Another reason springs from the time-honored custom of calling and renewing old acquaintances, and thus reviving many happy memories.

Let no boy or girl be laughed out of making good resolutions on New Year’s Day.  To make a resolution and keep it for a single day is better than to make none at all, and it renders each successive resolution easier to make and keep.  But good resolutions may be kept, and then, indeed, the new year will be a happy one.

Resolve, then, on New Year’s Day to be something better and nobler than you have been in the old year, to correct some fault or develop some virtue; resolve to make some one’s life brighter, or to do good in some way, however humble, and you will find your reward in a happiness equal if not superior to that which you have bestowed.

ICEBERGS.

by J.V.  HAY.

It may sound strangely to the average reader to say that icebergs are more numerous in warm weather, but such is the fact.  Of course they are formed in winter, but it takes the summer sun to set them adrift and send them floating on the ocean, a grand sight to look at but a fearful menace to vessels.

Icebergs are born every day in every month, but most of them remain in or near their native waters for a long time before they escape and wander to the great lanes of travel between here and Europe.

The bergs seen last summer are from two to ten years old—­that is, they have had an existence individually for years, though the ice from which they are formed is much older, some of it possibly having been frozen first a thousand years ago.

Icebergs are born of glaciers, and four out of five of the floating bergs on the Atlantic come from Greenland.  A glacier is a river of solid water confined in the depressions running down the mountain sides.

Soft and powdery snow falls upon the summits, and though some is evaporated, the yearly fall is greater than the yearly loss, and so the excess is pushed down the slope into the valleys which possibly at the time are covered with green and have afforded pasture lands for cattle.

The snow gathers in the high valleys and every day undergoes some degree of the change which finally transforms it into ice.  Slowly, very slowly, in some cases only a foot every year, this frozen river flows downward.  Nothing can stop it, nothing can even check it.

The process is the same in Switzerland and Greenland, only in Switzerland the glacier melts when it reaches the lower valley and feeds rivers; in Greenland the glacier slides into the ocean, breaks off and becomes an iceberg and floats away.

One of the incidents of an ordinary Alaskan cruise along the coast is to see the glaciers break off and fall into the water.  They are far more beautiful than the finest of the glaciers of Switzerland, and in size they are so great that the largest Alpine glacier would make only a fair-sized nose, if it could be taken bodily and placed upon the face of one of the Alaskan giants.