As an hired servant be;
  Let the lowliest task be mine,
  Grateful, so the work be Thine;
  Let me find the humblest place
  In the shadow of Thy grace: 
  Blest to me were any spot
  Where temptation whispers not. 
  If there be some weaker one,
  Give me strength to help him on;
  If a blinder soul there be,
  Grant that I his guide may be. 
  Make my mortal dreams come true
  With the work I fain would do;
  Clothe with life the weak intent,
  Let me be the thing I meant;
  Let me find in Thy employ
  Peace that dearer is than joy;
  Out of self to love be led
  And to heaven acclimated,
  Until all things sweet and good
  Seem my natural habitude.

* * * * *

So we read the prayer of him
Who, with John of Labadie,
Trod, of old, the oozy rim
Of the Zuyder Zee.

Thus did Andrew Rykman pray. 
Are we wiser, better grown,
That we may not, in our day,
Make his prayer our own?

THE STRATHSAYS.

Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window, looking down the harbor.  A brave great window it was, and I mind me how many a dark summer’s night, we two leaned over its edge and watched the soft flow of the River of the Cross, where its shadowy tide came up and lapped the stone foundations of that old house by the water-side,—­I and Angus.  Under us the rowers slipped the wherries and the yawls; in the channel the rafts floated down a slow freight from the sweet and savage pine-forests, and the fire they carried on their breasts, and the flames of their pitch-knots, threw out strange shadows of the steering raftsmen, and a wild bandrol of smoke flaring and streaming on the night behind them;—­and yet away far up on the yonder side, beneath the hanging alders and the cedar-trees, the gundalows dropped down, great laden barges; and perhaps a lantern, hung high in the stern of some huge East-Indiaman at the wharves of the other town quite across the stream, showed us all its tracery and spires, dim webs of shadow stretched and woven against the solemn ground of the starlit sky, and taught us the limit of the shores.  Ah, all things were sweet to us then! we were little but children,—­Angus and I. And it’s not children we are now, small’s the pity!  The joys of childhood are good, I trow; but who would exchange for them the proud, glad pulse of full womanhood?—­not I. I mind me, too, that in those days the great world of which I used to hear them speak always seemed to me lying across the river, and over the fields and the hills, and away down and out by the skirts of the mystical sea; and on the morning when I set sail for Edinboro’, I felt to be forever drawing nigher its skurry and bustle, its sins and pleasures and commotions.