"At home," Ruth said, “there is need of fire as well as food; they come here mostly for warmth.” "Can it be possible, in such a city as this? What is the reason?—is it drunkenness? is it slothfulness? — what can it be that occasions such poverty?" "God knows! I never think to ask Some people passing through such, and such questions until I have done some- living until the frosts of years have whitthing for the evident and incontestable ened their hair, have never stood and seen result. I think, however, there is more clearly the true light of their lives as suffering this winter than ever before be- this girl now; therefore I thank God the cause of the scarcity of work since the more that she should so early see the selfailure of so many manufacturing estab-fishness and uselessness of the life she had lishments. My Cousin John says that, in the branch of iron-manufacture alone, he knows of five hundred hands thrown out of employment, each one, of course, having some one dependent upon his labor." "How do they live now?" "I can't tell; by not exactly starving, I think." begun. She had buried herself, in her personal loss, out of the world in which others were toiling and suffering and lamenting, where mothers were forced to hear the cries of starving children, -where wives suffered the taunts and blows of brutal husbands, where pure souls lay among festering corruption. It was time for afternoon session; and Ruth called her ragged school together, This was a tithe of what others sufferwhile Galena went to her classes, silently ed. Should she dare she-bury herquestioning whether it were really stupid-self out of this world, nor heed the cries ity or the craving of hunger that made issuing from the overburdened heart of her hours of teaching so unproductive to humanity? her pupils. That night she went home alone; Ruth had gone another way with one of her scholars, with some charitable intent. It was growing dusky. The short day, hedged in by houses, numbered fewer hours than in the country where its last rays met no obstruction. Her way lay before her a mile yet, one-half that through the most squalid portion of the city. On each side the street rose dingy brown tenements, tall and bare, built as we Americans build our houses to let, shackly and illy,—of badly-seasoned timber, that the sun and winds shrink, and the rains warp, until sun and wind and rain have free access. From the rickety doors and creaking outside stairways she knew the scum that filled the Sixth Ward oozed in coarse men and women and children. They filled every side, -children on the street, haggard faces from the windows, coming in and going out everywhere, She looked up from her walk. The sun was setting; amber light flooded the streets and houses. A carriage came down the cross-street as she attempted to cross; she looked up hastily full in the face and eyes of Edward Benton, who half raised his hat and passed out of sight. It was the first time she had seen him since her father's death; his duties at the capital had kept him from the city; perhaps something beside, anyway, this was her first look at him; and the full breath of all the lost sensations came upon her, choking her with their sweetness, like the scent of heliotrope faded years ago. The golden light floated around her with no warmth. She shivered; put her hands to her eyes to push off the pressure, leaning against a fence to steady herself. She did not love the man, that she knew. Love is immortal, and takes flight from the moral sloughs of humanity. She loved him no longer; but it was the shock to the immortal love in her, that it needs must be deceived in its restingplace, which stunned her. She grew stronger standing there; but the golden light had faded, and the twilight called out the lamps, before she greeted Aunt Martha in the sitting-room. (To be continued.) POPPED CORN. By M. C. P. ONE Christmas Eve the hearth was red; He sat with blue eyes open wide "But still I think you'll like to know Kriss Kringle's coming o'er the snow With sleigh-bells ringing soft and low. "And when the chimneys smoke at dawn, He'll be here with his wonder-horn Filled up with candy, nuts, and corn." "Those pearly flakes," the soldier said, "I can remember well, to-night, "God bless them all with Christmas cheer, The glow went out; the fire was dead; The soldier bowed his weary head, And said a prayer for little Fred. THOSE friendships are the most valuable in which the Bible is a witness between us; in which another world is not forgotten; in which we are bound by faith and love which are in Christ Jesus ; in which we walk together as heirs of the grace of life, that our prayers be not hindered.― Jay. GOD's goodness makes his majesty amiable, and his majesty makes his goodness wonderful. His love is not abated by his greatness, nor his greatness by his love. His holiness hinders him not from dwelling with the poor in spirit. A RECORD FOR FRIENDS. the all of us, that night, expecting to leave in a couple of hours, whereas no passenger train left till the next day, at four, IP. M. Patience! Well, we took the angel to our heart, and lived through the intervening hours. THE winter was over and gone, winter to which in the early autumn had looked forward with so much dread, wondering how I should spend the cold and cheerless days, and how live through The snow had changed to rain, and in the long and dreary nights. Gone, and the drizzle, damp and shivering, and with how differently from what I had feared, a sinking heart, I went to the cars. How gone quickly,-gone even cheerfully, leav- I dreaded reaching Davenport! A straning behind it memories which I shall cher-ger in a strange city, and late in the evenish through life. I sat at my window on ing! What would become of me? I the night before I left Albany, and re- almost, for the moment, wished I had traced them all. heeded the advice of friends, and deferred my sad errand till the spring-time. Should I play the coward, and go on? "Never! I shall get along some way," I said; and a very good way it proved to be, the Burtis House being but a step from the train, where I found a gentlemanly host, a pleasant room, and epicurean supper and breakfast. First, that afternoon ride over the snow-clad prairie, on the 1st of December, in a crowded stage, my heart saddened at the parting with children and friends, those dear ones who had been so true in all those weary months of bitter, bitter woe, saddened, and yet lightened of a slavish chain-a fear that had ground out of us all hope of peace and comfort. If we could not leave all our trouble in the rear, we could, at least, the exponent of the biggest and worst portion; for the sorrows that God sends down are as nothing, after all, to those which man flings after us; the one lifts us to heaven; the other drags us to hell. A quiet night in Nevada, the shiretown of our next county, twenty-five miles from home, and we retake the stage and at noon find ourself at the railroad. Early in the afternoon, we leave "State Centre," and after a ride of fifty-five miles, reach Blairstown, whence we cross over in a chartered team to Marengo, the nearest point on the parallel railroad. A chill creeps over me as I think of that eight-mile ride in the dreary December twilight, across the "Iona bottom," the wind howling dismally through the naked trees, the keen air penetrating to my very marrow, the damp snow-flakes whitening my garments, the horses stumbling up and down the slippery bluffs, no light but the blinking stars, our team a countryman's rough lumber-wagon, myself sitting upon my trunk, and my companions three strange men. But it was over in two hours, and I was safely housed in a quiet tavern kept by a motherly widow, but so sadly disappointed. We had come over, The clerk ordered me a carriage, and before ten the next morning I was driving along the banks of the Mississippi toward Camp McClellan. The surgeon stood upon the steps of the hospital, and seemed as if by intuition to know me; and his cordial, brotherly greeting went deep into my heart, and in a few moments I was quite at home with his lovely wife and bright little boy. Let me pass over briefly the ten days spent there, though the kindnesses showered upon me by all the officials of the hospital will never be forgotten. Fortunate is he who, while in camp, is necessitated by sickness to go into any of those wards, so commodious, neat, airy, and light, with such skilful medical attendance, and such an efficient and sympathizing corps of nurses. If my soul was heavy with its weight of woe while there, it was yet a sweet relief to know and feel that the boy who sickened there and died was in such gentle, thoughtful hands. What we suffered when we leaned upon the cot once stained with his heart's blood, the cot where he died with his mother's name upon his lips, what we felt when we knelt by that humble hospital-grave, seeming to be so near him, and yet realizing how far, how very far, we were apart, O God! - only the mother for the first time bereft of one of her idols, only she can guess. The heart knoweth its own bitterness. Thanks to the generous kindness of my young son's uncle, I was enabled to mark his grave with a neat, white stone; and before I turned away, I fastened in the mould two handfuls of choice flowers, crimson amaranths from his sister's garden, and white and yellow immortelles from my own, - and also sowed over it some seeds of the snowy moss, sowed them, and watered them with my tears,a mother's tears; surely, so moistened, they will spring up and grow and keep out the weeds that were straggling over those earlier graves. - A dreary ride from Davenport to Chicago, sick in body and sad in heart, seeming a second time to have parted with the child. Snow lay heavy on the road, the air was piercing cold, and as a climax, the last car ran off the track, giving us for an instant the acute pang which precedes a sudden death. But it was all lived through, and evening found us at a pleasant home on Michigan Avenue, with such a welcome as friends give after ten of absence. A week in Chicago years a stormy week that kept us prisoners in the house, and yet a week of quiet, sweet content! Perhaps we should have seen more if the pastor of St. Paul's had been in his usual health, but we doubt if we should have enjoyed ourself the better, a convalescent's room being just the place for holy confidence. Three Carries and one William ! A quartette of lively tongues, of tongues which hardly the midnight bells could silence. But when folks meet only twice in twenty years, they have a deal to say and hear. Three times we did get out, though, spite the weather. Once, sight-seeing in Mrs. G -'s luxurious carriage; once to see Chicago book-stores in their holiday attire, and on Sunday to St. Paul's, a church of which any denomination might be proud. With pleasant memories of our visit, and of the friends, both old and new, who called to give us greeting, we turned away, resisting little Carrie's pleadings that we would stay till after Christmas, because we had a childish longing to hang up our stockings in our native city. A weary ride from Chicago there, weary that it seemed as if our life would all be spent before we reached there; but oh, the welcome we received! One would have thought the Queen of Sheba had come on, instead of a poor, heart-broken, homeless, and penniless sister! Oh, it paid for many a weary, saddened hour, for many a cruel word, for many a poisoned pang! Thank God! there are yet true hearts in this world of ours, hearts whose love nor space, nor time, nor anything can waste. Not only in idle words either did this love show itself. It took the wanderer in and gave her the best and pleasantest chamber in the house, some windows looking down Broadway, and others over the frozen Hudson on to the white hills far beyond, while from either I could see every train that came and went on the Northern & Central road. For eyes that then could neither see to read, or write, or sew, such views helped while away many and many an hour that else would have hung heavy on my idle hands. Nor was this all. The Christmas stockings were both full, and bundles hung besides upon the door-knobs; and what was given at Christmas was all made up before the New Year's. And then both stockings were filled again, and other bundles fastened to the knobs, bonnets and gaiters and slippers and shoes and hose, dresses and collars and gloves and everything the emigrant lacked; and in two weeks they, too, were all ready to wear, and then "dressed up" I was taken away to other scenes, -away to the Green Mountains. That week in Montpelier, where all were strangers when I went, and so many of them friends when I came away, - how like a dream it seems! How vivid the contrast between my prairie home and that little nook among the mountains! How near the sky they seemed to reach, and how pure the snow that lay upon their summits, and what a delicate and yet distinct sea-green the clouds that hovered at sunset over those dim fir forests! I recall it all, as I sit here a moment with closed re thundered as audibly as do the heavens, eyes-the town, the streets, the lanes, my heart stands still even now as I the frozen river, the burying-ground, the member how it looked and sounded! long road in the country, the towering Holmes has immortalized it in the Atlanpiles of earth and stone and evergreens, tic; yet, from reading, one can scarcely with their drapings of frost and snow; form any idea of its size; at least, one the beautiful and the grand blended as in cannot realize it, colossal, magnificent, a painting which the artist would not beautiful, strange, weird. I sat in one have too wild, nor yet too homelike of the balconies the first evening, and recall it all, and can hardly believe it is could look right down upon the stage and a vision until, as I look out again, I see with the opera-glass examine one side of the ten-mile stretch of prairie flushed the organ closely. They played the with the green of May-time. "Dead March" from Saul then; and that The scene was quickly changed though."great instrument," as Holmes calls it, A day's ride in the cars, and I was in Boston, once a home and now a Mecca, toward which my pilgrim feet turn fondly. Those two weeks there, how crowded with sight-seeing and pleasant incidents! Forbidden absolutely to read a line, we dared only dally with the bindings of the books that filled the shelves and counters of the stores in which we loved to linger. Oh, it was tantalizing! For three years forbidden by hard fortune to read one of the hundred issues of the press, and then when in the midst of them daring not, lest total blindness come! But friends kept the time from hanging heavily, each day and evening finding us at some place of recreation or amusement. Our conscience would have smitten us for so much dissipation; but it was the doctor's orders, and we were only obeying his prescriptions. We took long rides into the pleasant towns around; we lingered in the picture-galleries; we spent hours walking up and down the streets and looking, childlike, into the windows, wishing sometimes we were rich enough to buy some of the pretty things that made them so attractive; we went to the Public Library, and longed anew for eyes; we went to vocal concerts; we went to lectures; we went to hear the "Ticket-ofLeave Man," and to hear Forrest in Coriolanus," and to see and listen to negro minstrelsy, and to the opera of "Norma" (we don't know but it was very wrong for one who had reached our years; but we quieted our qualms with the reflection that we were gathering up materials for future stories); and last, but, ah, not least, we saw and heard the great organ,-saw and heard it twice. O God! 46 The second time, they played a pastoral, and such sweet, faintly sweet sounds, such delicate intonations! They lifted my soul to the very gates of heaven; they seemed like the refrain of angel voices. I cannot speak about them; they seem too sacred to be talked of; they are like the memories of my mother's kisses and my father's blessings. After the last concert, we went on to the stage; and not till then-till I stood beside the organ and stretched my neck to look up to its summit- did I realize how immense it was. It is worth a journey from Iowa to Boston only to see it. They called me organ mad. But how could I help going into ecstasies as I stood beside it and heard its varied tones, - its thunders and its whispers? Oh, the genius of man to conceive such an instrument; to build out of wood and metal such a cathedral of music; to vitalize in so many ways the silent air! Oh, man, puny in thy dust, in thy soul thou art omnipotent! We went to church, too, and when one has not heard gospel preaching for three years and a half, it is worth telling of to hear four such sermons as I did.. Yes, I went to the same church where once I used to sit as pastor's wife. I went early once, and sat for over an hour in the |