M.  Well, they seem to me like those rare friends that love us best in adversity, when the bright summer of prosperity, with its attendant joys, has fled, and the winter of sorrow and misfortune shuts out, with its dark clouds, the light of life, and withers, with its frosts, the few flowers which bloom along its pathway.  There are summer friends, Clara, as well as summer birds, and they both wear brilliant colors, and sing enchanting songs, but they depart with the sunshine; the first leave us to battle the storms of adversity, and the others, the cold and barren prospect of winter; these little snow-birds, however, remain, and through all its dark hours they cheer us by their presence.  They seem to tell us that we are not entirely destitute of pleasure, but that the darkest hours have something of beauty; and, while they serve to awaken in our minds a remembrance of the bright days that have gone, they bid us look forward to the end of our sorrows, and welcome the bright spring days, which shall return to us the joys that departed.

C. I declare! you have preached quite a sermon, and from a funny text; I confess there is both truth and poetry in what you say.  I do not wonder that you love the snow-birds, if they awaken such pleasant and pretty thoughts in your mind.  Henceforth I will love them myself, for the good lesson that, through you, they have imparted.  I trust you will forgive me the rudeness of laughing at you.

M.  Cheerfully, Clara; but learn from this never to despise any of God’s creatures; they can all teach us some important and beautiful lesson which we should be happy to heed.  And now, if you please, we will go and feed the snow-birds.

C.  With all my heart!

[Illustration:  MOUNT CARMEL.]

MOUNT CARMEL.

SELECTED.

Mount Carmel is a high promontory, forming the termination of a range of hills running northwest from the plain of Esdraelon.  Mount Carmel is the southern boundary of the Bay of Acre, on Acca, as it is called by the Turks; its height is about fifteen hundred feet, and at its foot, north, runs the brook Kishon, and a little further north the river Belus.

Mount Carmel is celebrated in Scripture history as the place where Elijah went up when he told his servant to look forth to the sea yet seven times, and the seventh time he saw a little cloud coming up from the sea “like a man’s hand,” when the prophet knew that the promised rain was at hand, and girded up his loins, and ran before Ahab’s chariot even to the gates of Jezreel. (1 Kings xviii. 44-46.)