assica. We forget that the traveler or the native enjoying the shade of the date-palm or the plantain, and feasting on their delicious fruits, knows not how soon he will be fanned by the poisonous Simoon, or how soon the withering harmattan will crisp the luxuriant growth of leaves that protect him from the burning rays of the sun. And if he gets a few hours of rest, during the day, beneath his balmy shade, his night's repose is destroyed by the torments of poisonous insects. We forget that while he is admiring the beautiful plumage of the feathery tribe, beneath his feet lurk the venomous spider and the deadly scorpion.

The ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii give us the blackest picture of the sad and desolating effects of volcanic action, yet the same mountains that occasionally spit forth their fiery breath, or cause cities to be swallowed up by the earthquake, afford a secure shelter from the chilling blast of the north, or the burning winds of the south. They condense the vapors of the atmosphere and send rain down to fertilize the valley below, or feed the streams that flow from their sides, on to the ocean.

The coral reefs, that silently rise from the bottom of the ocean, have ever been the terror of navigation; and many a proud ship, with her gallant crew, has found a watery grave on the summit of an ocean mountain. Yet perhaps the same ring of coral encloses the lagoon which forms, for the wary mariner, a safe harbor in the heart of the wild ocean.

Again, the long and unbroken coast line of the southern continent affords few maritime advantages; but we see stretching across the same continent the vast navigable rivers, Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata.

The changes of climate experienced in passing from the torrid zone to the frigid, demand different kinds of food; and accordingly we find that within the tropics, where a vegetable diet is most grateful and most conducive to health, nature supplies, in the greatest abundance, the most valuable productions. In the temperate regions, where we need a little more stimulating diet, animal food is found more abundant, and the grains and fruits afford plentiful and wholesome nutriment. As we approach the polar regions grains gradually disappear, and animal food becomes more and more exclusively used, until we reach the habitations of the Esquimaux, among whom bread and fruits are unknown. Without the counteracting influence of animal heat which is supported by the fat of animal food, the

cold of these regions would be insufferable; while the same food in the equatorial regions would be extremely nauseating, and the heat produced by such stimulating diet would be insupportable.

Throughout the whole range of science we discover striking illustrations of this beautiful law. Thus, if a blood-vessel be severed, the surrounding inosculations immediately enlarge, and the blood flows on in its living channels as though its course had not been interrupted. And if by accident any of the senses become impaired or destroyed, the others become correspondingly active:-the sense of feeling, in cases of blindness, often becoming so acute as to distinguish colors with great accuracy. So we may, with impunity, abuse ourselves to almost any extent in one direction, provided on the other hand we observe other necessary conditions to secure health.

This beautiful principle will be more fully appreciated when we reflect on the numerous conditions of men which compel them to neglect or violate some of the fundamental principles of health, who yet, by the observance of the rest, are permitted to enjoy all the comforts usually allotted to others.

Again we see a peculiarity in the mental constitutions of men adapting them to all the characteristics of the different climates. The love of home which thrills the patriot's breast, blinds him to the beauties of other climes, and to the disadvantages of his own.

"Every good his native wilds impart,
Imprints the patriot passion on his heart.

The shuddering tenant of the frigid zone,
Boldly proclaims that happiest spot his own;
Extols the treasures of his stormy seas,
And his long nights of revelry and ease;
The naked negro, panting at the line,

Boasts of his golden sands and palmy wine,

Basks in the glare or stems the tepid wave,

And thanks his gods for all the good they gave.
Such is the patriot's boast. where'er we roam,
His first, best coun ry ever is at home."

Thus it is, whether we examine the workmanship of our own bodies, or the more intricate workings of the mind, we see the same divine principle stamping its impress on the soul. And when we turn to external nature, whether we are on the raging ocean or among the mountains and valleys of the continents, whether on the burning wastes of the torrid zone, or in the cold, bleak regions of polar desolation, the same beneficent law is seen establishing equilibrium in the great scale of Justice.

THE TEACHER AS HE FIGURES IN LITERATURE.

If it is true that the songs of a people determine its characteristics, it is no less true that the character of a people determines its songs. A writer who would be acceptable must be true to nature as manifested in the people for whom he writes, or as they may readily conceive it to be manifested. Hence the successful novelist or poet is the true expositor of the manners of a nation, as well as of their modes of thinking and their style of thought.

Since the introduction of letters, the customs of all times and all classes of society have been left on record; and Literature, which preserves these, has, among them, perpetuated the memory of the Teacher. If it does him injustice by preserving only his excentricities and failings, still whatever it does preserve, is acknowledged to be characteristic.

The professional teacher is not frequently described. This is probably owing to the fact that novelists generally begin their stories with the debut of their heroes and heroines, only prefacing a few remarks about pedigree and possessions. All of the dreamy, hazy, indefinite wonderings of childhood are unrecorded. Dickens is a remarkable exception to this general rule. He not unfrequently begins with his hero when he is a little, red, fisty fellow, whose eyes look nowhere and see nothing; who cries without knowing wherefore, and sleeps when that wherefore is satisfied. Hence Dickens has described nurses and governesses, ushers and head-masters, Mr. Feeder and Dr. Blimber. Mr. Feeder, who wears his hair in bristles, as though he were terrified or at least astonished at the doctor's learning; Dr. Blimber, who always expresses his opinion in such a manner as to preclude the possibility of any one's thinking differently, and to dispose of the subject finally.

Little Panl Dombey's preceptress, "Mrs. Pipchin, was a remarkably ill-favored, ill-condiționed old lady, of a stooping figure, and a mottled face like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard gray eye that looked as if it might have been hammered on an anvil without sustaining any injury. * She was generally spoken of as a great manager of children, and the secret of her management was, to give them everything they didn't like, and nothing that they did; which was found to sweeten their dispositions very much."

*

Yet she was kind, too, in her way, and succeeded in attaching little Paul to herself in a very slight degree.

We recognize, at once, the honest-hearted old gentleman who gave direction to our budding intellect, in Thomas Gradgrind, sir, who appeared to the children before him "as a kind of cannon, loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the region of childhood at the first discharge." Mr. Squeers, who was so unmerciful upon poor Smike--as indeed upon every little wretch whom he once got to the "Hall"-represents, thank heaven, a very small proportion of those who have engaged in the profession of teaching. He is one of those brutal wretches, who, if he had been a drayman, would have beaten his horse; a master-would have tortured his slaves; a jailor-would have starved his prisoners; but being a schoolmaster, he inflicted all of these things upon his unhappy little victims.

Dickens says: "Mr. Squeers' appearance was not prepossessing; he had but one eye, while the popular prejudice runs in favor of two. The The eye he had was unquestionably useful, but decidedly not ornamental, being of a greenish gray, and in shape resembling the fan-light of a street door. The blank side of his face was much wrinkled and puckered up, which gave a very sinister appearance, especia!ly when he smiled, at which time it bordered closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat and shiny save at the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low protruding forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse manner. * * He wore a white neckerchief, with long ends, and a suit of scholastic black, but his coat sleeves being a greal deal too long, and his trowsers a great deal too short, he appeared ill at ease in his clothes, as if he were in a perpetual state of astonishment at finding himself so respectable."

His school, which for the most part was made up of abandoned children, or such as had step-fathers or mothers, or were deformed and unsightly, was a sorry spectacle. "Pale, haggard faces ; children with the countenances of old men ; deformities, with irons upon their limbs; boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together. There were the bleared eye, the hair lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion concieved by parents for their offspring, or of young lives, which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of

cruelty and neglect; there were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened by the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering: there was childhood, with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining."

Such was the school of Squeers, in the far-off Dothy Hall, where parent or friend never came, and where his sovereignty was undisputed. Such the children, whose cries, failing to move his heart to pity, ascended up-up-until they reached the Throne of God, and were heard; and a judgment overtook the miserable tyrant in his old age, but the retribution was no less sure for being tardy.

In the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, we make the acquaintance of a personage who represents quite a numerous class of some fifty years ago, but whose counterpart it is now somewhat difficult to find.

"In this bye-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, "tarried," in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

"The school-house was a low building of one large room, rudely constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with leaves of old copy-books. * From hence the low

murmur of his pupils' voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard in a drowsy summer's day, Itke the hum of a beehive; interrupted now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or command; or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery