The poor man, with his half dozen children, toils, and often dies, under the vain labor of winning bread for them. God feeds his family of countless myriads swarming over the surface of all his countless worlds, and none know need but through the follies or the cruelty of their fellows. God pours his light from innumerable suns on innumerable rejoicing planets; he waters them everywhere in the fitting moment; he ripens the food of globes and of nations, and gives them fair weather to garner it; and from age to age, amid his creatures of endless forms and powers, in the beauty, and the sunshine, and the magnificence of Nature, he seems to sing throughout creation the glorious song of his own divine joy in the immortality of his youth, in the omnipotence of his nature, in the eternity of his patience, and the abounding boundlessness of his love.

What a family hangs on his sustaining arm! The life and souls of infinite ages and of uncounted worlds! Let a moment's failure of his power, of his watchfulness, or of his will to do good, occur, and what a sweep of death and annihilation through the universe! How stars would reel, planets expire, and nations perish! But from age to age no such catastrophe occurs, even in the midst of national crimes, and of atheism that denies the hand that made and feeds it: life springs with a power ever new, food springs up as plentifully to sustain it, and sunshine and joy are poured over all from the invisible throne of God, as the poetry of the existence he has given. If there come seasons of dearth or of failure, they come but as warnings to proud and tyrannic man. The potato is smitten, that a nation may not be oppressed for ever; and the harvest is diminished, that the laws of man's unnatural avarice may be rent asunder. And then again the sun shines, the rain falls, and the earth rejoices in a renewed beauty, and in a redoubled plenty.

It is amid one of these rises that we at this moment stand, and hail the month of harvests with unmingled joy. Never did the finger of God demonstrate his beneficent will more perspicuously than at this moment. The nations have been warned and rebuked, and again the bounty of heaven overflows the earth in golden billows of the ocean of abundance. God wills that all the arts of man to check his bounty, to create scarcity to establish dearness, to enfeeble the hand of the laborer, and curse the table of the poor, shall be put to shame. That his creatures shall eat and be glad, whether corn-dealers and speculators live or die.

Nations, therefore, have fittingly rejoiced every century since the creation in the joyfulness of harvest. It has been a time of activity and of songs. Never was there a generation that had more cause to put forth their reaping and rejoicing hands and sing so heartily as ours. The coming month will see the Pharaoh of monstrous monopoly, and all his wretched selfish hosts, drowned in the Red Sea of abundance. The corn dealers will be smothered in the showering-down heaps of their own commodity; the speculator who has so long sought his own fattening at the cost of a nation's starvation and misery, shall find that there is a greater speculator in the blue serene above him, whose hand can whelm him in the gulf of his own schemes, and craze all the chariot wheels of his cunning. Praise to God-the God of harvests-and to Him whose cattle are on a thousand hills. Let us go out and rejoice amid the sunshine, and the wheat stooping to the sickle, and the barley to the scythe, and in the certain assurance that the loaf never was cheaper than it shall be within the next six months, never the heart of labor more strengthened with abundance.

There is no month more beautiful than August. It has a serene splendor and maturity about it that is delightful. The soil is dry, the sky is bright and beautiful, with scattered and silvery clouds. The foliage is full and luxuriant—the grass fields mown in June and July are now full of the richest green, and cattle wander in finest condition through them, or lie in groups around worthy of a painter's hand. There is a sort of second spring in trees, the oak and the elm, especially, putting forth new shoots of a lighter tint. The hedges put on the same vernal looking hue, and the heather on the moors, and sweet scabiuses, blue chicory, the large white convolvulus, hawkweeds, honeysuckles, and the small blue campanula, make the fields gay. The nuts, still green, hang in prodigal clusters on the tall old hedges of old woodland lanes. Young frogs in thousands are issuing from the waters, and traversing the roads; and birds having terminated their spring cares, are out enjoying their families in the sunny and plentiful fields.

THE VIRGIN MARTYR.-MASSINGER AND DECKER

Angelo, an angel, attends Dorothea as a page.

ANGELO. DOROTHEA.

Dor. My book and taper.

The time, Midnight,

Ang. Here, most holy mistress.

Dor. Thy voice sends forth such music, that I never

Was ravished with a more celestial sound.

Were every servant in the world like thee,

So full of goodness, angels would come down
To dwell with us: thy name is Angelo,
And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest;
Thy youth with too much watching is opprest.

Ang. No, my dear lady. I could weary stars,
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,
By my late watching, but to wait on you.
When at your prayers you kneel before the altar
Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven,
So blest I hold me in your company.
Therefore, my most loved mistress, do not bid
Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence;
For then you break his heart.

Dor. Be nigh me still, then.

In golden letters down I'll set that day,
Which gave thee to me. Little did I hope
To meet such words of comfort in thyself,
This little, pretty body, when I coming
Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy,
My se et-fac'd, godly beggar-boy, crave an alms,
Which with glad hand I gave, with lucky hand;
And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom
Methought was filled with no wanton fire,
But with a holy flame, mounting since higher,
On wings of cherubims, than it did before.
Ang. Proud am I that my lady's modest eye
So likes so poor a servant.

Dor. I have offer'd

Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents.
I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some,
To dwell with thy good father; for, the son
Bewitching me so deeply with his presence,
He that begot him must do 't ten times more.
I pray thee, my sweet boy, show me thy parents;
Be not ashamed.

Ang. I am not: I did never

Know who my mother was; but, by yon palace,

Fill'd with bright heav'nly courtiers, I dare assure you, And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand,

My father is in heav'n; and, pretty mistress

If your illustrious hour-glass spend his sand
No worse, than yet it doth, upon my life,
You and I both shall meet my father there,
And he shall bid you welcome.
Dor. A bless'd day!

MY MOTHER'S BIBLE.-GEORGE P. MORRIS.

This book is all that's left me now!-
Tears will unbidden start-
With faltering lip and throbbing brow,
I press it to my heart.

For many generations past,

Here is our family tree;

My mother's hands this Bible clasp'd;
She, dying, gave it me.

Ah! well do I remember those

Whose names these records bear:
Who round the hearth-stone used to close
After the evening prayer,

And speak of what these pages said,

In tones my heart would thrill!
Though they are with the silent dead,
Here are they living still!

My father read this holy book
To brothers, sisters dear;

How calm was my poor mother's look,
Who lean'd God's word to hear.

Her angel face-I see it yet!

What thronging memories come!

Again that little group is met

Within the halls of home!

Thou truest friend man ever knew,

Thy constancy I've tried;

Where all were false I found thee true,

My counsellor and guide.

The mines of earth no treasures give

That could this volume buy:

In teaching me the way to live,
It taught me how to die.

DESCRIPTION OF A DUTCH VILLAGE.-D. G. MITCHELL.

A HALF-HOUR's sail brought us in sight of the church spire, rising from among the trees; and soon appeared the chimneytops, and finally the houses themselves, of the little town of Broek-all prettily reflected in a clear side-basin of the canal.

A town it hardly is; but a group of houses among rich trees, where eight hundred neighbors live, and make things so neat, that strangers come a thousand miles for a look at the wondrous nicety. Passing by the basin of smooth water that reflected so prettily the church and the trees, we stopped before a little inn, finely shaded with a beech trained into an arbor all over the front. A very, very pretty blue-eyed Dutch girl of sixteen, received me. We could talk nothing together; but there happened a stupid old Meinheer smoking with his wife at the door, through whom I explained my wants.

I saw by the twinkle in her eye that she comprehended. If I had spoken an hour it could not have been better—my dinner. There were cutlets white as the driven snow, and wine with cobwebs of at least a year's date on the bottle, and the nicest of Dutch cheese, and strawberries, and profusion of delicious cream.

The blue-eyed girl had stolen out to put on another dress, while I was busy with the first cutlet; and she wore one of the prettiest little, handkerchiefs imaginable on her shoulders, and she glided about the table so noiselessly, so charmingly, and arranged the dishes so neatly, and put so heaping a plateful of strawberries before me, that-confound me! I should have kept by the dinner-table until night, if the old lady had not put her head in the door, to say-there was a person without who would guide me through the village.

"And who is to be my guide?" said I, as well as I could say it.

The old lady pointed opposite. I thought she misunderstood me, and asked her again.

She pointed the same way—it was a stout woman with a baby in her arms!

Was there ever such a Cicerone before? I looked incredulously at my hostess; she looked me honestly enough back, and set her arms a-kimbo. I tried to understand her to point to her blue-eyed daughter, who was giggling behind her shoulder -but she was inexorable.