to have "Thus saith the Lord" written across it.

Don't let your harp have only one string.

Don't be a vender of nostrums. Don't try to make bricks without straw.

Don't be anybody but yourself.

In the Congregation.

Don't forget that you belong, first to Christ, second to the Presbyterian Church, and third to this congregation.

Don't be a sectarian.

Don't be afraid to be a denominationalist.

Don't let any religious hobby ride you, but don't be afraid to ride any religious hobby if you have one.

Don't live in the third century.
Don't live in the twentieth century.
Don't live in the clouds.

Don't follow everybody's advice.
Don't be afraid of any man.
Don't be afraid of the devil.
Don't be afraid of yourself.
Don't depend too much upon the
Gospel of shoe leather.

Don't become a peripatetic gossip or a persistent tea-drinker, nor on the other hand a solemn clam.

Don't hold yourself too cheap. Don't try to do anybody's duty but your own.

Don't let a few, and especially the same few, do the work of the many. Don't spare the people's pockets, for therein lie their hearts. Don't be too confiding. Don't despair.

Don't expect the sun to shine through all the twenty-four hours of the day.

Don't expect that all your geese will be swans, or all your believers saints.

Don't expect Rome to be built in a day, or the Lord to be in as big a hurry as you are.

Don't mistake Detroit for Red Wing.

Don't spread your congregation over every scheme that is presented, lest it suddenly grow thin and vanish. Don't restrain too much; it is well often that steam escape.

Don't let the young people run away with you, nor the bald headed put too many brakes on.

Don't drive, but lead.

Don't ask any to work harder than you do yourself.

Don't be disappointed when harvests do not come in a day, and oats do not spring up like Jonah's gourd. Don't see everything that is wrong in the congregation.

Don't hear everything that is said in the congregation.

Don't carry all your ecclesiastical eggs in one basket.

Don't despise the rich nor dishonor the poor, nor esteem yourself wiser than your brethren.

Don't feel yourself responsible for the universe, nor try to spread yourself over creation.

Don't be an evangelist without a message, a preacher without doctrine, a pastor without devotion, a presbyter without responsibility, or a bishop without watchfulness, and you will not be a servant without reward.

Don't fail to appreciate your predecessor.

Don't fail to prepare for your successor.

TO BOYS COMMENCING

BUSINESS.

Be on hand promptly in the morning at your place of business, and make it a point never to be late, and perform cheerfully every duty. Be respectful to your employers, and to all in authority over you, and be polite to every one; politeness costs nothing, and it will help you wonderfully in getting on in the world. And above

all, be honest and truthful. The boy who starts in life with a sound mind in a sound body, who falls into no bad habits, who is honest, truthful, and industrious, who remembers with grateful love his father and mother, and who does not grow away from his church and Sunday-school, has qualities of mind and heart that will insure him success to a remarkable degree, even though he is endowed with only ordinary mental capacity; for honor, truth, and industry are more than gerius.

Don't be foppish in your dress, and don't buy anything before you have the money to pay for it. Shun billiard-saloons, and be careful how you spend the evenings. Cultivate a taste for reading, and read only good books. With a love for reading, you will find in books friends ever true, and full of cheer in time of gloom, and sweet companionship for lonely hours. Other friends may grow cold and forsake you, but books are always the same. And in closing, boys, I would say again, that with truth, honesty, and industry, and a living faith in God, you will succeed.

Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honor lies.

THE DIGNITY OF HONEST TOIL.

Ashamed of work, young man, good, hard, honest work? Then I am ashamed of you-ashamed that you know so little about great men. Open your old Roman history now, and read of Cincinnatus. On the day on which they wanted him to be dictator where did they find him? In the field, plowing.

What about Marcus Curius, who drove Pyrrhus out of Italy? Look him up; you will find him busy on his little farm.

The great Cato; you have surely

185

heard of him-how he rose to all the honors of the Roman state; yet he was often seen at work in the fields with his slaves.

Scipio Africanus, who conquered Hannibal and won Carthage for Rome, was not ashamed to labor on his farm.

Lucretia, one of the noblest of Roman matrons, might have been seen many a day at work spinning among her maidens.

Better even than the example of noble Romans is the advice of the wise man: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Better than this even are the beautiful New Testament words: "Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord."

EVERY MAN HIS OWN

NOVELIST.

The reason that everybody likes novels is, that everybody is more or less a novelist. In addition to the practical life that men and women lead, constantly vexed as it is by obstructive facts, there is an interior life which they imagine, in which facts smoothly give way to sentiments, ideas, and aspirations. In this imagined existence people strengthen themselves with new faculties, exalt themselves with new passions, surround themselves with new companions, devote themselves to new objects. They are richer, handsomer, braver, wittier, nobler, more disinterested, more adventurous, more efficient, than they are in their actual personalities and mode of living. They construet lcng stories, long as their own lives, of which they are the heroes or heroines; and the novels they best like to read are those whose scenes and characters best fit into the

novel they are themselves incessantly weaving. The universality of selfesteem is probably due to the fact that people confuse the possibilities

of their existence with its actualities. Each being the hero of "My Novel," gains self-importance in virtue of that; and while externally classed with the "nobodies," is internally conscious of ranking with the "somebodies." Burn out of a man, indeed, everything else-sense, sensibility and conscience-you will still find alive in his ashes a little self-conceit and a little imagination. "How much do you weigh?" a man asked. "Well," he replied, "ordinarily, only a hundred and twenty pounds; but when I'm mad, I weigh a ton!" But the great increase of weight arises when a person is kindled with a conception of what he has a possibility of becoming.-Scribner's Magazine.

GOLDEN KEYS.

A bunch of golden keys is mine

To make each day with gladness shine. "Good morning!" that's the golden key That unlocks every day for me.

was

When evening comes, "Good night!" I

say,

And close the door of each glad day. When at the table, "If you please" I take from off my bunch of keys. When friends give anything to me, I'll use the little "Thank you!" key. "Excuse me," "Beg your pardon," too, When by mistake some harm I do. Or if unkind offense I've given, "Forgive me"; and I'll be forgiven. On a golden ring these keys I'll bind, This is its motto: "Be ye kind." I'll often use each go den key, And then a happy child I'll be.

FUN IS ON THE SIDE OF RIGHT.

I want you to notice this fact, that when a man gives up the straight upand-down religion in the Bible for any new-fangled religion, it is generally to suit his sins. You first hear

of his change of religion, and then you hear of some swindle he has practiced in Colorado mining stock, telling some one if he will put in ten thousand dollars he can take out one hundred thousand dollars! or he has plunged into irremediable worldliness. His sins are so broad he has to broaden his religion, and he becomes as broad as temptation, as broad as the soul's darkness, as broad as hell.

"But you shut us young folks out from all fun," you say. O no! I like fun. I believe in fun. I have had lots of it in my time. But I have not had to go into the paths of sin to find it. I have had fun illimitable, though I never swore one oath, and never gambled for so much as the value of a pin, and never saw the inside of a haunt of sin, save, as when ten years ago, with commissioner of police and a detective and two elders of my church, I explored these cities by midnight, not out of curiosity, but that I might in pulpit set before the people the poverty and the horrors of underground city life. Yet though I never was intoxicated for an instant, and never committed one act of dissoluteness, restrained only by the grace of God, without which restraint I would have gone headlong to the bottom of infamy, I have had so much fun that I don't believe there is a man on the planet in the present time who has had more. Hear it, men and boys, women and girls, all the fun is on the side of right.

Young man, there is no fun in shipwrecking your character, no fun in disgracing your father's name. There is no fun in breaking your mother's heart. There is no fun in the physical pangs of the dissolute. There is no fun in the profligate's death-bed. There is no fun in an undone eternity.-Rev. T. De Witt Talmage,

D. D.

BOOTBLACKS HELPING ONE

ANOTHER.

A reporter called to a little bootblack near the City Hall, New York, to give him a shine. The little fellow came rather slowly for one of that lively guild, and planted his box down under the reporter's foot. Before he could get his brushes out another larger boy ran up and, calmly pushing the little one aside, said: "Here, you go sit down, Jimmy."

The reporter at once became indig nant at what he took to be a piece of outrageous bullying, and sharply told

the newcomer to clear out.

66

Oh, dat's all right, boss," was the reply, "I'm only going to do it fur him; you see he's been sick in the hospital for mor'n a month and can't do much work yet, so us boys all turn in and give him a lift when we can, savy?" "Is that so, Jimmy?" asked the reporter, turning to the smaller boy.

"Yes, sir," wearily replied the boy, and as he looked up, the pallid, pinched face could be discerned, even through the grime that covered it. "He does it fur me, if you'll let him." "Certainly; go ahead;" and as the bootblack plied the brush, the reporter plied him with questions. "You say all the boys help him in this way?" "Yes, sir. When they ain't got no job themselves, and Jimmy gets one, they turns in and helps him, 'cause he ain't very strong yet, ye see."

"What percentage do you charge him on a job?"

"Hey!" queried the youngster. "I don't know what you mean.

"I mean, what part of the money do you give Jimmy, and how much do you keep out of it?"

"You bet yer life I don't keep none; I ain't no such sneak as that.'

"So you give it all to him, do you?" "Yes, I do. All the boys give up what they gets on his job. I'd like to

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catch any feller sneaking it on a sick boy, I would.”

The shine being completed, the reporter handed the urchin a quarter, saying: "I guess you're a pretty good fellow; so you keep ten cents and give the rest to Jimmy there."

"Can't do it, sir; it's his customer. Here, Jim." He threw him the coin and was off like a shot after a custoamond. In this big city there are a mer for himself, a veritable rough digood many such lads, with warm and generous hearts under their ragged coats.-Commercial Advertiser.

HOW A ST. BERNARD DOG
FOUND A CHILD THAT

HAD BEEN LOST.

George Hicks, with his wife and several children, live in a small house Pa., near what is known as "the on the mountain, back of Hyde Park, White Farm." Among the children of this family is a boy that has become entirely blind. He is nine years old. On Thursday, April 3d, the mother, accompanied by this blind boy and another, left their home early in the afternoon to gather wood from the underbrush on the mountain side, and the two boys, having become weary, sat down upon a rock, and the mother left them there while she continued on her quest for fagots. She did not return that way, but went home, expecting the boys would return when they got ready. At night the boy who could see returned home without his blind brother, saying that the lad had wandered away from him

and he couldn't find him. Search was instituted at once, and all night men with lanterns scoured that vicinity without finding any trace of the blind boy. The search was continued the following day without successful results, and the parents, and particularly the mother, were almost frantic with grief over their lost boy. Some

one told the mother that St. Bernard dogs could find lost children, even when buried under the snow, and that Mr. S. G. Kerr, the carpet dealer in Scranton, had a very sagacious dog of that species. The woman, weeping bitterly, on the day following her loss called on Mr. Kerr at his store and begged him to send his dog to the place where the child had been lost, to see if he could not find the boy. Mr. Kerr told the woman that it would be quite useless to do so, as the dog would not be able to trace the child after such a long time since his disappearance, as all scent would have been obliterated. But she pleaded with him to try, and finally Mr. Kerr consented-merely to satisfy the mother-to send his dog there, and told his son, Bennie Kerr, to take the dog, go with the woman, and do the best he could to satisfy the mother. So Bennie took the dog and accompanied Mrs. Hicks to the rock on which the boy was last seen sitting, more than twenty-four hours previous, and allowed the animal to smell all around the place. Then with the usual command to the dog when anything was required to be searched for, sent it off on the hunt for the boy. The dog immediately started, with nose to the ground, and plunged through brush and rock until a stone wall was reached, and then darted off so rapidly that Bennie lost sight and sound of the animal. In about an hour from the time the dog left the rock there was heard a half mile distant, such a baying as these dogs always make when they have found what they were in search of, and Bennie, following the direction indicated by the barking, came upon the dog, which was standing over and licking the face of the little blind boy, whom it had waked from sleep. Thus was the child restored to his home through the instinct of this sagacious dog; and it is

a question whether a better test of canine sagacity has ever been placed can, Pa. on record. The Scranton Republi

LONDON PUNCH TO WALES.

Taffy is a Welshman,
Taffy's not a thief;
Taffy's mutton's very good,
Not so good his beef:
I went to Taffy's house,
Several things I saw,
Cleanliness and godliness;
Obedience to the law.
If Taffy rides to my house,

Or unto Pat's doth swim,
I think my Taffy will remark
That we might learn of him.
He does'nt drink, my Taffy,
(Not leastways, as a rule);
He goes to Chapel regular,

And sends his boys to school.
He dresses well on Sunday,
His family the like:

He's not too fond of over-work,

But seldom cares to strike. He never lurks behind a hedge, To pay his rent with slugs; Up craggy hills of deep incline, His garden-mould he lugs. And there he grows his garden, His cabbages and leeks, His kids get green-meat in their mouths,

And roses in their cheeks.
Taffy is a Welshman,

And glories in the name,
To laugh at which enjoyment
Appears to me a shame.
You compliment the Scotchman,
Who talks of Bruce and Burns;
You tolerate the Irishman,

Who vaunts ancestral kerns:
You're nuts on your own pedigree,
Won't call it English, fair,
But prate of "Anglo Saxons,"

Till reviewers nearly swear;
Why should'nt gallant Taffy,

Have his relics and his bones,
Llewelyn and Cadwallos,

And Gryffyevanjones.
To say nothing of the question
Whether Taffy's mother tongue,
Was'nt quite a fine old language
When all of yours were young.
He says he has good poets,

Leave him his own opinion;
You like obscure old ballads,

And Taffy likes Englynion. Pray, are not "moel," "afon,"