of New England at that day, on the score of courage, would be essentially erroneous. It is true, they were not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for the mere glory of the sacrifice. They had always a prudent and wholesome regard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon sound heads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too serious and important, and their hardgained property too valuable, to be lightly hazarded. They never attempted to cheat themselves by underestimating the difficulty to be encountered or shutting their eyes to its probable conse quences. Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indian warfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, they had little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the British regular army. When danger could no longer be avoided they met it with firmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of its magnitude. Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with the history of our fathers that the element of fear held an important place among their characteristics. It exaggerated all the dangers of their earthly pilgrimage and peopled the future with shapes of evil. Their fear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence and almost reached the point of reverence. The slightest shock of

an earthquake filled all hearts with terror. Stout men trembled by their hearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch. And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with these ter rors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought to the trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform of modern philosophy. They were heroic in endurance. Panics like the one we have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; but they stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder and the hail of actual calamity.

It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex county that no wicked wag of a tory undertook to immortalize in rhyme their ridiculous hegira, as Judge Hopkinson did the famous Battle of the Kegs in Philadelphia. Like the more recent Madawaska war in Maine, the great Chepatchet demonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, it remains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung ;" and the fast-fading memory of age alone preserves the unwritten history of the great Ipswich fright.

LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES.

"THEY that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who took offence at his companions the poor, the degraded, the weak, and the sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth. I will have mercy, and not sacrifice; for I am come not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."

The great lesson of duty inculcated by this answer of the divine Teacher has been too long overlooked by individuals and communities professedly governed by his maxims. The phylacteries of our modern Pharisees are as broad as those of the old Jewish saints. The respectable Christian detests his vicious and ill-conditioned neighbors as heartily as the Israelite did the publicans and sinners of his day. He folds his robe of self-righteousness closely about him, and denounces as little better than sinful weakness all commiseration for the guilty; and all attempts to restore and reclaim the erring violators of human law otherwise than by pains and penalties as

wicked collusion with crime, dangerous to the stability and safety of society and offensive in the sight of God. And yet nothing is more certain than that, just in proportion as the example of our Lord has been followed in respect to the outcast and criminal, the effect has been to reform and elevate - to snatch as brands from the burning souls not yet wholly given over to the service of evil. The wonderful influence for good exerted over the most degraded and reckless criminals of London by the excellent and self-denying Elizabeth Fry, the happy results of the establishment of houses of refuge and reformation and Magdalen asylums, all illustrate the wisdom of Him who went about doing good, in pointing out the morally diseased as the appropriate subjects of the benevolent labors of his disciples. No one is to be despaired of. We have no warrant to pass by any of our fellow-creatures as beyond the reach of God's grace and mercy; for, beneath the most repulsive and hateful outward manifestation, there is always a consciousness of the beauty of goodness and purity, and of the loathsomeness of sin

one chamber of the heart as yet not wholly profaned, whence at times arises the prayer of a burdened and miserable spirit for deliverance. Deep down under the squalid exterior, unparticipative in the hideous merriment and recklessness of the criminal, there is another self, — a chained and suffering inner man, crying out, in the

intervals of intoxication and brutal excesses, like Jonah from the bosom of hell. To this lingering consciousness the sympathy and kindness of benevolent and humane spirits seldom appeal in vain; for, whatever may be outward appearances, it remains true that the way of the transgressor is hard, and that sin and suffering are inseparable. Crime is seldom loved or persevered in for its own sake; but, when once the evil path is entered upon, a return is in reality extremely difficult to the unhappy wanderer, and often seems well nigh impossible. The laws of social life rise up like insurmountable barriers between him and escape. As he turns towards the society whose rights he has outraged its frown settles upon him; the penalties of the laws he has violated await him; and he falls back despairing, and suffers the fetters of the evil habit to whose power he has yielded himself to be fastened closer and heavier upon him. O for some good angel, in the form of a brother-man and touched with a feeling of his sins and infirmities, to reassure his better nature and to point out a way of escape from its body of death!

We have been led into these remarks by an account, given in the London Weekly Chronicle, of a most remarkable interview between the professional thieves of London and Lord Ashley a gentleman whose best patent of nobility is to be found in his generous and untiring devotion to the interests of his fellow-men. It