“See my cherub.  Are not all cherubs such as he?” and “Behold these trees and this water; and how the sun glowed on the day when I walked there!” and all the while the cherub is like a paper doll, and the trees and the water never had any likeness to any thing that is in this beautiful earth.  But, after all, this similitude is short and paltry, for it is of comparatively small moment that so many men and women spend their lives in making bad cherubs in marble, and hideous landscapes in oil.  It is industry, and it keeps them in bread; in butter, too, if their cherubs and trees are very bad.  But, when it is a human being that is to be moulded, how do we dare, even with all the help which we can ask and find in earth and in heaven, to shape it by our touch!

Clay in the hands of the potter is not more plastic than is the little child’s soul in the hands of those who tend it.  Alas! how many shapeless, how many ill-formed, how many broken do we see!  Who does not believe that the image of God could have been beautiful on all?  Sooner or later it will be, thank Christ!  But what a pity, what a loss, not to have had the sweet blessedness of being even here fellow-workers with him in this glorious modelling for eternity!

The King’s Friend.

We are a gay party, summering among the hills.  New-comers into the little boarding-house where we, by reason of prior possession, hold a kind of sway are apt to fare hardly at our hands unless they come up to our standard.  We are not exacting in the matter of clothes; we are liberal on creeds; but we have our shibboleths.  And, though we do not drown unlucky Ephraimites, whose tongues make bad work with S’s, I fear we are not quite kind to them; they never stay long, and so we go on having it much our own way.

Week before last a man appeared at dinner, of whom our good little landlady said, deprecatingly, that he would stay only a few days.  She knew by instinct that his presence would not be agreeable to us.  He was not in the least an intrusive person,—­on the contrary, there was a sort of mute appeal to our humanity in the very extent of his quiet inoffensiveness; but his whole atmosphere was utterly uninteresting.  He was untrained in manner, awkwardly ill at ease in the table routine; and, altogether, it was so uncomfortable to make any attempt to include him in our circle that in a few days he was ignored by every one, to a degree which was neither courteous nor Christian.

In all families there is a leader.  Ours is a charming and brilliant married woman, whose ready wit and never-failing spirits make her the best of centres for a country party of pleasure-seekers.  Her keen sense of humor had not been able entirely to spare this unfortunate man, whose attitudes and movements were certainly at times almost irresistible.