Perhaps to say much about skating in America just now, when rinking is a mania in our own country, may be venturing on dangerous and slippery ground, so I will be brief.

"It must remind you, who have been so much in America, of the skating there," said an Anglo-maniac in my ear. We were watching the gyrations of a crowd, upon wheel skates, on an artificial surface supposed to represent ice. "Not very much," I answered, with a grim smile; and as I spoke my mind went back to the river-skating on the St. John.

The long interminable stretch of the frozen river, winding away like a white ribbon as far as the eye can reach, edged by the lovely frost-gemmed woods; the soft "ruff-ruff" of a thousand skates upon the ice; dark, fur-clad figures gliding here and there, some solitary, some in couples, hand-in-hand, swinging and swaying from side to side in what seems in truth the very "poetry of motion." Here and there slight girlish figures, trained from earliest childhood to "walk the ice" as easily as the earth, swing, and glide, and swirl, and turn, so that in my fancy I liken them to swallows flying in a summer sky.

No; after all, my Anglo-maniac was wrong-the rink did not very forcibly remind me of "skating in America."

Moose-hunting is another pastime for the male portion of humanity to follow over the snow; but I fear my sympathies were always with the hunted moose, and not with those who chased it over the frozen crust, and tracked it by the blood from the wounds inflicted by the jagged edges as its hoofs broke through.

These poor animals, when pressed to extremity, will pause a moment and cool their parched tongues with a mouthful of snow; and so timid are the young, that it is no rare occurrence for them to faint, and fall and die, at the sound of the baying of the dogs, paralysis of the heart resulting from intense fear.

About April the ice "breaks," the snow begins to melt, and the coming spring is heralded in by the American robin uttering his familiar "chuckee, chuckee," as he sits and jerks his tail on the snake-fence.

Then how rapidly the scene changes! It is as though the enchanter's wand again waved over the earth, and lo! summer has come. The frogs chant in the marshes; a soft, sweet, low

monotonous song, like the tones of an Æolian harp. They begin to sing when the sun sets, and far on into the night keep up their mournful litany. "Nightingales" the natives call them, but to me no nightingale ever sung so sweetly, for there is a strange and marvellous concord of one tone with another, a diapason the like of which I never heard before and shall never hear again, unless I go back to the land where the frogs sing as sweetly as the birds.

Very rapidly the ice of the river breaks up into great "hummocks," and then disappears altogether; the blue, blue water shows its shining surface, and makes a mirror for the trees that dress themselves in green as hurriedly as an impatient beauty might don her festal robe for some gay gathering. The currant-tree is one of the first shrubs to put forth flowers; and then is vouchsafed to the stranger's wondering eyes that most exquisite of all sights-the humming-bird drinking the nectar from those sweet-scented blossoms. A living sunbeam, a flash of quivering, gleaming, glancing green and crimson light, hovering on tremulous wings before the blossom, and then, while you hold your breath in wonder and delight, a flash—and it is gone!

These are some of the delights of spring in Northern America. It has its summer glories too, its beauteous field-flowers, its woods hung with natural garlands of wild clematis, its wonderful and curious pitcher-plants, its summer birds of brilliant plumage and melodious song; but when I look back upon the happy years spent in that highly favoured land, almost the happiest memory of all seems to be that of those merry days when to the sweet music of the sleigh-bells we glided swiftly "over the snow."

SOME

BY THE REV. JOHN S. MOFFAT, OF KURUMAN.

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OME years ago a well-known minister, at one of the anniversary missionary meetings in London, delivered a rattling speech, the burden of which was that missionaries ought to be content to forego the attractions of married life, in order that they might be the better able to devote themselves to their work. I think one of the societies was at the time adopting regulations, the effect of which would be to

postpone marriage until the missionary had been some time in the field. The reverend doctor went further than this, however, and, unfortunately for the interests of truth, dealt with the whole subject in a flippant and sarcastic style, which ill befitted a man who dwelt at home in ease and domestic comfort. He threw contempt upon a body of men who did not deserve it; and many a lonely missionary, too far off to answer for himself, smarted under the unreasonable sarcasms which had been flung at his order, when he read them in the newspaper reports which reached him it may be some months afterwards.

Answers, however, were not wanting, and the great gun soon found himself so well peppered by numerous active, if less sonorous pieces, that he must have been glad to hear the last of it. Had the mode of attack been less offensive, a modicum of truth might have been laid bare, but in the heat of feeling engendered the whole thing got thrown aside when the controversy reached the personal and unseemly stage, and probably there was an end of it in most minds. But truth there was, more or less, and truth which is a good deal lost sight of in the administration of our missionary societies.

I shall be met on the threshold of my subject by those who have a pious dread of celibacy, if only because it forms a part of the Romish system. Let it be clearly understood that nothing like a law, or vow of celibacy, is to be advocated here. All that is sought is the allowance of the principle that, whilst many, if not most missionaries, ought to go out as married men, and will find a good position for work as such, there is room for agency of a different kind. I will go further, and say that there is absolute need of it to fill up great defects in the present system. If men can be found—and there is little reason to doubt that they are to be found—willing to undertake special work in places in which it is undesirable, at least for a time, for ladies and children to be located, their services ought to be gladly accepted. As a matter of fact, such persons have been deterred from carrying out their self-denying impulses. Many a student, either early in his course or towards the end of it, has seriously contemplated a life of this kind, but all around him have taken for granted that he will do otherwise, and he himself perhaps gives way to the impression that there is no real advantage to be gained.

I would have such men understand that there are good reasons for

a missionary going out single if possible. I say if possible, because so serious an undertaking ought not to be entered upon without a strong conviction of duty. I would almost make bold to say that a higher standard of Christian heroism is aimed at by the man who is willing to become not only an exile, but to endure that condition without the presence of a fellow-helper and friend such as only a wife can be.

In dealing with the more remote points to which missionary labour may be directed, as for instance with some places in the interior of Africa, to which an enormously long land journey must be made, people need to have put before them something like a fair notion of the time which frequently elapses after a missionary sets foot on shore, and before he is fairly settled down to his work. I have no hesitation in saying that two or three years may slip away in the mere transport to their destination of himself and the numerous impedimenta pertaining to the married state, in getting a suitable house built, probably building it with his own hands, and in then finding out his own or his wife's inability to stand the climate. I will give a few cases which occurred under my own immediate observation.

Mr. and Mrs. A. landed in July, 1858. They reached the station to which they had been designated in February, 1860, after infinite labour and suffering, and an expenditure the figure of which I had better not mention. Mrs. A. died of fever one month after her arrival, and was survived six weeks by her husband. Mr. and Mrs. B. landed a month earlier than the preceding couple, travelled with them to the same station, had to retrace their steps; Mrs. B. died in the wilderness on the return journey, I think in August, 1860, and her husband, after marrying again, settled down on a station and began building himself a habitation in April, 1862. Mr. and Mrs. C. landed a month earlier than the before-mentioned, and reached their station in December, 1859. Mrs. C.'s health required a journey to the coast in 1862, resulting in an absence of sixteen months; and on the same account in 1865, Mr. C. finally left that station, and retired to one where the climate was less trying. Three other missionaries belonging to the same party had similar experiences. Then came Mr. and Mrs. D., who landed about October, 1869, and reached their station in April, 1870, the most rapid and successful new arrival that ever occurred in that particular mission. Mr. and Mrs, E. landed

in October, 1873, and reached their station at the end of 1875. This is all in one district. Then it may be supposed that the missionary has been at work in the meantime. To a very slight extent is this the case, and as a matter of course,-for the new arrivals have not acquired the language, and their desultory life precludes a steady application to the study of it. By the time these missionaries had really reached their stations, they had still to a large extent the work of learning the language before them, and they had to provide themselves with houses in a country where they must mainly depend on the labour of their own hands.

The same considerations which encumber the journey of the married missionary to his first station, apply with equal force to his removal from one point to another. It does not always follow that the post to which a man is appointed by the directors at home is the best possible. After a few months, or a year or two of residence, he may see a far better position somewhere else. Were he alone he could take his measures accordingly, and date his next letter to the Committee from his new location; but a family flit is another affair, and years go by whilst the undertaking is being looked at on all sides, and the opportunity is lost or only taken advantage of when half its value is gone.

The people are much more accessible to a missionary when alone. He is perforce thrown more among them. If he be a family man, he is liable to forget how little he really is with the people for whose sake he has come all the way from England. Their society is not attractive to a European with refined and educated tastes; their conversation is vapid, if not worse. He is tempted to shrink within the precincts of his own household, where he can hear nothing but the music of his children's voices, and breathe an atmosphere of purity and peace. A missionary returning from a long itineracy, however devoted to his work and however opposed to selfishness, feels like a school-boy nearing the holidays. It is not because he is lazy and wants ease; possibly the journey with its change of scene, and the absence of actual occupation when on the march, may be a less severe and continuous spell of labour than his home routine. But home has the solace of a congenial spirit, and at least an occasional withdrawal from the strain of being the observed of all observers. Yet it is during these exceptional itineracies (for they are exceptional in the