took place long before man was made: indeed, man could not have lived on the earth in those days, for it was not yet ready for him.

But how is it that the coal burns as it does? Let me tell you a great wonder. The coal is just a great prison of sunbeams, and when you set fire to it the sunbeams are set free, and you get the light of days that shone ages on ages ago, to cheer and warm you now! Plants drink in the light and grow by its help. It takes all the sunshine of a long summer to make the leaves and blossoms you see in a year, and to add one thin ring of wood to the trunk and branches of a tree; and you may think how many years it must have taken to grow flowers and leaves and trees enough to make all the coal there is, after they had been squeezed so small and close, and how much light of the old sunshine of the days when they were growing must be shut up in the black lumps we burn. A coal fire is just so much sunshine kindled again into brightness, after lying hid in the coal, far down in the earth, for ages and ages.

But this is not all the wonder in a piece of coal. Where are all the colours of the flowers and leaves, if the coal be made of them? Just look into the fire. Do you see these red and yellow flames? They are the very colours of the old flowers that helped to make the coal. Look at the bright green and blue, and mauve and magenta, and rose and yellow ribbons, on the ladies or on the girls around. you. Where do you think most of these colours come from? They are got from the tar that oozes out of coal when it is heated, and they are nothing

but the bright lovely colours of the old old flowers and leaves. But how did the leaves and flowers get these lovely colours? They drank in the colours of the old old sunshine, which was just the same then as it is now, and you. see in the rainbow what that is; and all these colours are just the rainbow colours of the light that made the summers when these flowers and leaves were growing. But where is the sweet smell of these old old flowers? Why

you can buy it at the shops, if you like; for some of the sweetest perfumes that we have are made from coal, and are just the perfume of the buds and blossoms that waved in the summer light ages of ages of ages ago.

If you think on all this it will be well.

QUESTIONS.--Where is coal found? Of what is it made? How many plants are found in coal? Of what kinds are they chiefly ? What plants are they like, of those we know? What creatures lived then? What are the colours of the flames? What are the colours of the dyes? What are they got from? What are the light and heat of coal? Is the smell of these old flowers to be had yet?

THE GOLDEN

Songs.

WE sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move;
The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun;
The dark Earth follows wheel'd in her ellipse;
And human things returning on themselves
Move onward, leading up the golden year.

Ah, tho' the times, when some new thought can bud,

Are but as poets' seasons when they flower,
Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore,
Have ebb and flow conditioning their march,
And slow and sure comes up the golden year.

When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps,
But smit with freër light shall slowly melt
In many streams to fatten lower lands,
And light shall spread, and man be liker man
Thro' all the season of the golden year.

Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens?
If all the world were falcons, what of that?
The wonder of the eagle were the less,
But he not less the eagle. Happy days
Roll onward, leading up the golden year.

Fly, happy, happy sails, and bear the Press;
Fly happy with the mission of the Cross;

Knit land to land, and blowing havenward
With silks, and fruits, and spices, clear of toll,
Enrich the markets of the golden year.

But we grow old. Ah! when shall all men's good
Be each man's rule, and universal Peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea
Thro' all the circle of the golden year.

Even

NOTHING is harder, and nothing is more noble, than to think of others rather than of ourselves. in trifles we are apt to think of our own pleasure rather than that of others, and the difficulty of being unselfish increases with the value of the sacrifice required. Instances are not wanting, however, of noble self-denial, even in the most extreme cases, as, for instance, where personal suffering, or even the demands of life, seemed to excuse indulgence. No agony, it is said, is greater than that of excessive thirst, and yet some have been known who have handed to others, in their own direst extremity, the cup of cold water which they might themselves have drunk. Nor has it been only the common pangs of thirst that have thus been endured; some have even resisted the aggravations

added by fever, wounds, or the deadly faintness of approaching death.

Thus it is related of Alexander the Great that

when he was marching back his army from the Indus, after having conquered Asia, the route taken led them through a terrible desert called Gedrosia,* on the shores of the Persian Gulf. I hope you will look in the map to see exactly where these places are. On the left was the salt sea, under their feet an endless waste of sand and gravel, and on their right towered ranges of mountains of bare red stone. Over all a cloudless sky oppressed them with sweltering heat, from which there was no escape.

No

thing could save the whole force from destruction but the greatest exertion, that they might get through this fearful region before they sank under its horrors. Alexander shared all the hardships