Tenderness, pity, regret, as after a pause he proceeded: "Yonder there, on the hill by the sea, lies buried Rose

Standish;

Beautiful rose of love, that bloomed for me by the wayside!

She was the first to die of all who came in the Mayflower! Green above her is growing the field of wheat we have sown there,

Better to hide from the Indian scouts the graves of our

people,

Lest they should count them and see how many already have perished!"

Sadly his face he averted, and strode up and down, and was thoughtful.

From "The Courtship of Miles Standish. "

A LETTER

BY JANE CARLYLE

So many talents are wasted, so many enthusiasms turned to smoke, so many lives spoilt, for want of recognizing that it is not the greatness or littleness of the duty nearest hand, but the spirit in which one does it, that makes one's doing noble or mean. I can't think how people who have any natural ambition, and any sense of power in them, escape going mad in a world like this, without the recognition of that.

I had gone with my husband to live on a little estate of peat-bog, that had descended to me all the way down from John Welsh, the Covenanter who married a daughter of John Knox. That didn't, I am ashamed to say, make me feel Craigenputtock a whit less of a peat-bog, and a most dreary, untoward place to live in. Further, we were very poor, and, further and worst, being an only child, and brought up to "great prospects," I was sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar and a very fair mathematician.

It behooved me, in these astonishing circumstances, to learn to sew! Husbands, I was shocked to find, wore their stockings into holes, and were always losing buttons; and I was expected to "look to all that." Also it behooved me to learn to cook!-no capable servant

choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way place. It was plainly my duty as a Christian wife to bake at home! So I sent for Cobbett's Cottage Economy, and fell to work at a loaf of bread.

But, knowing nothing about the process of fermentation, or the heat of ovens, it came to pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that myself ought to have been put into bed. And I remained the only person not asleep in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock struck, and then two, and then three, and still I was sitting there, in an immense solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a sense of forlornness and degradation, that I, who had been so petted at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the house, who had never been required to do anything but cultivate my mind, should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching a loaf of bread-which might not turn out bread after all!

Such thoughts maddened me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud. It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all night watching his "Perseus" in the furnace came into my head, and suddenly I asked myself--"After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers, what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus, and a loaf of bread, so that each be the thing one's hand has found to do?"

Abridged.

MARMION AND DOUGLAS

BY SIR WALTER SCOTT

The train from out the castle drew,
But Marmion stopped to bid adieu:

"Though something I might 'plain," he said,

"Of cold respect to stranger guest,

Sent hither by your king's behest,

While in Tantallon's towers I stayed,
Part we in friendship from your land,
And, noble earl, receive my hand."
But Douglas round him drew his cloak,
Folded his arms, and thus he spoke:
"My manors, halls, and bowers shall still
Be open at my sovereign's will
To each one whom he lists, howe'er
Unmeet to be the owner's peer.
My castles are my king's alone,
From turret to foundation-stone-
The hand of Douglas is his own,
And never shall in friendly grasp
The hand of such as Marmion clasp."
Burned Marmion's swarthy cheek like fire
And shook his very frame for ire,

And-"This to me!" he said,

"And 'twere not for thy hoary beard,