unusual; the phases of the moon are regarded with great respect,—­in one, medicine may be taken, in another it is advisable to kill a pig; over the doors of many houses may be found twigs placed crosswise, and never suffered to lose their cruciform position; and the horseshoe preserves its old station on many a stable-door.  Charms are devoutly believed in; a ring made from a shilling, offered at the communion, is an undoubted cure for fits; hair plucked from the crop on an ass’s shoulder, and woven into a chain, to be put round a child’s neck, is powerful for the same purpose; and the hand of a corpse applied to the neck is believed to disperse a wen.  The ‘evil eye,’ so long dreaded in uneducated countries, has its terrors among us; and if a person of ill life be suddenly called away, there are generally some who hear his ‘tokens,’ or see his ghost.  There exists, besides, the custom of communicating deaths to hives of bees, in the belief that they invariably abandon their owners if the intelligence be withheld.”

Sydney Smith has said, with more truth than elegance, that in the infancy of all nations, even the most civilized, men lived the life of pigs; and if sanitary reporters had existed in times past as they do now, we should doubtless have received an account of the actual existence and domestic accommodation of the old English “swains” and “shepherds,” very different from that given by Phineas Fletcher.  Even the mechanics of this day are more comfortably lodged than the great landed gentry of the Saxon and Norman periods:  and if the truth could be got at, it would be found that, bad as is the state of our agricultural labourers now, the condition of their forefathers was no better.

The first method of raising a man above the life of an animal is to provide him with a healthy home.  The Home is after all the best school for the world.  Children grow up into men and women there; they imbibe their best and their worst morality there; and their morals and intelligence are in a great measure well or ill trained there.  Men can only be really and truly humanized and civilized through the institution of the Home.  There is domestic purity and moral life in the good home; and individual defilement and moral death in the bad one.  The schoolmaster has really very little to do with the formation of the characters of children.  These are formed in the home, by the father and mother,—­by brothers, sisters, and companions.  It does not matter how complete may be the education given in schools.  It may include the whole range of knowledge:  yet if the scholar is under the necessity of daily returning to a home which is indecent, vicious, and miserable, all this learning will prove of comparatively little value.  Character and disposition are the result of home training; and if these are, through bad physical and moral conditions, deteriorated and destroyed, the intellectual culture acquired in the school may prove an instrumentality for evil rather than for good.