Neither could you learn to know them at a single visit.  Come and sit by this indoor sea, day by day, and learn to love its people.  Many a lesson for good have they taught me.  When weary and disheartened, the patient perseverance of these undoubting beings has given me new impulses upward and onward.  Remembering that their sole guide is instinct, while mine is the voice behind me, saying, “This is the way,” I have risen with new resolve to walk therein.  Seeing the blind persistency with which some straying zooephyte has refused to follow other counsel than its own, I have learned that self-reliance and strength of will are not, in higher natures, virtues for gratulation, but, if unsanctified, faults to blush for.  Finding each creature here so fitted with organs and instincts for the life it was meant to lead, I have considered that to me also is given all that I ought to wish, more than I have ever rightly used.

New evidences are here disclosed to me of God’s care for his creation, deepening my faith in the fact that he is not merely the great First Cause, but still the watchful Father.  New revelations teach me of his sympathy in our joys, as well as of his care for our necessities.  The Maker’s love of the beautiful fills me with gladness, and I catch new glimpses of those boundless regions where the perfection of his conceptions has never been marred by sin; and where each of us who may attain thereto shall find a fitting sphere for every energy, an answering joy for every pure aspiration.

* * * * *

THE QUEEN OF THE RED CHESSMEN.

The box of chessmen had been left open all night.  That was a great oversight!  For everybody knows that the contending chessmen are but too eager to fight their battles over again by mid-night, if a chance is only allowed them.

It was at the Willows,—­so called, not because the house is surrounded by willows, but because a little clump of them hangs over the pond close by.  It is a pretty place, with its broad lawn in front of the door-way, its winding avenue hidden from the road by high trees.  It is a quiet place, too; the sun rests gently on the green lawn, and the drooping leaves of the willows hang heavily over the water.

No one would imagine what violent contests were going on under the still roof, this very night.  It was the night of the first of May.  The moon came silently out from the shadows; the trees were scarcely stirring.  The box of chessmen had been left on the balcony steps by the drawing-room window, and the window, too, that warm night, had been left open.  So, one by one, all the chessmen came out to fight over again their evening’s battles.

It was a famously carved set of chessmen.  The bishops wore their mitres, the knights pranced on spirited steeds, the castles rested on the backs of elephants,—­even the pawns mimicked the private soldiers of an army.  The skilful carver had given to each piece, and each pawn, too, a certain individuality.  That night there had been a close contest.  Two well-matched players had guided the game, and it had ended with leaving a deep irritation on the conquered side.