[Illustration:  Hospitality]

SUNDAY EVENING.

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When I was a girl, Sunday evening used to be the part of the week that I loved best; and I liked it better in Winter than in Summer.  We used to sit round a blazing fire; my mother used then to teach my little brother Tom to say his prayers, and my father used to teach me to read in Pilgrim’s Progress, or some such book; while my brother John sat near reading some book or other that was fit for a Sunday, with his dog Hector lying at his feet.

My dear old grand-father was then alive, and he would sit at the table with the large old family Bible before him for the whole evening.

As I look back upon the pleasant picture in my mind, my eye fills with tears.  I cannot help thinking of what has become of the faces that were then so full of smiles and gladness.  My grand-father went to the grave first, but he died in a good old age; and though we mourned to lose him whom we had all loved so much, we could not help feeling that it was a happy change for him, as he could hardly see or hear.  Next to him, my poor little brother Tom fell ill of the typhus fever, and God took him to heaven in the budding of his child-hood.  Only a year or two ago, my father gave me his dying blessing, and was then a very old man.  My mother now survives, though very old; and my two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, who were then lively girls, are living, and are the mothers of families.  My brother John, a middle-aged man, is the Captain of a ship, being now far away on a voyage; and he has left behind him a wife and two boys, the youngest of whom is as old as he was at the time I have spoken of.  I am almost an old woman; though on these happy evenings that I was speaking of, I was the youngest but one.

You, my little friends, will, perhaps, some day have to look back upon such changes as I have seen.  The thought that they will come upon you need not make you sad, but it should make you good, and cause you to resolve to do your duty and to serve God.  If you do so, when you get as old as I am, you will find that if age brings its cares and sorrows, it also brings surer and even brighter hopes of a life beyond the grave.

[Illustration:  Sunday evening]

CONTENTMENT.

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John Davis and his wife were very poor people, but as they worked very hard, they could just get a living for themselves.  John worked for a farmer in the parish, and his wife took in needle-work.

They did pretty well, when John had work; but for nearly two years John’s master could not employ him always, and he was brought almost to distress.  But his wife always used to keep up his spirits by saying, “Be content, and thank God if you can but live; brighter hours will come.”