The high-topped chaise and old gray pony

Stood waiting in the lane;

Idly my father swayed the whip-lash,
Lightly he held the rein.

The stars went softly back to heaven,
The night-fogs rolled away,

And rims of gold and crowns of crimson
Along the hill-tops lay.

That morn the fields, they surely never

So fair an aspect wore;

And never from the purple clover
Such perfume rose before.

O'er hills and low romantic valleys,
And flowery by-roads through,
I sang my simplest songs familiar,
That he might sing them too.

Our souls lay open to all pleasure,
No shadow came between ;

Two children, busy with their leisure,
He fifty, I fifteen.

As on my couch in languor lonely,

I weave beguiling rhyme,

Comes back with strangely sweet remembrance That far-removèd time.

The slow-paced years have wrought sad changes, That moon and this between;

And now on earth my years are fifty,

And his, in heaven, fifteen.

SEVEN TIMES TWO.

JEAN INGELOW.

You bells in the steeple, ring, ring out your changes, How many soever they be,

And let the brown meadow-lark's note as he ranges Come over, come over to me!

Yet birds' clearest carol by fall or by swelling

No magical sense conveys;

And bells have forgotten their old art of telling
The fortune of future days.

"Turn again, turn again!" once they rang cheerily, While a boy listened alone;

Made his heart yearn again, musing so wearily
All by himself on a stone.

Poor bells! I forgive you; your good days are over,
And mine, they are yet to be;

No listening, no longing, shall aught, aught discover; You leave the story to me.

The foxglove shoots out of the green matted heather,
And hangeth her hoods of snow;

She was idle, and slept till the sunshiny weather:
Oh, children, take long to grow!

I wish and I wish that the spring would go faster,
Nor long summer bide so late;

And I could grow on like the foxglove and aster, For some things are ill to wait.

I wait for the day when dear hearts shall discover, While dear hands are laid on my head,

"The child is a woman- the book may close over, For all the lessons are said."

I wait for my story: the birds cannot sing it,
Not one, as he sits on the tree;

The bells cannot ring it, but long years, oh bring it!
Such as I wish it to be.

BROTHER AND SISTER.

GEORGE ELIOT. EXTRACT ARRANGED.

HIS sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy
Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy
Had any reason when my brother came.

I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling,
Cut the ringed stem, and made the apple drop;
Or watched him winding close the spiral string
That looped the orbits of the humming-top.

School parted us; we never found again

That childish world where our two spirits mingled, Like scents from varying roses that remain

One sweetness, nor can ever more be mingled ;

But were another childhood's world my share,
I would be born a little sister there.

MORAL COURAGE.

SYDNEY SMITH.

A GREAT deal of talent is lost in the world for the want of a little courage. The fact is, that to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. It will not do to be perpetually calculating tasks and adjusting nice chances; it did very well before the flood, where a man could consult his friends upon an intended scheme for a hundred and fifty years, and then live to see its success afterward: but at present, a man waits and doubts and hesitates, and consults his brother and his uncle and particular friends, till one fine day he finds that he is sixty years of age; that he has lost so much time in consulting his first cousin and particular friends, that he has no more time to follow their advice.

TOM BROWN AT RUGBY.

THOMAS HUGHES. EXTRACT.

WITHIN a few moments of their entry, all the boys who slept in dormitory Number 4 had come up. The little fellows went quietly to their own beds and began undressing and talking to one another in whispers ; while the elders, amongst whom was Tom, sat chatting about on one another's beds with their jackets and waistcoats off. Poor little Arthur was overwhelmed