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One brother's heart I have not found; Nor have I met one friendly eye

To cheer me in my lonely round.

I'm sick and weary-I will stay
Awhile beside this rich man's gate;
The very hall is bright as day,

And guests are coming, though it's late. One enters now, in joyous grace,

With jewels flashing on her wrist;
Sure love must dwell with such a face,

She seems an angel in the mist.
Oh, will she think, in yon bright room,
Of feet like mine, about to sink,-
Of sisters falling in the gloom,-

Or, is her heart too full to think?
Too full of merriment and song,

Too giddy with the fumes of praise ;And dazzled with a vista long

Of shows, and vanities, and plays? Is that her shadow on the blind?

She may be planning, all this while, High deeds of mercy in her mind,

To make the poor and needy smile. Whilst thus I muse, my straining ear Can almost catch the words they say; How strange it is, to be so near,

And yet so very far away! So far away! these rails divide

Our path of life-and I might be Upon the Ocean's other side,

For all they know, or think, of me! But, bless the Lord! no iron rails

Can keep the friendless and the small Apart from Him who never fails

To open wide His heart for all.

I suffer, yet I will not blame,

Nor ask the Lord His reasons why; I'll hold Him good, and clear His name, Although I famish and I die!

G. S. OUTRAM.

AMONG LIONS. (Continued from page 212.)

CHAPTER IX.

It

HE Weirs had one of the neatest cottages in the village; one of the old sort, with lattice windows, trellised porch, and thatched roof. had a good-sized garden round it, with a straight walk leading from the door to the little gate into the street. grew stocks and sweet-williams, gilly-flowers and pinks, roses, and southernwood, or, as Moor called it, 'old man,' just as oldfashioned gardens have had them for generations. Behind the comfortable old cabbage-rose bushes were the vegetable beds, kept tidy and useful by Roger and his father.

Here

Mrs. Weir, a thrifty housekeeper, kept things tidy within, and, if she had not had poor health, she would have done more still, for she loved managing. Now she chiefly directed Roger and his father, in a somewhat sharp voice, what to do in the garden, while, if the weather permitted, she sat by working in her basketchair. Thomas Weir and his son Roger thought there was no one in the world like this small, fair, shrill-voiced woman, who knew the weather so well, (poor woman! her weak chest taught her that lore), and knitted stockings so deftly, while she watched the bread rise or saw to the dinner. She might have been a lady,' and sat all day with her hands before her, if she had liked, but that was not her notion of happiness. I do not think she had shed a tear since her little girl's death four years back, till the day, two autumns since, when she had to consent to engage a certain Nancy to help

in the washing and other hard house-work. She, who had prided herself on doing every bit of work needed for the family with her own two hands, and now, at only eight-andthirty, to be set aside like that!

In vain her husband told her that it was all right; he in good work, as gardener at the Manor, Roger growing a big lad, and earning for himself, and little Johnny! Well, little Johnny in time was expected to do wonders! But Mrs. Weir would not be comforted, and she retired to her bedroom upstairs under pretence of sorting something or other, and came down later in the day with very red eyes, and a quickness of speech which made Nancy think she might find her rather a hard mistress. But Mrs. Weir was not hard, she only found her cross very difficult to bear. It seems to all of us as if our trials came in the wrong quarter; if it had only been this or that, we say, we could have borne it better: but we deceive ourselves, for to our selfindulgent nature all crosses would be heavy.

But the doctor's orders were strict. Mrs. Weir was for the future to do nothing but light work; so stout Nancy was engaged to come every morning after breakfast for a few hours.

Roger loved his mother more than she ever guessed, for he was not good at showing his feelings, and one of his great troubles was that most of her loving words and looks went to the little brother, who was already so much more clever than he was. More than his talents, Roger grudged him his looks, the brown eyes, golden hair, and oval face, which made people say how Johnny Weir featured his mother. Roger would have been like his mother too if he could, and it seemed so hard that this had been denied him.

Mrs. Weir was very clever in many ways, but she never knew how Roger

listened in the night and rejoiced when he did not hear her cough, how on winter mornings he rose earlier on purpose to get the fire lighted, and the kitchen warm for the sickly woman, and how anxiously he questioned Dr. Darell when he chanced to meet him, whether she would not get strong again in the summer weather.

Johnny, the only other child, was eight years old now; while he had been small, Roger had made as great a pet of him as any one else, had carried him on his shoulders, given him every toy he cried for, and joined in the family pride over the clever darling. But time had been changing all this. Johnny had shown great quickness over his books (poor Roger could only just stumble through a chapter in St. John), and was head-chorister at the church.

Mrs. Weir did not wish to be thought 'high,' but still she could not help confiding to a neighbour or two, that her Johnny would certainly be a clerk in due time in Mr. Appleby the lawyer's office at Shockley, and a clerk meant a gentleman in quiet Moor, one who sauntered out. on Sundays with a rosebud in his buttonhole, and soiled his fingers in the week with nothing less degrading than ink.

Happy Johnny! He held his head up at hearing this, and took immense pains with his writing in consequence. All this was very well, but the coming glory rather got into the little fellow's head, and gave him a feeling of contempt for those not so forHe took to lording it over Roger, and parading before him his advances in the spelling and reading line.

tunate.

Johnny, with the outside quickness of a pert child, could easily catch Roger tripping in a calculation regarding potatoes and turnips, and liked nothing better than to correct his spelling, on the rare occasions when Roger betrayed himself on paper.

Poor Roger was not specially touchy, but when his mother joined in the laugh, and wondered how it happened that he had no turn for books like Johnny there, he felt a pain at his heart.

He no more wrote copies of an evening, leaning his head well on his arm, and breathing heavily, under Johnny's instruction, for he had seen his mother hold up a particularly shaky K to derision, when she thought he was not by, with the remark, that it was wonderful any child of hers could be so unhandy. Neither did he blunder through that chapter in the Bible any more of nights, as he had been used to do ever since he was six years old. Johnny was old enough now, he said, by way of excuse, and Johnny was proud to use his glib little tongue and if a neighbour happened to step in the piping voice grew so important that a whisper went about that Weir's Johnny might almost be a parson.

Ah, Johnny! much more goes to the making of a parson than a loud voice or a quick brain! But all the same, these gifts in their little son excited immense admiration in his parents, and how or why, Roger knew not, but he felt ashamed. of himself, and thought his mother was ashamed of him.

He grew more and more silent at home. He never had been much of a talker, his great pleasure was listening to tales of travel and adventure which Johnny read aloud of an evening. Master Gilbert, at the Rectory, lent the books, and they were sometimes true, sometimes fiction, but always about foreign lands, their wonders, and the wonderful things which happened to people who travelled in them.

While Johnny looked to the office, and the pen behind his ear, as the summit of earthly happiness, Roger began to have misty, and yet sunny dreams, of a distant

land, where he might, if not achieve greatness, yet meet with some of those rewards to patient industry which his native village did not seem to promise him: for Roger had enough of his mother in him to make him wish to do something better than hoe turnips all his life. This feeling, however, he might have lived down, had it not been for all the talk of Johnny's prospects, which set him thinking if there was nothing in store for him.

If his heart could have been filled with love at home, Roger might have still drudged happily on, finding ample reward in bringing his few shillings to the family fund on Saturday nights, but an uneasy jealousy of Johnny had taken possession of him, which he tried to combat, poor lad! but sometimes gave way to, often bringing on himself a sharp word from his mother, and always a sense of remorse in his own breast.

(To be continued.)

'AFTER LONG YEARS.'

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OT many years ago you might have seen, in one of the streets at the back of the parish church of Longford, a famous old shop, which had descended from father to son for many generations, and dal which was noted for the excellence of its goods.

At the time of our story its occupants were John and Emma Parkinson, a thrifty, industrious couple, who were becoming wellto-do, as the family had been for so many years, through the success of the old grocer's shop. Many of the townsfolk envied Mrs. Parkinson for the good business which kept her house well filled, for the husband who

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