THE WANDERING JEW.—­There are various versions of the story of “The Wandering Jew,” the legends of whom have formed the foundation of numerous romances, poems and tragedies.  One version is that this person was a servant in the house of Pilate, and gave the Master a blow as He was being dragged out of the palace to go to His death.  A popular tradition makes the wanderer a member of the tribe of Naphtali, who, some seven or eight years previous to the birth of the Christ-child left his father to go with the wise men of the East whom the star led to the lowly cot in Bethlehem.  It runs, also, that the cause of the killing of the children can be traced to the stories this person related when he returned to Jerusalem of the visit of the wise men, and the presentation of the gifts they brought to the Divine Infant, when He was acknowledged by them to be the king of the Jews, He was lost sight of for a time, when he appeared as a carpenter who was employed in making the cross on which the Saviour was to be lifted up into the eyes of all men.  As Christ walked up the way to Calvary, He had to pass the workshop of this man, and when He reached its door, the soldiers, touched by the sufferings of the Man of Sorrows, besought the carpenter to allow Him to rest there for a little, but he refused, adding insult to a want of charity.  Then it is said that Christ pronounced his doom, which was to wander over the earth until the second coming.  Since that sentence was uttered, he has wandered, courting death, but finding it not, and his punishment, becoming more unbearable as the generations come and go.  He is said to have appeared in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even as recently as the eighteenth century, under the names of Cartaphilus, and Ahasuerus, by which the Wandering Jew has been known.  One of the legends described him as a shoemaker of Jerusalem, at whose door Christ desired to rest on the road to Calvary, but the man refused, and the sentence to wander was pronounced.

SOME MEMORABLE DARK DAYS.—­During the last hundred years there have been an unusually large number of dark days recorded.  As has been suggested by several writers, this may have been the result of the careful scientific observations of modern times, as well as of the frequency of these phenomena.  The dark day in the beginning of this century about which so much has been said and written occurred Oct. 21, 1816.  The first day of the same month and year is also represented as “a close dark day.”  Mr. Thomas Robie, who took observations at Cambridge, Mass., has this to offer in regard to the phenomenon.  “On Oct. 21 the day was so dark that people were forced to light candles to eat their dinners by; which could not he from an eclipse, the solar eclipse being the fourth of that month.”  The day is referred to by another writer as “a remarkable dark day in New England and New York,” and it is noted, quaintly by a third, that “in October, 1816, a dark day occurred after a severe