and deserts they pour out their watery treasures, which gather themselves again in streams and torrents, to return, with exulting bounds, to their parent ocean. These are the messengers which proclaim in every land the exhaustless resources of the sea; but it is reserved for those who go down in ships, and who do business in the great waters, to see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.

Let one go upon deck in the middle watch of a still night, with naught above him but the silent and solemn skies, and naught around and beneath him but an interminable waste of waters, and with the conviction that there is but a plank between him and eternity, a feeling of loneliness, solitude, and desertion, mingled with a sentiment of reverence for the vast, mysterious and unknown, will come upon him with a power, all unknown before, and he might stand for hours entranced in reverence and tears.

Man, also, has made the ocean the theater of his power. The ship in which he rides that element, is one of the highest triumphs of his skill. At first, this floating fabric was only a frail bark, slowly urged by the laboring oar. The sail, at length, arose and spread its wings to the wind. Still he had no power to direct his course when the lofty promontory sunk from sight, or the orbs above him were lost in clouds. But the secret of the magnet is, at length, revealed to him, and his needle now settles, with a fixedness which love has stolen as the symbol of its constancy, to the polar star.

Now, however, he can dispense even with sail, and wind, and flowing wave. He constructs and propels his vast engines of flame and vapor, and, through the solitude of the sea, as over the solid land, goes thundering on his track. On the ocean, too, thrones have been lost and won. On the fate of Actium was suspended the empire of the world. In the gulf of Salamis, the pride of Persia found a grave; and the crescent set forever

in the waters of Navarino; while, at Trafalgar and the Nile, nations held their breath,

"As each gun

From its adamantine lips,

Spread a death-shade round the ships
Like the hurricane's eclipse

Of the sun."

But, of all the wonders appertaining to the ocean, the greatest, perhaps, is its transforming power on man. It unravels and weaves anew the web of his moral and social being. It invests him with feelings, associations, and habits, to which he has been an entire stranger. It breaks up the sealed fountain of his nature, and lifts his soul into features prominent as the cliffs which beetle over its surge.

Once the adopted child of the ocean, he can never bring back his entire sympathies to land. He will still move in his dreams over that vast waste of waters, still bound in exultation and triumph through its foaming billows. All the other realities of life will be comparatively tame, and he will sigh for his tossing element, as the caged eagle for the roar and arrowy light of his mountain cataract.

PADDY'S LAMENT.

Oh. Mary McGallagher, see phat you've done now,
You've tied me poor heart in a double bow-knot;
For a nice, daycent gairl it's a quare piece o' fun now,
To play such a thrick-Och! phat's into ye got?
You've twisted me head till it's all full of aching,
For thinking o' you, Mary, all the day long;
There's nothing I touch but it's shplitting and breaking,
I niver can do a thing right but it's wrong.

The whole house is aff on a horse-throt to ruin,
The parlor's not fit for a jintleman's pig;
feel in me bones that there's throuble abrewin',
An' me legs are too wake for the ghost of a jig.

There's a pipe on the mantlepiece all broke to flinders,
There's a shoe near the fender's all out at the toe;
There's rags
where the glass ought to be in the winders,
Fur, Mary, mavourneen, I'm loving you so.
Don't talk to that baste of a Barney McFinnegan!
It's working I am fur your good, don't you see?
He's no sooner out of a shpree than he's in agin;
Iv'ry cint that he owns, faith it's coming to me.
Then, Mary McGallagher, pity me sorrow,

Stand ready to put on your wedding-dress soon. Throw care to the dogs-pay the fiddler to-morrow→ And dance till the morn by the glint o' the moon.

Bad luck to the gairl! May I never begin agin!
I'll be an ould bachelor, sure, till I die;
For Mary's gone married to Barney McFinnegan
In the dress that I guv her the money to buy.
But fortune go with her! I'll niver deride her;
There's fish, jist as good as are caught in the say;
An' since she's took Barney, to jog on beside her,
Why, faith, I'll make love to swate Biddy McKay.

BIJAI'S STORY.

He was little more than a baby,
And played on the streets all day;
And holding in his tiny fingers
The string of a broken sleigh.

He was ragged, and cold and hungry,
Yet his face was a sight to see,
And he lisped to a passing lady-
"Pleathe, mithus, will you yide me?"
But she drew close her fur-lined mantle,
And her train of silk and lace,
While she stared with haughty wonder
In the eager, piteous face.

And the eyes that shone so brightly,
Brimmed o'er with gushing rain,
And the poor little head dropped lower
While his heart beat a sad refrain.

When night came, cold and darkly,
And the lamps were all alight,
The pallid lips grew whiter

With childish grief and fright.
As I was passing the entrance
Of a church across the way,
I found a poor dead baby,
With his head on a broken sleigh.
Soon young and eager footsteps
Were heard on the frozen street,
And a boy dashed into the station,
Covered with snow and sleet.

On his coat was a newsboy's number,
On his arm a "bran new sled;"
"Have you seen my brother, Bijah?
He ought to be home in bed.
"You see, I leave him at Smithers'
While I go round with the 'Press:'
They must have forgot about him,
And he's strayed away, I guess.
"Last night when he said 'Our Father,'
And about the daily bread,

He just threw in an extra

Concerning a nice new sled.

"I was tellin' the boys at the office,

As how he was only three;

And they stuck in for this here stunner:
And sent it home with me.

"And won't-what's the matter, Bijah?
Why do you shake your head?
O Father in Heaven, have pity!
O Bijah, he can't be dead!"

He clasped the child to his bosom,
In a passionate, close embrace,
His tears and kisses falling,

'Twixt sobs, on the little face.

Soon the bovish grief grew silent;

There was never a tear nor a moan, For the heart of the dear Lord Jesus Had taken the children home.

-Detroit Free Press.

GRANDMOTHER'S BIBLE.-HATTIE A. COOLEY,

So you've brought me this costly Bible,
With its covers so grand and gay;
You thought I must need a new one
On my eighty-first birthday, you say.
Yes, mine is a worn-out volume,

Grown ragged and yellow with age,
With finger-prints thick on the margin;
But there's never a missing page.

And the finger-prints call back my wee ones,
Just learning a verse to repeat;
And again, in the twilight, their faces
Look up to me eagerly sweet.

It has pencil marks pointed in silence
To words I have hid in my heart;
And the lessons so hard in the learning,
Once learned, can never depart.

There's the verse your grandfather spoke of
The very night that he died,
"When I awake with thy likeness,

I, too, shall be satisfied."

And here, inside the old cover,

Is a date, it is faded and dim,

For I wrote it the day the good pastor
Baptized me-I've an old woman's whim
That beside the pearl gates he is waiting,
And when by and by I shall go,
That he will lead me into that kingdom,
As then into this one below.

And under that date, little Mary,

Write another one when I die;

Then keep both Bibles and read them;
God bless you, child, why should you cry?

Your gift is a beauty, my dearie,

With its wonderful clasps of gold,

Put it carefully into that drawer;

I shall keep it till death; but the old—

Just leave it close by on the table,

And then you may bring me a light, And I'll read a sweet psalm from its pages To think of, if wakeful to-night.