horizon of our early time! You may sour the human spirit for ever by cruelty and injustice in youth. There is a past suffering which exalts and purifies; but this leaves only an evil result: it darkens all the world, and all our views of it. Let us try to make every little child happy. The most selfish person might try to please a little child, if it were only to see the fresh expression of unblunted feeling, and a liveliness of pleasurable emotion which in after years we shall never know. I do not believe a great English barrister is so happy when he has the Great Seal committed to him, as two little and rather ragged urchins whom I saw this very afternoon. I was walking along a country road, and overtook them. They were about five years old. I walked slower, and talked to them for a few minutes, and found that they were good boys, and went to school every day. Then I produced two coins of the copper coinage of Britain: one a large penny of ancient days, another a small penny of the present age. "There is a penny for each of you,' I said with some solemnity :

one is large, you see, and the other small; but they are each worth exactly the same. Go and get something good.' I wish you had seen them go off! It is a cheap and easy thing to make a little heart happy. May this hand never write another essay if it ever wilfully miss the chance of doing so! It is all quite right in after years to be careworn and sad. We understand these matters ourselves. Let others bear the burden which we ourselves bear, and which is doubtless good

for us. But the poor little things! I can enter into the feeling of a kindhearted man who told me that he never could look at a number of little children but the tears came into his eyes. How much these young creatures have to bear yet! I think you can, as you look at them, in some degree understand and sympathize with the Redeemer, who, when He saw a great multitude, was moved with compassion towards them!" Ah, you smooth little face (you may think), I know what years will make of you, if they find you in this world. in this world. And you, light little heart, will know your weight of care!

And I remember, as I write these concluding lines, who they were that the Best and Kindest this world ever saw, liked to have near Him; and what the reason was He gave why He felt most in his element when they were by His side. He wished to have little children round Him, and would not have them chidden away; and this because there was something about them that reminded Him of the Place from which He came. He liked the little faces and the little voices;-He to whom the wisest are in understanding as children. And oftentimes, I believe, these little ones still do His work. Oftentimes, I believe, when the worn Man is led to Him in childlike confidence, it is by the hand of a little child.

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CHAPTER IV.

CONCERNING ATMOSPHERES ;

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON CURRENTS.

I

AM not going to write an essay on Ventilation, important as that subject unquestionably is ; nor am I about to enter into any discussion of the various elements of which the air we breathe is made up. I am aware, indeed, that for the maintenance of animal and intellectual energy in their best state, it is expedient that the atmosphere should contain a certain amount of ozone; but what ozone is I do not know, and neither, I believe, does any one else. And on the matter of material currents, whether ocean currents, atmospheric currents, or river currents, I am not competent to afford the scientific reader much information. I know, indeed, as most people know, that it is well for Britain that the warm Gulf Stream sets upon our shores. I read in the newspapers how bottles thrown into the sea turn up in distant and surprising places. I am aware that the Trade Winds blow steadily from west to east. And I have

sat tranquilly, and looked intently at the onward flow of streams; from the slow and smooth canal-like river that silently steals on through the rich level English landscape, to the wild Highland torrent that tears down its rocky bed, in white foam and thunder. But what I wish, my reader, that you and I should do at present, is to take a large view of the case, not needing any special knowledge of physical science. Let us remember just this, that the atmosphere in which we live is something that touches and affects us at every inch of our superficies, and at every moment of our life. It is not to say merely that we breathe it ; but that it exerts upon every part of us, inner and outer, an influence which never ceases, and which, though possibly not much marked at the time, produces in the long-run a very great and decided effect. You draw in the air from ague-laden fens, and you do not find anything very particular in each breath you draw. But breathe that, and live in that, for a few weeks or months, and see what will come to you. Or you go in the autumn, weak and weary with the season's work and worry, jaded and nervous, to the seaside, and the bracing atmosphere in a little while insensibly does its work; your limbs grow strong and active again, and your mind grows energetic and hopeful. And you have doubtless felt for yourself how the heavy, smoky air of a large city makes you dull and stupid, and how the sparkling draughts you draw in of the keen, unbreathed air of the mountains, exhilarate and nerve

anew. And as for currents, without going into details, we know this general fact: If you cast a floating thing upon a current, it will insensibly go along with the current. There may not be a stronger or a more perceptible push at one moment than at another; but there is an influence which in the main is unceasing, and there is a general drifting away. Slowly, slowly, the log cast into the sea, out in the middle of the Atlantic, comes eastward, week by week, till it is thrown somewhere on the outer coast of Ireland or of the Hebrides. And when the thing cast upon the current is more energetic than a log, still the current affects it none the less really. The Mississippi steamer breasts that great turbid stream, and makes way against it; but it makes way slowly. Let the engines cease to work, and the steamer drifts as the log drifted. Or let the engines work as before, and the vessel's head be turned down the stream; and then, going with the current, its speed is doubled.

Now, the atmosphere I mean in this essay is the atmosphere in which the soul lives and breathes; and the currents, those which carry along the moral and spiritual nature to developments better or worse. Shall we say it, for the most part to worse? In this world, in a moral sense, we generally drift towards evil, if we drift at all. You must warp up the stream if you would advance towards good. It seems to be God's purpose that anything good must be attained by effort: if you slothfully go with the current, it will be only to ill.