light up all the year, and keep the little fellows perennial candidates for hope. How much happiness is purchased for how little in the Holidays! And it is easily calculated that if eighteen pence will render a boy just turned of six, supremely happy, two-and-six pence will make a lad of nine, a prince. Who wouldn't invest in such property! But those eyes; there they are yet, looking over the table's edge, and I cannot help dreading the time when they will look down upon it, and one can see shadows in them, and the coming of a real tear in them for children seldom weep and a heavy light in them, and dimness and death in them. True, there are shadows there now, but they are like those "by a cloud in a summer-day made, Looking down on a field of blossoming clover." A cloud! Life itself is a morning cloud, and whether with shadows or glory, glides swiftly and silently by. The Wonders of "Galena.” SOME BODY, curious in minerals, has sent me a piece of Lead Ore, as bright in coloring and regular in form, as if it had been made by hand,' and there lies the little cube on the table, this minute. I am informed it is some eighty-five per cent. pure lead, and it is very likely. Lead is gray, sometimes "silver gray," it is dull, it has no music in it, it cannot be shaped into swords, nor yet into ploughshares, and yet it is not without its poetry. True, we cannot make blades or bells of it, but we can make balls. Who would suppose now, looking at that dull lump of lead, that it ever 'took to itself wings,' like gold, its better, and flew away? I said it had no music in it, but I was too fast; I retract, for there is a little song in that stupid block, that has charmed princely ears before now. Was it Charles the XIIth, or Frederick the Great, that thought the singing of bullets, the sweetest of singing? Sing? Maybe you do not think lead can sing? But moulded into bullets, and flying like hail upon the field of battle, you shall hear its song, as it hums by like a harmless bird. Often and often has it proved a knell to strong, tall warriors; often and often has it made widows and orphans, and done what preachers could not do-brought tears into dry eyes. Ah! there is a wonderful eloquence, as well as a wonderful song, in the steel-gray lead. Sometimes it sounds a little like a sigh, and it is not to be marvelled at, considering the errand it so often goes on. But there is more about lead than has been told yet. Look at it now, so cloddish, so senseless. It has no endurance; place it in the fire, and it runs away; it cannot resist heat. Strike it with a hammer, but it gives out no ringing cry; it is dumb. And yet, senseless as it is, they have made a nerve of it, and hundreds of lives and thousands of hopes depend upon its doing its office. Mists are over the water and clouds are over the sky, and the lights are out on the shore-the lee shore-and the vessel is bewildered, if not lost. They must move-they keep moving. Shall they go upon the rocks? Shall they drive upon the shore, a broken wreck? Heaven has no eyes for them, earth no eyes, they no eyes, and so they must feel their way into port. Down goes the lead: "five fathoms!" "Six "Seven fathoms !" "All right!" fathoms !" keep heaving. Heave the lead!— There! move on steadily. Deeper, deeper, grows the water. They have made the harbor. They are safe! They felt their way through the waves, through the night, through the storm; and the wonderful nerve was a line with a lump of Lead. The Old-Fashioned Fire. Down goes the mercury to the zero of Celius and Reaumur. Down it goes again, to the 0 of Fahrenheit. The frost is creeping, creeping over the lower panes, one after another. Now it finishes a feather; now it completes a plume; now it tries its hand at a specimen of silver-graining. Up, up it goes, pane after pane, clouds, and feathers, and grains. Here a joint, there a nail cracks like a craft in a racking storm; but all is calm and cold as death. goes a forgotten glass in the pantry. The door-latch Clink! is plated; half-hidden nail-heads, here and there in the corners, are 'silvered o'er with '-frost. But what cared we for that, as we sat by the oldfashioned fire? Back-stick, fore-stick, top-stick, and superstructure, all in their places. The coals are turned out from their glowing bed between the sentinel andirons the old-time irons, with huge rings in the top. One of them has rested, for many a day, on a broken brick, but what of that? Many a beautiful tree, nay, a whole grove, maybe, has turned to glory and to ashes thereon, and will again, winters and winters to come. A handful of 'kindlings' is placed beneath this future temple of flame; here and there a chip, a splinter, a dry twig, is skilfully chinked into the interstices of the structure; a wave or two of the housewife's wand of power, and the hearth is "swept up." The old bricks in that altar-place of home, begin to grow bright, and 'as good as new.' A little spiring flame, ambitious to be something and some body, creeps stealthily up, and peeps through the crevices, over this stick, under that one, looking like a little half-furled banner of crimson. Then come another and another, and down they go again, the timid flames that they are! By and by they grow |