and beautiful.  There is an eloquent charm which, while it touches the chords of truth, makes the heart respond to the tale.  The raven would find sufficient for its carnivorous appetite in the floatage of the animal remains, on the briny flood, and would return to roost on the ark; but it was far different with Noah’s bird, so long as the waters prevailed, there could be no pause for her weary wing, and the messenger would return to the ark.  So soon, however, as the subsidence of the waters had permitted the olive to emerge, a sprig was plucked off, and borne to the patriarch in triumph.  Emphatic symbol of peace!  Commemorated through ages, it is still the symbol of peace.  Along with the fig tree and vine, it is associated, as the emblem of man’s inheritance, and in the geography of its locality, the patriarch would hail the plain on which it flourished, and from which it was borne, as the place of his former abode.  The dove would return, though the olive had emerged, because no food had as yet been provided.  How long this ambassador of peace was absent, we cannot tell:  we are only informed that the dove returned in the evening.  If the winged messenger was despatched early in the day, it is not improbable that the delightful trophy was obtained from Mount Olivet, where, according to the late Dr. Clarke, ’the olive still vindicates its parental soil.’  In considering the question of the geographical distribution of plants, this would likely be the nearest olive plane from the mountains of Armenia.  It may be remarked also, that the olive remarkably synchronizes with the habits of the dove; since, according to Dr. Chandler, in his Travels in Greece, as soon as the olive matures its berries, vast numbers of doves, among other birds, repair for food to the olive groves.  It cannot be irrelevant to remind our readers of the habits of the columba tabellaria, or the carrier pigeon, so called from the office to which it has been applied, viz. that of carrying letters, in the Levant, &c.  Those of Mesopotamia are the most famous in the world, and the Babylonian carrier pigeon is employed even on ordinary occasions at Bagdad.  The geographical locality, therefore, of the carrier pigeon, it is interesting to remember, is in the vicinity of those very mountains where the ark finally rested.  With us the carrier pigeon is an exotic, and is now acclimated, or naturalized.  Carrier pigeons fly at the rate of fifty miles an hour.—­’Napoleon,’ the name of one of the carrier pigeons which was despatched from London a short time ago, at four o’clock A.M., reached Liege, in France, about ten o’clock in the day.  Mr. Audubon states his having shot the passenger pigeon (columba migratoria) in America, and found in its stomach, rice, which could not have been obtained within a distance of eight hundred miles.”

Parable of the Good Samaritan.