it discloses to you! What an airy, fairy, crystalline splendor! What delicate spires of feathery light shoot out from the center, with tiny fringes, and rosy, radiating bars!

8. In all your life you have never seen anything more beautiful, more perfect; and you may stand "breast-high" in just such marvelous radiance. Talk of robbers' caves and magic lamps! No Eastern imagination, rioting in "barbaric pearl and gold," can eclipse the magnificence in which you live and move and have your being.

9. And there is a deeper beauty than this. It is not only that the snow makes fair what was good before, but it is a messenger of love from heaven, bearing glad tidings of great joy. Hope for the future comes down to the earth in every tiny flake. Underneath the deep and wide-spreading snowdrifts, as they span the hill-side and lie lightly piled in the valleys, the earth-spirits and fairies are ceaselessly working out their multifold plans.

10. The grasses hold high carnival safe under their crystal roof. The roses and lilies keep holiday. The snow-drops and hyacinths and the pink-lipped May-flower wait as they that watch for the morning. The life that stirs beneath thrills to the life that stirs above. The spring sun will mount higher and higher in the heavens; the sweet snow will sink down into the arms of the violets; and, at the word of the Lord, the earth shall come up once more as a bride adorned for her husband.

11. "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Gail Hamilton.

WORD ANALYSIS AND DEFINITIONS.

Car'ni val (carni, flesh or meat; val, farewell), a festival celebrated at the commencement of the Lent fasts.

Crys' tal line, consisting of crystal; clear like glass.

Mul ti fold (multi, many), manifold; various.

Squa' lor, foulness; filthiness.

Stat u esque' (-esk), like a statue.

Sym' me try (sym, together; metry, measure), a due proportion of parts taken together; beauty.

Trans figure (trans, across; figure, form), to transform; to change the form of.

Wōld, a wood; a forest.

LESSON LXV.

UNWRITTEN MUSIC.

1. There is a melancholy music in autumn. The leaves. float sadly about with a look of peculiar desolateness, waving capriciously in the wind, and falling with a just audible sound that is a very sigh for its sadness. And then, when the breeze is fresher, though the early autumn months are mostly still, they are swept on with a cheerless rustle over the naked harvest-fields, and about in the eddies of the blast; and though I have, sometimes, in the glow of exercise, felt my life securer in the triumph of the brave contest, yet, in the chill of evening, or when any sickness of mind or body was on me, the moaning of those withered leaves has pressed down my heart like a sorrow, and the cheerful fire and the voices of my merry sisters might scarce remove it.

2. Then for the music of winter. I love to listen to the falling of the snow. It is an unobtrusive and sweet music. You may temper your heart to the serenest mood by its low murmur. It is that kind of music that only intrudes upon your ear when your thoughts come languidly. You need not

hear it, if your mind is not idle. It realizes my dream of another world, where music is intuitive like a thought, and comes only when it is remembered.

3. And the frost, too, has a melodious "ministry." You will hear its crystals shoot in the dead of a clear night, as if the moonbeams were splintering like arrows on the ground; and you would listen to it the more earnestly that it is the going on of one of the most cunning and beautiful of nature's deep mysteries. I know nothing so wonderful as the shooting of a crystal. God has hidden its principle as yet from the inquisitive eye of the philosopher; and we must be content to gaze on its exquisite beauty, and listen in mute wonder to the noise of its invisible workmanship. It is too fine a knowledge for us. We shall comprehend it when we know how the "morning stars sang together."

4. You would hardly look for music in the dreariness of early winter. But before the keener frosts set in, and while the warm winds are yet stealing back occasionally like regrets of the departed summer, there will come a soft rain or a heavy mist; and when the north-wind returns, there will be drops suspended like ear-ring jewels between the filaments of the cedar-tassels and in the feathery edges of the dark-green hemlocks; and, if the clearing up is not followed by a heavy wind, they will all be frozen in their places like well-set gems.

5. The next morning the warm sun comes out; and by the middle of the calm, dazzling forenoon, they are all loosened from the close touch which sustained them, and they will drop at the lightest motion. If you go along upon the south side of the wood at that hour, you will hear music. The dry foliage of the summer's shedding is scattered over the ground, and the round, hard drops ring out clearly and distinctly as they are shaken down with the stirring of the breeze. It is something like the running of deep and rapid water, only more fitful and merrier; but to one who goes out in nature with his

heart open, it is pleasant music, and, in contrast with the stern character of the season, delightful.

6. Winter has many other sounds that give pleasure to the seeker for hidden sweetness; but they are too rare and accidental to be described distinctly. The brooks have a sullen and muffled murmur under their frozen surface; the ice in the distant river heaves up with the swell of the current, and falls again to the bank with a prolonged echo; and the woodman's ax rings cheerfully out from the bosom of the unrobed forest.

7. These are at best, however, but melancholy sounds, and like all that meets the eye in that cheerless season, they but drive in the heart upon itself. I believe it is so ordered in God's wisdom. We forget ourselves in the enticement of the sweet summer. Its music and its loveliness win away the senses that link up the affections, and we need a hand to turn us back tenderly, and hide from us the outward idols in whose worship we are forgetting the higher and more spiritual altars. N. P. Willis.

LESSON LXVI.

THE DEFEAT OF GENERAL BRADDOCK.

1. On the 8th of July the advanced body reached the Monongahela, at a point not far distant from Fort du Quesne (du kane). The rocky and impracticable ground on the eastern side debarred their passage; and General Braddock resolved to cross the river in search of a smoother path, and recross it a few miles lower down, in order to gain the fort. The first passage was easily made; and the troops moved in glittering array down the western margin of the water, rejoicing that their goal was well-nigh reached, and the hour of their expected triumph close at hand.

2. Scouts and Indian runners had brought the tidings of Braddock's approach to the French at Fort du Quesne. Their dismay was great, and their commander thought only of retreat, when Beaujeu (bo zhu'), a captain in the garrison, made the bold proposal of leading out a party of French and Indians to waylay the English in the woods, and harass or interrupt their march. The offer was accepted, and Beaujeu hastened to the Indian camps.

3. Around the fort and beneath the adjacent forest were the bark lodges of savage hordes, whom the French had mustered from far and near. Beaujeu called the warriors together, flung a hatchet on the ground before them, and invited them to follow him out to battle; but the boldest stood aghast at the peril, and none would accept the challenge.

4. A second interview took place with no better success; but the Frenchman was resolved to carry his point. "I am determined to go," he exclaimed. "What! will you suffer your father to go alone?" His daring spirit proved contagious. The warriors hesitated no longer; and when, on the morning of the 9th of July, a scout ran in with the news that the English army was but a few miles distant, the Indian camps were at once astir with the turmoil of preparation. Chiefs harangued their yelling followers, braves bedaubed themselves with war-paint, smeared themselves with grease, hung feathers in their scalp-locks, and whooped and stamped till they had wrought themselves into a delirium of valor.

5. That morning James Smith, an English prisoner recently captured on the frontier of Pennsylvania, stood on the rampart, and saw the half-frenzied multitude thronging about the gateway, where kegs of bullets and gunpowder were broken open that each might help himself at will. Then band after band hastened away toward the forest, followed and supported by nearly two hundred and fifty French and Canadians, commanded by Beaujeu.