Whose youth from thee by gripin’ want was wrung,
     Brown foundlin’ o’ the woods, whose baby bed
     Was prowled round by the Injun’s cracklin’ tread,
     An’ who grewst strong thru’ shifts, and wants, an’ pains. 
     Nursed by stern men, with empires in their brains!

Another sweet poet has sung: 

     Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
     Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

There can be no question that wealth is fast accumulating.  Let fathers, and mothers, and preceptors spur the rising generation to that love of accuracy, of “right dress,” as the soldiers say, which puts each man in his place, certain to stay there as long as he has agreed to, and certain to act when the fitting time arrives.

THE ORGAN AND ITS PIPES AND REEDS.

Perhaps I can impress the true necessity of discipline no more forcibly than by comparing society to a grand organ upon which the Creator sounds his mighty fugue of years.  We are the pipes—­some the colossal columns which shake the world, and others the tiny tubes which make a feeble cry, almost unheard.  No one of us must sound his note save in that proper place and at that proper time which Duty indicates.  We mar a perfect harmony by ill-tempered silence, and perhaps ruin the labors of our associates by a continuous sounding of our own ridiculous reed.

WHEREVER WE ARE

In the factory, the counting house, the workshops of the grand industries,—­or on the broad acres which watch so fondly for the sun, let us be careful, when there is a troubling jar, a fatal discord, that our key is not the guilty one.

BOOKS.

                           —­Books, we know,
     Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
     Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
     Our pastime and our happiness will grow.—­Wordsworth.

By the aid of books we multiply our sensations a million-fold.  Often the reader actually feels what he reads.  Such impressions would perhaps never have fallen to his lot in the ordinary way of getting experience.  Our indebtedness, then, to the art of printing, is perhaps greater than to any other of the remarkable discoveries which have lent enduring charms to human life.  And yet, with all its progress, the book-reading world is still in its infancy.  The people do not read half enough, they do not discriminate wisely between good reading and indifferent reading, and they read too much matter of an ephemeral nature, little calculated to be of the slightest benefit to them a week after its perusal.  If a man lived on the banks of a beautiful lake, and went down to its shore each pleasant day to take a ride, and, after an excursion upon the peaceful waters, stove his boat in, or cast it adrift, he would be actually following the practice of our people of the present day.  The man who owns a library in these times, is considered either a book-worm or an opulent citizen.  And yet what treasures are within everyone’s reach!  Suppose you buy and read a volume.  You are