whom it was her sacred duty to chastise and save. She sent her spies and bravoes into London. She landed her troops in Connaught. By her gold and by her craft she raised up enemies against our peace beyond the Scottish border and in the Low 5 Country camps. Even when her policy was that of peace, she drove our ships from the ocean and cast our sailors into prison. She closed the Levant against our merchants and forbade all intercourse of England with America. try found in her a friend. She stirred up Rome against us. When she could not fight she never ceased to plot. In brief, at all times, in all places, our fathers had to count with Spain as their most deadly foe.

Every foe of this coun- 10

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Against that country Raleigh set his teeth. It was Spain which he braved in Guiana, which he humiliated at Cadiz, which he outwitted in Virginia. Toward Spain the most splendid Englishman ever born nursed the hostile passion which 20 Hannibal fed against Rome.

In the end a great country wears out a great man; and after fighting Spain for forty years with the sword and with the pen, Raleigh was murdered, at the command of Philip the Third, in Palace Yard. 25

Levant: the Mediterranean Sea and the region around it.

LAFAYETTE AND NAPOLEON

SERGEANT SMITH PRENTISS

SERGEANT SMITH PRENTISS (1808-1850), an eloquent American orator, was born in Portland, Maine, and was educated at Bowdoin College. He moved South to practice law.

In 1829 he was admitted, at Natchez, to the Mississippi bar. 5 He practiced at Natchez until 1832, when he moved to Vicksburg. After serving his adopted state as a member of the Legislature and of the national Congress, he moved to New Orleans in 1845. In that city he actively engaged in law business until his early death in 1850. Prentiss was regarded as one of the 10 most eloquent speakers of America.

And here let us pause to compare these two wonderful men, belonging to the same age and to the same nation, - Napoleon and Lafayette. Napoleon, the child of destiny, the thunderbolt 15 of war, the dispenser of thrones and kingdoms, he who scaled the Alps and reclined beneath the Pyramids, whose word was fate and whose wish was law; Lafayette, the volunteer of freedom, the advocate of human rights, the defender of civil 20 liberty, the patriot, the philanthropist, the beloved of the good and the free. Napoleon, the vanquished warrior, ignobly flying from the field of Waterloo, the wild beast of Europe hunted down by the banded and affrighted nations, and caged

far

away upon an ocean-girdled rock; Lafayette, a watchword by which men are excited to deeds of noble daring, whose home has become the Mecca of freedom toward which the pilgrims of liberty turn their eyes from every quarter of the globe.

Napoleon was the red and fiery comet, shooting wildly through the realms of space and scattering terror and pestilence among the nations; Lafayette was the pure and brilliant planet beneath whose grateful beams the mariner directs his bark and 10 the shepherd tends his flocks. Napoleon died, and a few old warriors, the scattered relics of Marengo and Austerlitz, bewailed their chief; Lafayette is dead, and the tears of the civilized world attest how deep is the mourning for his loss.

Waterloo the fierce battle in which Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington. - Mecca: the sacred city of the Mohammedans. Marengo and Austerlitz: two battles in which Napoleon was brilliantly successful.

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PSALM VIII

THE BIBLE

O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who has set thy glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, 5 that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and 10 the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under 15 his feet:

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All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;

The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE TREE

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862), an American naturalist and philosopher, was born in Concord, Massachusetts. There, too, lived Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne, all older than he, but all outliving him. After graduation at Harvard he was schoolteacher, surveyor, lecturer, writer, pencil maker, farmer, recluse, 5 each in its turn.

Personally Thoreau was exceedingly odd. His habits were solitary. For weeks at a time he would tramp the woods alone. To show that man's happiness is independent of luxuries, he built, with his own hands, a hut on Walden Pond and lived there 10 alone for two years. He seldom used flesh, wine, tea, or coffee. "I want," he said, "to live as daintily and as tenderly as one would pluck a flower." His first lecture was on Society, yet he never willingly entered company. He got along so badly with his fellow-men that even the tolerant Emerson said of him, 15 "Thoreau is, with difficulty, sweet." Yet he loved the wild animals as though they had been his brothers. The wild mice ate out of his hand, and it is said of him that he would take fish out of the lake in his hands, and put them back, the fish showing no fear and making no effort to escape.

As Noble says, Thoreau was not "a scientific naturalist like Audubon; but he was a loving observer and a charming recorder of the phenomena of sky, field, and flood, and of the ways of flowers, trees, birds, and beasts. His writings gave a great stimulus to that sort of loving study and observation of nature."

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the Rose family, which includes

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