestly that it is the going on of one of the most cunning and beautiful of nature's deep mysteries. I know nothing so wonderful as the shooting of a crystal. God has hidden its principle as yet from the inquisitive eye of the philosopher; and we must be content to gaze on its exquisite beauty, and listen in mute wonder to the noise of its invisible workmanship. It is too fine a knowledge for us. We shall comprehend it when we know how the "morning stars sang together."

4. You would hardly look for music in the dreariness of early winter. But before the keener frosts set in, and while the warm winds are yet stealing back occasionally like regrets of the departed summer, there will come a soft rain or a heavy mist; and when the north-wind returns, there will be drops suspended like ear-ring jewels between the filaments of the cedar-tassels and in the feathery edges of the dark-green hemlocks; and, if the clearing up is not followed by a heavy wind, they will all be frozen in their places like well-set gems.

5. The next morning the warm sun comes out; and by the middle of the calm, dazzling forenoon, they are all loosened from the close touch which sustained them, and they will drop at the lightest motion. If you go along upon the south side of the wood at that hour, you will hear music. The dry foliage of the summer's shedding is scattered over the ground, and the round, hard drops ring out clearly and distinctly as they are shaken down with the stirring of the breeze. It is something like the running of deep and rapid water, only more fitful and merrier; but to one who goes out in nature with his

heart open, it is pleasant music, and, in contrast with the stern character of the season, delightful.

6. Winter has many other sounds that give pleasure to the seeker for hidden sweetness; but they are too rare and accidental to be described distinctly. The brooks have a sullen and muffled murmur under their frozen surface; the ice in the distant river heaves up with the swell of the current, and falls again to the bank with a prolonged echo; and the woodman's ax rings cheerfully out from the bosom of the unrobed forest.

7. These are at best, however, but melancholy sounds, and like all that meets the eye in that cheerless season, they but drive in the heart upon itself. I believe it is so ordered in God's wisdom. We forget ourselves in the enticement of the sweet summer. Its music and its loveliness win away the senses that link up the affections, and we need a hand to turn us back tenderly, and hide from us the outward idols in whose worship we are forgetting the higher and more spiritual altars. N. P. Willis.

LESSON LXVI.

THE DEFEAT OF GENERAL BRADDOCK.

1. On the 8th of July the advanced body reached the Monongahela, at a point not far distant from Fort du Quesne (du kane). The rocky and impracticable ground on the eastern side debarred their passage; and General Braddock resolved to cross the river in search of a smoother path, and recross it a few miles lower down, in order to gain the fort. The first passage was easily made; and the troops moved in glittering array down the western margin of the water, rejoicing that their goal was well-nigh reached, and the hour of their expected triumph close at hand.