An indifferent life is a stagnant pool covered with the slime of its own selfishness. Such a life is its own curse. If you have never felt the fire of a righteous anger burn upon its altar, if you have never felt the pulses leap and throb, if you have never felt your whole being heated by the glow of a great purpose for which you would die, you have not yet learned to live! Great reforms may break upon the nation's hope as the dawn flushes the hill-tops; a world lying in darkness may tremble in its woe; thrones may go down and war shake the nations; yet there are souls proud of their very indifference, whose only care is how it will affect the price of pork.

No more blighting, freezing, soul-destroying curse can fall upon life than this indifference. Much of it is caused by fear of popular opinion. Conviction is smothered and the mask of indifference worn until it corrupts life. It were better to die one's self than to kill a God-given conviction, better to be tossed aloft and carried on the whirlwind of popular indignation than to ride in the chariot of popular applause while the moan of a needy world falls unheeded on the ear. We should be thankful when the world is roused enough from its indifference to oppose should thank God for its current of unrest caused by conviction, for the earnestness that does not cry "Peace! Peace! when there is no peace." Our life is a warfare. Christ said, "I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword," and so long as evil exists, so long as selfishness is opposed to righteousness, so long as God and God's great enemy are at war, there is no room for indifference. We sleep and drift with folded hands while destin hardens in the mould of time, and eternity reaches out to wrap us in its embrace.

Let us rouse from the rust of indifference, coerce our own inertia, bend our back to the world's burden and the Saviour's cross. Let us place our feet firmly on the threshold of our future, and with brow bared to the world's frown and finger on the world's hot pulse, live for eternity.

S. L. GUTHRIE.

THE SQUIRE'S BARGAIN.

COME, all who love a merry jest, and listen while I tell A tale of what in ancient days, the good old times, befell; How greed and cunning both were foiled by simple mother-wit,

And he who went abroad to spoil, returned, the biter bit.

Was once an ancient manor-house, and Squire of high degree;

A true and fearless heart was his, an open hand and free. Content amid his own, he lived in patriarchal state, And cheerily welcomed all within his hospitable gate.

High in the neighboring valley rose an abbey's towers fair;

Its bells rang morning, noon and night, to call the monks to prayer.

And some were good and holy men, but some, we needs must say,

In idle pleasures, lust of gold, passed all their lives away.

The Abbot cast a longing eye upon his neighbor's field, Which, year by year, the richest crops abundantly did yield;

"This land shall yet be mine," he said, "my right shall none gainsay;

The Abbot's word is worth a Squire's on any summer's day."

Now see our lordly Prelate mid a pile of parchments sit, And twist each clause until he finds a quibble that will fit.

"Eureka!" Writs and summonses, and soon the thing is done,

Before the Squire has time to think, the cause is lost and

won.

Ah! now the triumph: "Yours no more this field to plow or sow,

Good neighbor, where you scattered seed, my monks shall reap and mow.'

The Squire bowed low:

day,

1

"For me,

if So, it is a woful

As, loyal still to king and law, I dare not say you nay.

"So, since the land I loved is gone, its loss I will not weep,

But only beg this little boon, one crop to sow and reap, But one, and when 'tis ripe to fall beneath the mower's

hand,

Content, I'll yield my ancient rights, give up my father's land."

"Why, no great boon," the Abbot thought. Then loud, "I do agree,

And then when once more sown and reaped, that field belongs to me."

'Twas signed and sealed. Well pleased withal, the Abbot homeward rode.

The Squire his men together called, the field they plowed and sowed.

"Twas autumn when the seed was sown, and soon the winter's snow

Came down o'er all, to keep it warm, his white fur coat to throw ;

And slow and sad the days went past, came frost and sleet and rain;

Then sunshine in the soft blue skies; and spring was come again.

Oh! merry were the children then; the young lambs leaped in play;

The skylark carolled o'er the clouds, the robin from the spray;

The swelling buds grew green and burst on field and

forest tree,

And daisies white and violets were laughing on the lea.

The rivers ran, the fields began to don their dress of green

And soon the monks went peering round the Squire's old land, I ween,

Their Abbot too, with Hodge, his man, to see what had been sown,

And guess, if early grain or late, what time it should be

mown.

The crop was green; they gazed, they sniffed:

what new blade is here?"

"Ha!

Not wheat nor barley, oats nor rye! So much, at least, is clear.

What seed was this? "The Squire," grinned Hodge, "has played you all a hoax.

To judge, Lord Abbot, by the leaf, 'tis sown with seed of oaks."

The Abbot raged, the Abbot stormed, his wrath was all in vain,

For signed and sealed, in black and white, the contract told it plain

That, when the crop was ripe to fall beneath the mower's

hand,

Then only should the Squire be called to yield the monks his land.

Now of our monks and merry Squire not much remains to tell.

The years rolled past, the abbey towers in crumbling ruins fell,

Then centuries, till monk nor friar were found in all the

land,

But still that field of oaks remains untouched by mow

er's hand.

E. M. TRAQUAIR.

THE THANKSGIVING IN BOSTON HARBOR. ·

July, 1630.

["So we came, by the good hand of the Lord, through the deep comfortably, paching or expounding the Word of the Lord every day for ten weeks toher."-ROGER CLAP, on the voyage of the Mary and John.]

"PRAISE ye the Lord!"

Still rises on our ears,

The psalm to-day

Borne from the hills of Boston Bay
Through five times fifty years.

When Winthrop's fleet from Yarmouth crept
Out to the open main,

And through the widening waters swept
In April sun and rain.

66

Pray to the Lord with fervent lips,"
The leader shouted, "Pray;"

And prayer arose from all the ships,
As faded Yarmouth Bay.

They passed the Scilly Isles that day,
And May-days came, and June,
And thrice upon the ocean lay
The full orb of the moon.

And as that day, on Yarmouth Bay,
Ere England sunk from view,
While yet the rippling Solent lay
In April skies of blue,

Pray to the Lord with fervent lips,"
Each morn was shouted, "Pray;"
And prayer arose from all the ships,
As first in Yarmouth Bay.

Blew warm the breeze o'er Western seas,
Through Maytime morns, and June,
Till hailed these souls the Isles of Shoals,
Low 'neath the summer moon;

And as Cape Ann arose to view,

And Norman's Woe they passed,

The wood doves came the white mists through,
And circled round each mast.