tival; just as truly a festival, I think, as it wa when Willie blessed it and made it bright, be cause I knew he wished to have it so.

The older children went with us to chari that morning. Harry and Susy, finding the turkeys rather an impediment to religious edifcation, kept guard at home. Susy's little whe per at starting did me good, I think.

When the morning really came, with its fresh, frolicking winds, and sunlight, and blue skies; with its merry faces and gay voices, and the happy children rapping at my door, I thought of what he said: "Perhaps the boy has been to you." Sometimes I think he must have been, so real and sweet is, even now, the memory of his coming. All that day he stood beside me; all that day I saw his peaceful face, and felt the blessing of his smile, and heard his low sweet voice. What for months I had looked upon and feared with the bitterness of a great dread, the face, and smile, made almost painless.

The children's merry greetings did not hurt me; my fingers did not tremble when they twined the fresh green leaves about the walls. Into the very making of my pudding I threw

day was real to him, and I listened.

A bit of Mrs. Browning music kept singing

-I, who only

last year had sat there with my boy beside meso manly and so brave he looked, so pleased that they chose the hymn he loved, so happy and at rest while he sang it with them.

I think that when the dear familiar words flooded the church with harmony again, as on that other morning, and John and I clasped hands silently- I think we uttered the old, old cry, "Blessed be the name of the Lord!"

We stopped after church together where the boy was lying, to let May lay down her litthe green wreath, and I was glad that she could do it calmly. Somehow I felt as if tears would be profanation just then. Then we went quietly home.

It was a happy home that day—as happy as it could be when we did not see him. Yet I know he was there.

you

66 Did think I should not be with you, mother?"

I heard it over and over; I hear it over and over now; I shall hear it when the next Thanksgiving sun brightens his quiet grave. He wished us to be happy; I know he was with us. I think he will always be.

EDITOR'S CHAIR.

December.

December comes to us, not with storms and chilling winds; but mild and gentle; as if pitying the poor who are suffering from the high prices that still prevail everywhere, and more especially in the provision for larder and coal bin. God pity the poor whose hearths are cold and whose tables are empty of food! How little can one who has plenty and comfort at the board and the fireside, appreciate the blessing that rests on him. How little can he feel for his poor neighbor, for him who toils with scanty reward, and finds, after all his labor, that the meagre sum will not warm or feed or clothe his family sufficiently.

But, thank God! there are warm hearts and open hands, that are continually devising and executing generous deeds. There are noble charities, stealing, with their blessed influences, into the homes of those, who, by misfortune or bereavement, have sunk from competence to that bitterest of all poverty. that which will not ask relief. Many a mother, to-day, tends

her fatherless children near a fireless hearth, who, in the days of her prosperity was hailed as the friend of the poor; yet now is poorer than they whom she relieved. Many a father, whose failing health is unequal to the labor of providing for his family, is doomed to see others reaping the fruits that which his own talent and enterprise once invented or established; while his own large and grand heart shrinks from asking the bitter bread of charity. Could we unroof these houses that stand shining in the rays of this bright December morning, what strange, sad stories might be gathered. What shivered hopes, such as buoy up human hearts in youth and prosperity- what vanished joys to which the soul has clung until its hold was dashed down forever- - what scores of grey heads going down into the grave - what good and kind hearts breaking for lack of human

VOL XXXIV.-24

sympathy-what brave, enduring spirits sinking down into despair!

It is sad this looking into the realities of life; but we cannot lay aside the fact that they are such. Novelists and poets may write and sing of sunshine and flowers and beauty; and they are right in doing so. God has made for us a beautiful world; fitted it with light and incense and brightness. But behind all this beauty, there are clouds that sometimes veil it from our sight. Poverty comes in and shrouds our blessings, and then the world is dark to the eyes that before only saw light and beauty.

Now, would it not be a blessed privilege to minister to this sorrow, to bear up the sinking heart, to hold up the feeble hands and to let in once more the sweet light of Heaven? And it is, after all, so easy to do it! So easy to drop the balm of consolation, to bind the broken heart and set the grief-stricken prisoner free.

Nor is it always money that is wanted for this. A little sympathy directed in the right channel; an opening suggested that has not been presented to the mind of him who so sorely needs it; a shifting of the dismal phenomena that has so long been before his eyes, so as to let in a sun ray. Oh, how much this the manner of might do! Then the tone addressing such an one, so as not to hurt his feelings by implied superiority on your part; the simple showing him how infinitely more you think of the man than of his surroundings. How such a course on your part will reconcile him to himself and help to sustain in him the dignity of manhood. Coming, too, perhaps, when he has been sadly wounded by the slights of others whose delicacy toward the poor is at last questionable, how will your words heal the inward hurt, and help him to ward off the next

attack.

It is not always that money will be needed to smooth the rugged path; though, if you become really interested, you will hardly with hold it; but even without it, you will expe rience a feeling of satisfaction in having made

the heart of a man to rejoice through your simple words of cheer.

Try it! It will do you as much good as it will the object of your sympathy; for charity is always twice blessed. Go forth in the chill air of December, and nurse it into warmth by your own breath. No Christmas bells will be sweeter than your voice thus raised in love and benevolence, to cheer the drooping spirit. No Christmas gift will bless the receiver half so much as your more precious gift of feeling. Lay not your head upon the pillow, until you have made the head of your brother lie easier. Depend on it, the simple effort will bring its own exceeding great reward.

Hark to the ringing of Whittier's bells, as they float over land and sea, and are echoed from every hill and mountain top of our dear, glorious, free, unshackled country, where "slaves can no longer breathe."

LAUS DEO.

It is done!

Clang of bell and roar of gun Send the tidings up and down.

How the belfries rock and reel, How the great guns, peal on peal, Fling the joy from town to town!

Ring, O bells!

Every stroke exulting tells Of the burial-hour of crime.

Loud and long that all may hear, Ring for every listening ear Of Eternity and Time!

Let us kneel;

God's own voice is in that peal, And this spot is holy ground.

Lord forgive us! What are we, That our eyes this glory see, That our ears have heard the sound!

For the Lord

On the whirlwind is abroad;

In the earthquake he has spoken: He has smitten with his thunder The iron walls asunder,

And the gates of brass are broken!

Loud and long,

Lift the old exulting song; Sing with Miriam by the sea:

He hath cast the mighty down; Horse and rider sink and drown: He hath triumphed gloriously!

Did we dare

In our agony of prayer
Ask for more than he has done?

When was ever his right hand
Over any time or land
Stretched as now, beneath the sun?

How they pale,

Ancient myth and song, and tale, In this wonder of our days,

When the cruel rod of war Blossoms white with righteous law, And the wrath of man is praise!

Blotted out!

All within and all about Shall a fresher life begin; Freer breathe the universe As it rolls its heavy curse On the dead and buried sin !

It is done!

In the circuit of the sun Shall the sound thereof go forth. It shall bid the sad rejoice,

It shall give the dumb a voice, It shall belt with joy the earth!

Ring and swing

Bells of joy! on morning's wing Send the song of praise abroad; With a sound of broken chains Tell the nations that he reigns Who alone is Lord and God!

A New Volume.

A new volume of the REPOSITORY will commence with the January number, and from this time the magazine will be issued in two volumes a year, the price being the same as heretofore, $2.50 a year. Twelve numbers of the REPOSITORY makes nearly 800 pages which is enough for two volumes, and if issued in two, can be bound in two, or in one, as the subscriber may prefer. With and after the beginning of the new volume much more of the matter in the REPOSITORY will be original, written specially for its pages, and after January, the numbers will appear promptly on or before the beginning of the month for which they are prepared.

OPEN-AIR preaching is becoming a great institution in England. It goes on in almost every part of the land, and a peculiar class of itinerant preachers is growing up to meet the demand. It is said:

"They preach wherever they can gather an audience, in the street, by the roadside, in cottages, theatres, town halls, corn exchanges, in camps and barracks. They are sure to be on race grounds, in fairs and at executions, which in England are public and draw together myriads of people. At such public gatherings several of them arrange to go together."

THE Washington Monument at Washington is to be completed. The papers are making fun of its appearance, comparing it to a chimney stack, a shot tower, and the like. But the work will go on nevertheless, and the monumeut will stand, long after the generation that ridicules it shall have passed away.

Book Notices.

COUNSEL AND ENCOURAGEMENT: Discourses on the Conduct of Life. By Hosea Ballou 2d, D. D.

This is a handsome book of upwards of four hundred pages, containing discourses upon various and well-chosen subjects, by the late lamented President of Tufts College. It is a book which will be eagerly welcomed, both by the personal friends of Dr. Ballou, and by others who have been looking for such a memorial of "the thoughts that were as a pyramid up-piled, on whose far top an angel sat

and smiled."

The book is attractively bound, and is for sale at the N. E. U. Publishing House. 37 Cornhill.

MILLIGENT HALFORD: A Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky, in the year 1865. By Miss Martha Remick, author of Agnes Stanhope. Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1865. We have always believed that our own country furnished abundant material for the novelist, and believing this, we have sometimes been a little out of patience when we noticed that so many of our most practised pens were not only confining their plots to the scenery of the Old World, but seeming to draw all their inspiration in regard to narrative details and delineation of character from European sources.

What if our history is comparatively new and brief! Every year is crowded with events, strange and startling. From the earliest dates of our national existence, the landing of the Puritans in New England, the settlement of New York by the Dutch, the occupation of the Southern States by the ancestors of their "F. F.'s" there are innumerable threads of romance running hither and thither and every | way, sometimes of so deep a crimson that we shudder as we trace the blood-red figures they have woven; sometimes so purely white that they seem lines dropt direct from the "Great Throne;" sometimes so brilliant in their hues that they seem to have been spun by fairy fingers, and again so sombre or so ghastly that we inwardly shrink and shiver as if we had inadvertently dragged the pall from a coffin, or in the dusk of day felt the touch of skeleton fingers.

Nay, more; take the veritable history of almost any one family that has emigrated within the last dozen years beyond the Mississippi, and a skilful pen could weave a novel, to say the least, quite as thrilling, both in incident and denouement, as the improbabilities of any

purely fictitious narrative. It is because we do not pick up what is under our feet, that we so often have to go abroad for specimens. Many a man will visit a foreign land at great expense to view a picture of a summer sunset, when if he would only consult his almanac and open his west window at the mentioned moment, he might see the work of God himself.

And if we tire of legends, traditions, and purely historical topics, if we want something fresh, new, modern,—the materials are at our very threshold-low or high life, as you choose. Do you want poverty? There it is, gathering into its patched bags the sweepings of railroad cars. Industry? Its calloused hands were delving this morning in those clay banks before. your eyes were open. Energy? See it tunneling its way out of those cellar depths. Patience? It is at that apple-stand, turning over the red-cheeked ones to the front. Perseverance? It haunts you in that little match-girl. Audacity? Mark that news-boy insisting on selling you a paper, when he sees your pockets are overrun with them already.

Will you go lower down and count the skin. ny hands that are held out for pennies; the white lips that cry for bread; the bare feet freezing for lack of shoes; the homeless wanderers that are glad of the summer nights because then there is only dew or warm rain to drip over them! Lower still, where- Oh, I cannot write it! Out, out of the depths, and up again where virtue keeps itself stainless amidst the soot of iniquity, and purity works its fingers to the bone; and higher still where love, true, devoted and Christ-like weaves romance into the very web and woof of daily realities.

Ah! for every class of stories the materials lie thick about us; from the sensation novel that deals in poison, murder, arson, and those yet blacker crimes which, while they seldom, perhaps, find their way into the police calendar, yet stain the genealogy of so many of our would-be-aristocrats, to the Sabbath School' library book with its poor boys emerging out of log cabins and fighting their way to the White House; and its weary sewing-girls, exchanging at last their needle for a pen, and winning literary distinction and riches.

And these national stories, when they are written, sell,-sell readily and well. The book that laid the foundation of both the fame

and fortune of one of America's most distinguished authoresses, was purely national. No other country could have furnished such a plot, because, alas, no other country had such materials.

And now, even more so than ever before, are we weaving the threads of romance into our history. The last four years have unrolled a web, that for a strange and marvellous blending of lights and shades, has nowhere its parallel. And by and by, when time shall have thrown its glamour over these years, and they speak of Springfield as we now speak of Mount Vernon, and children recite Lee's surrender as we used to that of Burgoyne, and grandfathers tell the little ones of the Rebellion as our grandfathers used to tell us of the Revolution,- then will this present period, or this period so fresh yet with us, be ransacked by story-writers of every grade, as furnishing more thrilling romances than the most fertile imagination could suggest.

Millicent Halford is a story of the early days of the Rebellion; those dark days when the most hopeful among us were trembling in every nerve; and the scene, laid in one of those border States, which was neither North nor South, and could not be neutral, hard though it might try, is a vivid picture of those troubled times. There is, indeed, a vrai-semblance to it, as a whole, which assures us that the writer either studied her part well and accurately, or else, if not really present, had authentic sources of information.

The story is straight-forward and natural, hurrying you on with a breathless interest to 'the denouement, just as we were hurried on through that first year of war; thoughts, emotions, actions born, grown and matured in less time than once they could have been conceived. With this fact kept in mind the work s artistic, finished,- even though the husband should have to leave his bride on the wedding norn; for a soldier's furlough always breaks off where it should seem only to begin.

Millicent is a fair type of our New England girls. Not one of them, but could pack their runk and start for Oregon on two days' noice, if it were necessary, and travel alone, too, or that matter, and win the respect of every nan that met her. Tender-hearted, too, not eeming it beneath her to pour out "balm tea" or an old negress and listen to her talk

about "Jim's whipping," as one friend might hear another's story. Sympathizing intuitively with slavery in its efforts to throw off its chains, praying that Fred's search for Jim might be a fruitless one, and emptying the contents of her purse into Susan's hand, without pausing to think of the heavy penalty she was laying herself open to. Equal to emergencies, taking the head of household affairs when her aunt is suddenly stricken down, and fulfilling its onerous duties as though born to them, fearless of contagion, and thoughtful even to the most minute details. Clear-sighted, able to calculate accurately from a single thought, the precise time when the fearful attack should be made upon a neighbor's home, and seeing, too, her own duty in the matter, desperate as the case seemed at that late time. Unfaltering in courage, taking the long, lonely walk without a thought of turning back, and able to hold her breath prayerfully while she crouched in the rank, wet grass, waiting for the brutal marauders to pass on to their hellish deed. Self-possessed, stilling her nerves to read to the invalid in her usual voice, when every moment she expected to see the light of the burning homestead. True to the instincts of every woman, anxious to begin the struggle of forgetfulness, the very day she discovered her heart had been given without the asking, and yet steeling herself to the wish, because duty opened another path to her. Sensible all through, doing what was before her, and leaving the issues to God.

We hold our breath in some of the chapters; that night-walk with the hounds baying on her track, and that yet more-to-be-feared man, learing at her and holding her so cruelly,— O, heavens! Our blood runs cold, for what is more horrible than the thought of a feeble girl struggling for honor and life in the grasp of a determined villain! And that night drive, with the conflagration of household treasures sheeting the heavens with lurid light, and only an inexperienced girl to manage the reins, with a dying woman to succor! Ah, it is a graphic story of what desperate strength will be born of desperate circumstances. And that single paragraph in which Frederick Leeson sces condensed the events of eight short months, is one of the most vivid portraitures of the times that could be imagined. Ordinarily eight years would be short for so many changes.

Poor Millicent, we say involuntarily, as find