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are the same generous plain fellows as you find them at home. Rev. Mr. Hall, who preaches at the chapel of the American Ambassadors has made me quite at home with him. I spent two evenings at his house in company with a party of other Americans. And the minister for the Prussian Ambassador sent me an invitation to spend an evening at his house with some Germans, English and American clergymen, but I was otherwise engaged. I sometimes attend church at his chapel and sometimes with the American. They are both very good preachers. Of course here the people are all Catholics, except strangers. I have often

been at their churches. I think many of them try to be good and pious and may stand a chance of getting to heaven, but they must reach it over a very round-about and rough way. I have seen the Pope four times. He looks like a good man.

There is a large

Italy is a pretty country but poor as a church-mouse uneven plain around Rome for many miles, with no human dwelling. The ground is rich and the climate lovely, but it has been left untilled and uncultivated so long that the deadly marshes and standing water make it so sickly in summer that nobody can live on it. No house is on it. The people have no work, and even if they had they have become schooled in doing nothing, so that many are too lazy for anything but begging. Day after day you can see hundreds of men, women and children leaning against buildings along the streets where the sun can shine on them. Strong healthy men have old cloaks thrown over them, and women squat flat down on the stony street. Going through churches beggars stop in the middle of their prayers to hold their hand or hat at you, or even stop others while they are praying. They cry after you in the streets, old and young, the healthy and the sick, the blind, halt, maimed, some without a nose, others without legs, and so on. At first I wondered where Rome got all these cripples from, but I soon heard that they came here from other countries, expecting to find more bread or money here than elsewhere. And far worse than these beggars are a class of cheating rascals with whom I had the misfortune to become acquainted. But I expected to be fleeced by them before I got through Italy, and shall consider my experience with them a necessary lesson in traveling through this country.

The more respectable Italians have excellent qualities most and are perfect gentlemen. Indeed the worst of them are not without their good side. One can see a kind of easy gentility and refined nature through the rags and grease of beggars. I was much interested in the appearance of the people on the Alban and Sabine mountains. In almost every village they are dressed differently. In some the men wear short breeches to the knees, with rags tied around their feet and legs, with cords for boots or shoes, and hats that come almost to a point at the top with a broad brim. The women wear tight red jackets, with sleeves and loose flowing petticoats hung to them, with lots of gold on their ears, neck and fingers. Some of them are very pretty. Their faces are of a dark complexion with a rosy tinge, their eyes black, eye-brows and hair black as a raven, whose tresses often dangle loosely over their gold plated ears and neck. During eight days before Christmas there are a great many in and about Rome, who go from house to house playing with a Scottish bag-pipe, or what you would perhaps call a "double sack." They

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have a large bladder-looking bag under the arm, which they blow full of wind, and press it through a pipe which squeals for a whole hour without getting out of breath. They have an excellent breed of cattle in the campagne about Rome. They are all of a dark ash color, very large, with horns half as long as their bodies. Three-fourths of the horses here are black, many of them most noble animals. The poorer people mostly use donkeys-maul esel-little animals with more head and ears than beauty. The Roman donkey excels any others I have seen in their strangling, boisterous braying. Did you ever hear the braying of an ass? It sounds as if their throats were cut, and they were hickuping their last kicks.

There are about 3000 strangers at Rome now, of which 300 are Americans and 1300 English. Erben came here week before last. Perhaps he will go with me to Egypt, &c. I am well pleased with Rome, have seen and enjoyed myself more here than in any city where I have been. I would like to remain here a month longer if I did not wish to visit Palestine. In a few weeks the flowers and trees will blossom. The roses bloom in the open air now, and I have plucked many. wild daliahs around the ruins.

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THE ANGEL OF PATIENCE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF SPITTA.

"Ye have need of patience."-HEB. X, 36

A gentle Angel walketh throughout a world of woe,
With messages of mercy to mourning hearts below;
His peaceful smile invites them to love and to confide,
Oh follow in His footsteps, keep closely by his side.

So gently will He lead thee, through all the cloudy day,
And whisper of glad tidings to cheer the pilgrim-way ;
His courage never failing, when thine is almost gone,
He takes thy heavy burden, and helps to bear it on.

To soft and tearful sadness, He changes dumb despair,
And soothes to deep submission the storm of grief and care;
Where midnight shades are brooding, He pours the light of noon,
And every grievous wound He heals, most surely, if not soon.

He will not blame thy sorrows, while He brings the healing balm;
He does not chide thy longings, while He soothes them into calm;
And when thy heart is murmuring, and wildly asking why?
He smiling beckons forward, points upward to the sky.

He will not always answer thy questions and thy fear:
His watchword is, "Be patient, the journey's end is near!"
And ever through the toilsome way. He tells of joys to come,
And points the pilgrim to his rest, the wanderer to his home.

NO OTHER RESORT FOR YOUNG MEN.

BY THE EDITOR.

"ONE of the principal resorts at night are the billiard saloons, which are fitted up in a scale of magnificence that dazzles the beholder. Large mirrors and pictures adorn the walls, and glass-drops depend from the gas-fixtures and sparkle and flash amid a hundred lights. I went into one of these saloons which contained twelve of fourteen tables, all of which were in full play. All the players were young men. Young men have no other place of resort."

This is an extract from a letter written for one of our Daily papers from Chicago, by one who is evidently himself a young man. Such a paragraph from a young man relating to young men, fills one with deep sadness. What a commentary on the manner of life among young men in Chicago! And, what is worse, it is but a truthful statement of what characterizes a large majority of this interesting class in other cities and larger inland towns. The young man who reads this may regard us as old-fashioned in our views of the diversions of young men; but yet we venture to say that any young man who can spend this seed-time season of life in the way of those alluded to is preparing for himself an afterlife of repentance which may come too late.

We would be the last to protest demurely against the innocent enjoyments of youth. Even as the birds sing more joyfully in Spring-time than in autumn, so do we gladly see youth buoyant and cheerful-but not in saloons! Those who begin life in saloons are likely to end life in nothing higher. Those young men to whom these are the sacred places of early life, and whose early associations and habits are bound up in them, are in a fair way to find themselves at length among the wrecks and moral off-fals of saloons-where a life that might have been noble, lies drearly behind as a melancholy failure.

In the fact that these resorts are made attractive to a youthful fancy, "fitted up on a scale of magnificence that dazzles the beholder," the evil spirit shows its subtlety. Not only are these saloons the initiation to the taste and habits of gambling, but are sure to open the way to many kinds of "evil communications which corrupt good manners." Instead of a recreation that invigorates mind and body, they become the hot-beds of feebleness and disease. The singular fascination of the game allures into late hours; and in vain does the excited body and fevered brain seek rest on the pillow when the tide of night already flows toward the morning; for he that passes the midnight hour has surmounted that natural call for repose which makes sleep refreshing. He that will not obey the summons when at a reasonable hour after the evening all nature invites the active powers to repose, will find that same nature gently but irresistably summoning him to wakefulness, and the struggle will be a restlessness which no desire for slumber can overcome. Such a course cannot fail to bring on in due time a diseased condition of body and a morbid state of mind.

Do you believe that "the young men have no other place of resort?"

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Not a word of it is true. Are there no avenues for the evening walk in God's pure health-giving air? no churches open for the evening lecture or meeting for prayer? no reading rooms and libraries? no private rooms for study and mental improvement? no intelligent and virtuous social circles in the bosom of which one always becomes silently wiser and better? Away with such miserable excuses for folly and sin. He who finds it more pleasant to the flesh to move on in the broad and welltrodden way to final sorrow may indeed persuade himself that there is not a narrow and a better way; but his wilful blindness and folly do not make it so. His foolish heart may apologize for him on the ground that "there is no other resort," but his reproaching conscience and sense of self-condemnation will treat him otherwise when once he finds himself lying amid the wrecks at the end of the race.

We know a young man, who in the course of his business as a journeyman mechanic, was thrown among a company of young fellow-workmen who had "no other resort," as they thought, but to spend their evenings in playing cards in a mill which they were at the time furnishing with its inside machinery and fixtures. He having been trained to different habits had no difficulty in finding another "place of resort." He procured for himself candles, fixed up for himself a study in a finished boltchest, where he spent his evenings in reading, writing, and study. As we know him well, we have been frequently assured that he still remembers some things which he learned in that bolting chest; and he is firmly of the opinion that those evenings were among the most pleasant and profitable of his whole life. While the card players would fall out in the game, and swear in fearful style at one another, the echoes of which would ring through the mill, he was getting along on the very best of terms with the poets, historians, and sages of other days. These conversed with him kindly and wisely, and did not seem at all ashamed or impatient of his humble company. He has since then learned a number of things which he knew not, nor learned in the bolting chest; but he has never yet been persuaded to believe that young men in any place, or under any circumstances, "have no other place of resort" than billiard saloons.

REMARKABLE WORKS OF HUMAN LABOR.

NINEVEH was 15 miles long, 8 wide, and 40 miles round, with a wall 100 feet high, and thick enough for three chariots abreast. Babylon was 50 miles within the walls, which were 75 feet thick, and 300 feet high, with 100 brazen gates. The temple of Diana, at Ephesus, was 429 feet to support the roof. It was a hundred years in building. The largest of the pyramids is 481 feet high, and 653 on the sides: its base covers 11 acres. The stones are about 30 feet in length, and the layers are 208. It employed 330,000 men in building. The labyrinth of Egypt contains 300 chambers, and 12 halls. Thebes, in Egypt, presents ruins 27 miles round, and had 100 gates. Carthage was 23 miles round. Athens was 25 miles round, and contained 259,000 citizens and 400,000 slaves. The Temple of Delphos was so rich in donations, that it was plundered of $500,000, and Nero carried away from it 500 statues. The walls of Rome were 13 miles round.

THE LORD'S PRAYER.

THE following leautiful Poem, from its pious sentiments as well as being a curious specimen of composition, well deserves a place among our Sabbath reading. The author of it is not known. There are only two transcript copies extant. In one, it is said to have been written by King James I., and in the other, it is ascribed to Bishop Andrews:

If any be distressed, and would gather
Some comfort, let them haste unto

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