FRANK'S FANCIES.

TANCIES are funny things. How can we describe

them? They are born, they feed, they grow, and they vanish like a vapour. But they are not to be seen, or heard, or tasted, or touched; they spring up like mushrooms, but not always in the night; for although they play some of their most fantastic tricks when we are fast asleep, they will indulge some strange antics when we are wide awake.

Fancies are born and bred and fed in the brain. The finest crops are mostly found among boys and girls in their teens. In some cases they keep sprouting until old age, but they never look so fresh and promising in the aged as in the young.

I cannot tell you exactly how they are born, but I do know that where allowed to do as they please, though sometimes harmless, they are often very mischievous; and so it is well to keep a tight hand on them, or, like an untrained young horse, they will gallop away with us and pitch us into some quagmire, and leave us there to sprawl out again as best we may. And this is why I wish to caution my young readers against indulging their fancies too much.

Many years ago I knew a lad—I shall call him Frank, though that was not his real name. He was almost fifteen, and very fond of reading, especially about voyages

and travels. There was one book however that he liked better than all, and that was-ROBINSON CRUSOE.

When Frank got hold of that book of wonders and began to read it, he was almost unwilling to leave off either for meals or play until he had read it through to the end, and then he wished there had been as much more. The reading of that book bred a strange crop of new fancies in the mind of Frank. Awake or asleep he was always drawing fanciful pictures of Crusoe with his dog and gun, his man Friday and the Spaniard, his parrot and his goats. What a fine thing it would be if he could be on an island like that and go where he pleased, and do what he pleased. He would himself be a Robinson Crusoe, that he would!

Poor Frank! his fancy cheated him sadly, by only shewing him the bright side of Crusoe's life. It hid out of sight the hardships and dangers of a sailor boy's life; the dreadful shipwreck, when no one was saved but himself; the lonely life he led; the fear of being eaten by the cannibals; the little hope he had of ever seeing his friends again; and the dread he had of dying there alone with no one to help him. Frank's fancy did not like to picture these things.

If Frank had been asked to draw a picture of his life on such an island it would have been like that you have just seen, where he is stretched out on the bank of a stream under the shade of beautiful trees, watching the

goats on the other side as they come down to the water to drink.

From what I have written, I hope my young readers will learn how to manage their fancies. I do not wish them to think that fancy is of itself wrong, or a bad thing; for that depends upon the use we make of it. We must not let it run wild, but try to keep it within the bounds of reason. We must not let it deceive us, but ask ourselves if there ought not to be shade as well as sunshine in its pictures-not all shade or all sunshine, but a blending of both. And we must not forget that fancy is not fact. Fancy may imagine a thousand things which one fact may drive away as the sun scatters a morning mist.

I sometimes almost doubt whether that book of wonderful things to which I have alluded has not done more harm than good in the minds of many boys who have read it. The man who wrote it was a clever man, and one of our best English writers, and we must all admire his genius in writing such a book. But it is not all true. There is more of his own fancy in it than fact. He wrote it after hearing an English sailor, Alexander Selkirk, tell his own tale, which might not be all true, of his adventures on a desolate island.

There is a Book, however, more interesting than Robinson Crusoe, in which are no fancies, and yet it is full of facts, the most wonderful the world ever knew or ever will know. It is THE BOOK. There is none like it,