put roses into this young lady's cheeks, and, by God's blessing, check what is now only a tendency; but which might have soon developed into a disease; and as for you, my little lass," he added, patting Maggie kindly on the shoulder, "you're a very fortunate child, I think-a very fortunate child. How could you persuade Captain Marcus to take her?" he continued. "Captain Marcus had invited both my husband and myself," returned she, "and I pleaded so earnestly for Maggie, that at last he consented that she should go too. The yacht will be away six weeks, and then we are to land at Penzance, and stay a little while at a farmhouse near. Another pleasure for Maggie is that now Captain Marcus says his own little motherless girl shall go too." "Altogether a most complete arrangement," said Dr. Jackson; and after a few directions about diet and clothing he took his leave. Maggie sat still for some moments after he had gone; then running to her mother she put both arms round her neck, and burst into tears. "Oh, mother," said she. "Do forgive me. I have been so naughty and so miserable. Jack said you did not care for me so much as for Mabel, be. cause I was so brown, and I believed him." "And is that why Jack was always singing 'Fair as a lily, and brown as a bun?'" "Yes," sobbed Maggie; "but auntie has been so good to me, I was naughty not to trust her." "You were, my dear child; but you see now," said her mother earnestly, "it was all a delusion that we did not love you as well as your sister, and it was thoughtless and wicked of Jack to tease you.' "He said at last he was only in fun," said poor Maggie; "but I couldn't get over it." "You will now," said her mother; "you will never doubt us again; and, Maggie dear, remember one thing-Trust brings rest."" "I will, mother," said the child, with a kiss. Before Maggie saw Jack that evening, the young gentleman had received a solemn talking-to from his uncle, and had been made to feel how selfish and unkind his conduct to Maggie had been. He was so sorry, that he made a serious promise of amendment, and was not ashamed to ask earnestly for Maggie's forgiveness. Maggie was too generous to bear any resentment. She forgave him with as hearty a kiss as if he had never teased her. When they entered the dining-room, Major Ransome was standing on the hearth-rug. "And so my little girl thought her parents loved Mabel better than they did Maggie," he said, smiling. Maggie jumped up, and tried to put her hand over her father's mouth. "You mustn't say a word about that, papa," she said. I know better now." 66 "Yes," added her mother; "that was Maggie's delusion. I have been teaching her that 'Trust brings rest."" LYDIA CAMPLIN. "F HINTS ON KEEPING SEA-ANEMONES. IRST catch your hare" is the! The common kind are easy enough to find. You need only go down to the shore the next time the tide is out, provided with a little wooden pail, and on the sides of almost every one of those slippery weedgrown rocks you will see little dark green, red, or brown things. Touch them, and you will think at once of jelly or damson cheese! They look plain and uninteresting enough just now, but go on farther to some little lake which the sea has left as a hunting-ground for amateur shrimpers, and there you will see at the side of the rock the same flabby animal, but this time it is not compressed to the shape of a pudding-basin, but it is wide awake, and stretching out its many arms to grasp its food. These are properly called tentacles, and supply the place of both hands and teeth. Here is one whose tentacles are ornamented with tiny blue spots, looking like beads. Touch them ever so gently with the tiniest piece of stick, and in an instant the tentacles are all drawn in, and instead of a flower you have a lump of jelly again. A little farther on is something which looks like a strawberry; it is marked in exactly the same way as the fruit, though certainly wanting in the particular shades of colour. That is the strawberry anemone, and as we are going to start a little aquarium we will secure him at once. Stoop down, and with the nail of your thumb slowly and gently edge the little fellow off his home on the rock; he will curl up into a ball by the time you have finished, but put him into the pail with some sea-water and he will soon recover his temper. Now let us return to those which we were looking at a little while ago, and remove two or three of them in the same manner. It is a pity to take the largest kind, for they need more water, and look ungainly in a small aquarium. And we will only take two or three, because these are only the common "mesembryanthemums," and when you have once seen the lovely "troglodytes" you will not care much for their simple-looking cousins. The long-named anemone does very well when we cannot get any others, but as we hope to be up and about to-morrow early, in search of the other species, we will leave him clinging to his rock. That old sailor standing by the pier tells us it will be the lowest tide of the season to-morrow, about five a.m. It is only at certain times that the farthest ridge of rocks is left bare, so our "troglodytes" are somewhat of a rarity. "The early bird catches the worm;" so let us hope we shall be rewarded for turning out of our comfortable beds three hours earlier than usual. What are you going to take with you? A pail. That is well, but that is not all that we want today. Thumb-nails will not do for the sea-flowers we are in search of now. Get a hammer and chisel, and off we go. What a difference there is in the rocks themselves! They are not covered with that coarse seaweed which we were scrambling and slipping over yesterday, but have a kind of soft brown moss growing on them; they are full, too, of little cavities, varying in size and shape. "Why, here is a daisy!" you exclaim. Well done; your eyes are sharper than mine. That little daisy is just what I am looking for. Now you can see the differences between it and its cousins which are safe in our lodgings. It has a delicate little pink body, more suggestive of flesh than jelly, with short fringy tentacles of the same pretty tint, and little rings of a darker shade marking its centre. Truly they are flowers of the ocean. And now, how are we to get him off? Give me the chisel and hammer. Tap, tap! and then you have the anemone, with a little bit of its house along with it, and no risk of injuring its base. How many we find, to be sure !-violet, red, yellow, green, white, all sizes and colours; and we will take as many as we can, for truly they are worth the trouble. Now let us go back to land and inspect our store. What has become of them all? Nothing is to be seen but little patches of colour on the brown rock. Never mind; they will all open again presently. Now we are at home; what are we to do with our treasures? Come into my room and I will show you. Here is a large glass dish (none of your globes for me)-a round pan, about twenty inches in diameter, with upright sides about ten inches deep. In it I put, a few days ago, a carpet of clean shingle and some nice large stones which I picked up on the beach. Several of them, you will see, have little holes worn by the tide and the rough treatment they have received at the hands of the waves. I have purposely selected them, in case my little flowers felt disposed to change their houses, as they often do when they have been transplanted. What are you smiling at? Don't you think those little anemones can move? Indeed they can, though. They seem to be neither entirely animal nor entirely vegetable, and yet to have many powers of each kind; so, very often in the course of your anemone-keeping you will find them moving their quarters. Of course they take some time about it, but the probabilities are that each of those little flowers we are now going to put in the aquarium will make for himself a new home. In the middle of my glass dish you will see I have put a good-sized piece of rock, which has some pretty light seaweed growing on it. It is always advisable to do this, so that the little creatures can get in the shade if they like. Although they have not eyes they are most sensitive to light, and if you take them from the sheltered nooks to which they have been accustomed, and put them straight into a bare desert in the full sunlight, you cannot expect them to flourish. At least, if you do, you will not be gratified, I can assure you. Do you see that powdery brown stuff which is on some of the stones? Probably you may think, with many older people, that it is dirt, and ought to be removed; but let me tell you that in that brown moss lies your only hope of successfully keeping anemones. After I had collected and arranged the stones, I poured in some clear sea-water, which I procured in a boat far away from the defilements of the shore. Then I gummed a piece of paper on the outside of the glass, just above where the water reached; this will serve us for a high-water mark by-and-by. Then I placed the glass in the sun for a day or two. Gradually that little brown stuff began to grow; and if you had a microscope you would find that it was not "stuff" at all, but myriads of tiny animalculæ, which will suck up all the impurities which the anemones will cause in the water, and keep it clear as crystal. If it were not for this "vegetation," as they call it, you would find the water grow gradually cloudy and more cloudy, till it would turn quite bad, and all our little flowers would die. Now then, having inspected all the domestic arrangements, we may put our anemones into their new house. Arrange the troglodytes carefully; the mesembryanthemums will take care of themselves, and when to-morrow comes will probably have taken lodgings on the glass walls. A shrimp or two will not do any harm, and they look lively skipping about; so put them in they will be found to be very entertaining in the midst of the quiet anemones. Having settled them all, let us get some dark blue tissue-paper, and paste it half-way round the glass on the side nearest the light; this will prevent too much glare, which, as I have before said, does not suit the anemones, and makes the vegetation grow too quickly. It will be as well also to have a sheet of glass covered with the same paper, to place half-way over the top of the aquarium when the sun is very bright. And now we will let them be for a few days to get used to their house, watching them as often as you will spreading out their lovely tentacles like so many beautiful feathers. Have we nothing else to do now except admire our little sea-garden? Once a week we must go to market for them, as we have removed them from the place where they could cater for themselves. We must buy an oyster, and cutting it into tiny pieces about the size of a pea, drop it gently from the end of a stick (a wooden knitting-needle is the best) into the centre of each little flower. You will see the tentacles close gradually over the food until it is sucked out of sight. Of course you may give a more liberal helping to the large anemones, but it is not advisable to overfeed them. The morning after feeding-day you must go again with the knitting-needle and hunt carefully for the pieces of oyster, which the anemone throws out again when it has extracted all the nourishment, for if you were to leave that refuse in the water it would decompose. Before saying good-bye to our silent little friends let us look at the "high-water mark." It is now about the third of an inch above the water. How is that? The water has evaporated. What are we to do, then? get some more from the sea? No; if you do that you will make it too salt, for it is the water, not the salt, which has evaporated. All you need to do is to pour in a little clean cold water till it reaches the mark again. If we attend to all these rules carefully and regularly we shall find the water will keep sweet and clear for three or four months, and then we must have a regular house-cleaning, sending the anemones for change of air into some smaller glass, to return them in a few hours to fresh water, clean stones, and new vegetation. Many years ago there was a young man, who, having just completed his training as a medical student, had settled down in a country town, hoping some day to succeed in establishing a practice there. A favourite dog was one of his first patients. He was a terrier called Ruff, not much to be admired, but dear to the heart of his master. They went out and came in together, and were almost inseparable companions. One day, Mr. X. having run quickly upstairs, heard a harsh voice, succeeded by a cry of pain from Ruff. On going down, he found his dog lying, evidently in pain, at the foot of the stairs, and was told by his landlady that a man in leaving the house had kicked it as he passed. He carried his favourite upstairs, and examining him, found no bones broken, but that he was terribly bruised, and unwilling to move. The evening passed, the dog lying still, much to the surprise of a cat, also a favourite of the gentleman. She walked round and round Ruff, and did all in her power to attract his notice, but in vain. The next day the dog was no better, and Puss showed the same concern. After long coaxing she left the room, and presently returned bringing a sparrow in her mouth, which she laid before the dog, mewing as if to invite him to eat. Ruff looked wistfully, but did not stir, and at length died. How Puss behaved on the death of her friend is not known; possibly she ate herself the dainty morsel she had been at such pains to procure for him. The South Sea Islander and the Alphabet. One of the most trying tasks that missionaries have to perform is the teaching of their converts to read. Some of the natives are apt, but most of them are slow to pick up even the elements of education. It is, however, on record that one South Sea Islander was unusually sanguine about learning, maintaining that the alphabet could be mastered without difficulty. "There is F," he said, "it is just like a club; C is like a half-moon; O is like a full moon; L is like a leg with a foot; T is like the post of a verandah with a cross-piece on the top," and so forth. This was teaching the alphabet in a way that was easily to be understood. George Cruikshank at a Children's Party. One who knew the late George Cruikshank, the famous artist, says that, though among grown-up people he was for the most part grave and businesslike, among children he became himself young again. He was in his glory at Christmas parties, full of fun and animal spirits. In games of romps and forfeits he was first and foremost, and so long as he formed one of the company the evening's amusements never flagged. His antics were always mirth-provoking; he would dress himself up in a sheet, and armed with the kitchen spit, act various characters, to the great delight of the spectators, young and old. His recitation of comic ballads invariably caused shouts of laughter. Need we wonder that little folk loved him? The Blind Thrush. An anecdote that is told respecting the attachment of a bird to another bird-a thrush which was blind-will perhaps be of interest to my readers. One evening a thrush suddenly appeared on the lawn of a house in one of our southern watering-places, hopping about in a way that attracted the attention of those who were in the adjoining drawing-room. and its movements being so apparently purposeless, could not be accounted for. Presently a second bird-believed to be a blackbird-appeared with a worm in its beak; and this it was observed to give |