of the pen. Let all the improvements in civil gov ernment be obliterated, and the world be driven from the happy arts of self-government to the guardianship of dungeons and chains. Let liberty of conscience expire, and the Church, now emancipated, and walking forth in her unsullied loveliness, return to the guidance of secular policy, and the perversions and corruptions of an unholy priesthood. And now reduce the vast number of nominal and real Christians, spread over the earth, to five hundred disciples, and to twelve apostles assembled, for fear of the Jews, in an upper chamber, to enjoy the blessings of a secret prayer-meeting. And give them the power of miracles, and the gift of tongues, and send them out into all the earth to preach the Gospel to every creature.

Is this the apostolic advantage for propagating Christianity, which throws into discouragement and hopeless imbecility all our present means of enlightening and disenthralling the world? They, comparatively, had nothing to begin with and everything to oppose them; and yet, in three hundred years, the whole civilized, and much of the barbarous world, was brought under the dominion of Christianity. And shall we, with the advantage of their labors, and of our numbers, and a thousandfold increase of opportunity, and moral power, stand halting in unbelief, while the Lord Jesus is still repeating the injunction, Go ye out into the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature; and repeating the assurance, Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world? Shame on our sloth! Shame upon our unbelief! BEECHER.

NICODEMUS DODGE.

WHEN I was a boy in a printing office in Missouri,

a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeansclad, countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day, and without removing his hands from the depths of his trowsers pockets or taking off his faded ruin of a slouch hat, whose broken brim hung limp and ragged about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf, stared indif ferently around, then leaned his hip against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said with composure:

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious bit of architecture wonderingly along up to his clockface with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 't ain't likely?"

'Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?" "Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git a show somers if I kin, 'taint no diffunce what-I'm strong and hearty, and I don't turn my back on no kind of work, hard nur soft."

"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"

66

'Well, I don't re'ly k'yer what I do learn, so's I git a chance fur to make my way. I'd jist as soon learn print'n 's anything."

"Can you read?"

"Yes; middlin'." "Write?"

"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."

"Cipher ?"

"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon, but up as far as twelve times twelve I aint no slouch. 'Tother side of that is what gits me."

"What's your father's religious denomination?" "Him? Oh! he's a blacksmith."

66

No, no. I don't mean his trade. What's his religious denomination?"

“Oh! I didn't understand you befo'. mason."

66

He's a Free

'No, no; you don't get my meaning yet. What I mean is, does he belong to any church?"

“Now you're talkin'! Couldn't make out what you was a tryin' to git through yo' head no way. B'long to a church! Why, bos, he's ben the pizenest kind of a Free-will Baptis' for forty year. They aint no pizener ones 'n what he is. Mighty good man, pap is. Everybody says that. If they said any diffrunt they wouldn't say it whar I wuz--not much they wouldn't."

"What is your own religion?"

66

'Well, boss, you've kind o' got me thar, and yit you hain't got me so mighty much nuther. I think 't if a feller he'ps another feller when he's in trouble, and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things nur nothin' he ain' no business to do, he aint runnin' no resks-he's about as saift as if he b'longed to a church."

66 "But suppose he did do mean things, what then?"

'Well, if he done 'em a purpose, I reckon he wouldn't

stand no chance-he oughtn't to have no chance, anyway, I'm most certain sure 'bout that."

"What is your name?"

"Nicodemus Dodge."

"I think maybe you'll do, Nicodemus. We'll give you a trial, any way."

"All right."

"When would you like to begin?"

"Now."

So within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off and hard at it.

Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless, and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous "jimpson" weed and its common friend, the stately sunflower. In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged little "frame" house with but one room, one window, and no ceiling; it had been a smoke-house a generation before. Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bed-chamber.

The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus right away-a butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see that he was inconceivably green and confiding. George Jones had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him; he gave him a cigar with a fire-cracker in it, and winked to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently, and swept away the bulk of Nicodemus's eyebrows and eyelashes. He simply said:

"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome," and seemed to suspect nothing. The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.

One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy "tied" his clothes. Nicodemus made a bon fire of Tom's, by way of retaliation.

A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later he walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night, with a staring handbill pinned between his shoulders. The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church, in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till toward breakfast time to make sure that the prisoner remembered that if any noise were made some rough treatment would be the consequence. The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed with six inches of soft mud.

Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of their attempts on the simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters grew scarce and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue. There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it. He had a noble new skeleton-the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard-a grisly piece of property which he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars, under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty dollars had gone promptly for whisky, and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton. The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's bed.

This was done about half-past ten in the evening. About Nicodemus's usual bedtime-midnight-the vil lage jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den. They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the