AUTUMN.

MY DEAR YOUNG FRIENDS,-I called your attention but very lately to the wisdom and providence of our great Creator, in ordaining the different seasons of the natural year. I also reminded you that each successive season has its own peculiar work allotted to it which may not be left undone without certain risk or loss.

Through the goodness, and long-suffering of God we have been spared to enjoy the season of Autumn, let us strive to make it a time, of spiritual improvement as well as temporal enjoyment. I have sometimes thought that a fine Autumnal day bears in its very brightness a voice. of warning sadness, and that may be, because it is fuller of recollections of the past, than promises for the future. Ornamental as the trees appear in the gay varieties of Autumnal tints we know and remember that they are produced by decay; and very soon indeed the branches will be brown and bare, and will remain so through a long. winter of frost and cold. And it is this consciousness that makes Autumn have a tone of sadness in it, more especially, when we contrast nature's dying and drooping appearance, with the brightness and beauty of the summer just passed away for ever. There are besides all this, generally more deaths in Autumn, than at any other time of

the year, many a human being drops off with the falling leaves, and this may convince us of the analogy that exists between our own nature, and the vegetable world. Our Blessed Lord's parables inculcate this lesson very strongly. Harvest-time which is in the Autumn, is often mentioned by Him, to illustrate His Heavenly teaching. In St. Matthew, xiii. 24, He compares the end of all things, and the final separation of the righteous from the wicked to that Season. And He may have made use of this simile, not only to render His teaching easy to be comprehended by the most ordinary capacity, but that the Divine lesson might recur to our minds at least once a year, as we pass through that great harvest-field, the world.

The good seed has been implanted in our nature at Baptism. Do you remember the question put by the servants of the householder to him, when they found tares, springing up with the wheat? - God's ministers may put the same, "from whence then hath it tares ?"

As in Autumn, we are active in our prepaations for that time when nature shall shake off her icy winter chains, and bud into fresh life and beauty, so we should at this season, use more than usual diligence in preparing for that great day when the body, which like the seeds of the earth, has been "sown in corruption," shall rise to incorruption;-when the mortal having thrown off the body, as the seed throws off its outer covering, shall "put on immortality."

AUTUMN.

I stood beneath some forest trees,
Upon a bleak Autumnal day,
And as I heard the fitful breeze,

Amid the withered branches play,
And watched the falling leaves around
Spread their sere carpet on the ground,

I thought how short a time had passed;
How brief the interval had been,
Since I had looked upon them last,
Clad in their robes of vernal green;
So closely all things living tread,
Upon the precincts of the dead.

I sate where Flora late had wreathed,
In gayest hues the Summer bower;
And sun-beams played, and zephyrs breathed,
Their perfumed gale o'er leaf, and flower;

And insect-rovers thronged to cull
Sweets from the bright and beautiful.

Now, nought save memory could deck,
The scene but yesterday so fair;
For Autumn hath no power to wreck,
The bloom of life, and beauty there,

She cherishes the past, to throw
Some gleam of light, o'er present woe.

I waited, where I love to wait,

Where living souls are warned, and taught, And slowly through the Church-yard gate, The dead unto her rest they brought;

And gave in mingled grief, and trust
The "earth to earth," the "dust to dust."

Then I bethought me we should learn,
As times and seasons reach their end,
That great hereafter to discern,

To which our daily footsteps tends;
And strive tho' nature droop, and die
To live for immortality!

THE FLOWER BETWEEN THE LEAVES.

I AM still going to talk to you about flowers, but instead of taking you out among the fields and gardens to look at them in their fresh bloom and beauty, I intend this time to tell you of one that had been gathered many years, and kept till its sweetness, and nearly all its colour was gone; you could see what it had been, certainly, and that was about all to be said for it, yet when you hear how this poor little withered flower was prized and treasured, I think you will agree with me that it was still sweet and lovely to the mind though it had lost all that made it so pleasing to

the eye.

I must begin my story by telling you about two little girls whom I shall call Ellen and Lucy: they were happy children, for though they had suffered a severe misfortune in the death of their mother, it happened when they were too young to know their loss. They had a very kind father but as they lived in a large town and his time was much filled up with business, the two little girls were left chiefly to the care of a good old servant who had been their mother's

nurse. She loved her "two dear children" as she called them very much, and did all in her power to make them happy, and good too, for she knew without being good no one can ever be really happy, and she knew too, that no one can ever become good without asking of God to make them so, and trying at the same time their very best to please Him. So she was very careful to make them say their little prayers night and morning, and to teach them that the Almighty's eyes were ever upon them, that He knew all they said, and did, and thought, and was pleased with them when they were kind and truthful and obedient. She was but a simple untaught old woman and very plain in her language and ideas, but if we open our Bibles we shall find an account of a person whom our Blessed Saviour praised very much, because "she had done what she could," and if we all did as much my dear young friends, the world, we may be sure would be a very different place from what it now is. However at the time I am now writing of, this good old nurse had been dead about a year, and her place filled by a person better fitted to take charge of Ellen and Lucy now that they were growing older, and their minds requiring more careful training: this was a very sensible and kind young lady who came to live with them as governess, and the little girls learnt many things from her both in and out of shool-hours, to which their attention had never before been directed. Many things respecting the world in which we are now living, for Miss Ashton had a very well-stored mind, and so pleasant a way of talking about the interesting things she had seen and read of, that there was a great deal to be learnt from her when she did not seem to be teaching, both in the summer walk or over