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Overhead a bright, mute, pale-green sky. A hard, cruel frost; firm, sparkling snow; from beneath the snow project grim blocks of ice-bound, windworn cliffs.

Two huge masses, two giants rise aloft, one on each side of the horizon: the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn.

And the Jungfrau says to its neighbor: "What news hast thou to tell? Thou canst see better.-What is going on there below?

Several thousand years pass by like one minute. And the Finsteraarhorn rumbles in reply: "Dense clouds veil the earth Wait!"

...

More thousands of years elapse, as it were one minute.

"Well, what now?"inquires the Jungfrau. "Now I can see; down yonder, below, everything is still the same: partycolored, tiny. The waters gleam blue; the forests are black; heaps of stones piled up shine gray. Around them small beetles are still bustling,-thou knowest, those two-legged beetles who have as yet been unable to defile either thou or me.' "Men? "

"Yes, men."

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Thousands of years pass, as it were one minute

"Well, and what now?" asks the Jungfrau

"I seem to see fewer of the little beetles," thunders the Finsteraarhorn. "Things have become clearer down below; the waters have contracted; the forests have grown thinner.”

More thousands of years pass, as it were one minute.

"What dost thou see?" says the Jungfrau

"Things seem to have grown clearer round us, close at hand," replies the Finsteraarhorn; "well, and yonder, far away, in the valleys there is still a spot, and something is moving."

"And now?" inquires the Jungfrau, after other thousands of years, which are as one minute.

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E said, I see." And they said: He's crazy; crucify him." He still said: "I see." And they said: "He 's an extremist." And they tolerated him. And he continued to say: I see." And they said: "He's eccentric." And they rather liked him, but smiled at him. And he stubbornly said again: "I see." And they said: "There's something in what he says." And they gave him half an ear. But he said as if he'd never said it before: "I see." And at last they were awake; and they gathered about him and built a temple in his name. And yet he only said: "I see." And they wanted to do something for him. " What can we do to express to you our regret?" He only smiled. He touched them with the ends of his fingers and kissed them. What could they do for him?" Nothing more than you have done," he answered. And what was that? they wanted to know. "You see," he said, "that's reward enough; you see, you see."-"The Prophet," by Horace Traubel.

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TEP by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world. And what a world it is! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts a world of misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How reconcile this world

HERE has arisen in society a figure

which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned

Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through
cloudy weather;

'T is hard to part when friends
are dear-

Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a
tear;

Then steal away, give little
warning,

Choose thine own time;
Say not Good-Night-but in
some brighter clime
Bid me Good-Morning.

"Life," by Anna Letitia Barbauld

of fact with the
bright world of my
imagining? My
darkness had been
filled with the light
of intelligence, and,
behold, the outer
day-lit world was
stumbling and
groping in social
blindness. At first
I was most un-
happy; but deeper
study restored my
confidence By
learning the suffer-
ings and burdens
of men, I became
aware as never be-
fore of the life-
power that has sur-
vived the forces of darkness-the power
which, though never completely victor-
ious, is continuously conquering. The
very fact that we are still here carrying
on the contest against the hosts of
annihilation proves that on the whole
the battle has gone for humanity. The
world's great heart has proved equal to
the prodigious undertaking which God
set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering;
self-reproached, but ever regaining faith;
undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man
labors towards immeasurably distant
goals. Discouraged not by difficulties
without, or the anguish of ages within,
the heart listens to a secret voice that
whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the
future lies the Promised Land."

-Helen Keller.

Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious. -Addison.

and insulted as the vilest of her sex and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man

Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue.

But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.-William E. H. Lecky.

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NEW era is dawning on the OR

world. We are beginning to believe in the religion of usefulness o

RATORY offers the acme of human delight; it offers the nectar that Jupiter sips; it offers the draft that intoxicates the gods, the divine felicity of lifting up and swaying mankind. There is nothing greater on this earth. 'T is the breath of the Eternal-the kiss of the Immortalo do

Oratory is far above houses and lands,

The golden poppy is God's gold,

The gold that lifts, nor weighs

us down,

The gold that knows no miser's hold,

The men who felled the forests, cultivated the earth, spanned the rivers with bridges of steel, built the railways and canals, the great ships, invented the locomotives and engines, supplying the countless wants of civilization; the men who invented the telegraphs and cables, and freighted the electricspark with thought and love; the men who invented the looms and spindles that clothe the world, the inventors of printing and the great presses that fill the earth with poetry, fiction and fact, that save and keep all knowledge for the children yet to be; the inventors of all the wonderful

The gold that banks not in the

town,

But singing, laughing, freely

spills

Its hoard far up the happy hills;
Far up, far down, at every turn-
What beggar has not gold to

burn!

"The California Poppy," by Joaquin Miller

machines that deftly mold from wood and steel the things we use; the men who explored the heavens and traced the orbits of the stars-who have read the story of the world in mountain range and billowed sea; the men who have lengthened life and conquered pain; the great philosophers and naturalists who have filled the world with light; the great poets whose thoughts have charmed the soul, the great painters and sculptors who have made the canvas speak, the marble live; the great orators who have swayed the world, the composers who have given their souls to sound, the captains of industry, the producers, the soldiers who have battled for the rightthese are our Christs, apostles and saints. The books filled with the facts of Nature are our sacred scriptures, and the force that is in every atom and in every starin everything that lives and grows-is the only possible god.-R. G. Ingersoll.

offices and emoluments, possessions and power.

While it may secure all of these it must not for a moment be classed with them. These things offer nothing that is worthy of a high ambition. Enjoyed to their fullest, they leave you hard, wrinkled and miserable. Get all they can give and the hand will be empty, the mind hungry, and the soul shriveled Ꮽ ᏭᏛ Oratory is an individual accomplish

ment, and no vicissitudes of fortune can wrest it from the owner. It points the martyr's path to the future; it guides the reaper's hand in the present, and it turns the face of ambition toward the delectable hills of achievement. One great speech made to an intelligent audience in favor of the rights of man will compensate for a life of labor, will crown a career with glory, and give a joy that is born of the divinities. There is no true orator who is not also a hero.

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UKA: Treat every one with friendliness-injure no one. Natasha:-How good you are, grandfather! How is it that you are so good? Luka:-I am good, you say. Nyah-if it is true, all right. But you see, my girlthere must be some one to be good. We must have pity on mankind. Christ, remember, had pity for us all and so taught us. Have pity when there is still time, believe me, that is right. I was once for example, employed as a watchman, at a country place which belonged to an engineer, not far from the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. The house stood in the middle of the forest, an out-of-the-way location; and it was winter and I was all alone in the country house. It was beautiful there -magnificent! And once-I heard them scrambling up!

Natasha:-Thieves?

Luka: Yes. They crept higher, and I took my rifle and went outside. I looked up-two men, opening a window, and so busy that they did not see anything of me at all. I cried to them: Hey, there, get out of that! And would you think it, they fell on me with a hand ax! I warned them. Halt, I cried, or else I fire! Then I aimed first at one and then at the other. They fell on their knees saying, Pardon us! I was pretty hot-on account of the hand ax, you remember. You devils, I cried, I told you to clear out and you did n't! And now, I said, one of you go into the brush and get a switch. It was done. And now, I commanded, one of you stretch out on the ground, and the other thrash him. And so they whipped each other at my command. And when they had each had a sound beating, they said to me: Grandfather, said they, for the sake of Christ give us a piece of bread. We have n't a bite in our bodies. They, my daughter, were the thieves who had fallen upon me with the hand ax. Yes, they were a pair of splendid fellows. I said to them, If you had asked for bread! Then they answered: We had gotten past that. We had asked and asked, and nobody would give us anything. Endurance was worn out. Nyahand so they remained with me the whole

winter. One of them, Stephen by name, liked to take the rifle and go into the woods. And the other, Jakoff, was constantly ill, always coughing. The three of us watched the place, and when spring came, they said, Farewell, grandfather, and went away-to Russia. Natasha:-Were they convicts, escaping? Luka:-They were fugitives-they had left their colony. A pair of splendid fellows. If I had not had pity on themwho knows what would have happened? They might have killed me? Then they would be taken to court again-put in prison, sent back to Siberia-why all that? You can learn nothing good in prison, nor in Siberia. But a man, what can he not learn!-Maxim Gorky.

WO contrary laws stand today op

posed: one a law of blood and death, which, inventing daily new means of combat, obliges the nations to be ever prepared for battle; the other a law of peace, of labor, of salvation, which strives to deliver man from the scourges which assail him. One looks only for violent conquest; the other for the relief of suffering humanity. The one would sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to the ambition of a single individual; the other places a single human life above all victories. The law of which we are the instruments essays even in the midst of carnage to heal the wounds caused by the law of war.-Louis Pasteur, at the opening of Pasteur Institute.

o O not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty. What is the matter with the Rich is Uselessness.

-George Bernard Shaw.

Who shall put his finger on the work of justice and say, "It is there"? Justice is like the kingdom of God: it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning. George Eliot.

Ꮽ Ꮽ

HE Age of Romance has not ceased;

it never ceases; it does not, if we will think of it, so much as very sensibly decline.-Carlyle.

H, God, here in my dressing room, with the door shut, I am alone with Thee.

I am glad I know the great spirit that stands silently by, here, as in every place where a human heart is beating!

Can not an actor be God's man? Can not I, whose business it is to play, be as conscientious as those in authority or peril or solemn function?

Convention classes me and my fellows among the loose and thoughtless. So Thou art my secret. I triumph inwardly to find Thy presence and taste the mystic joy of Thy friendship, while the world suspects not.

What is this mystery

death?

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My friend before me lies; in all save
breath

He seems the same as yesterday. His
face

So like to life, so calm, bears not a trace
Of that great change which all of us so
dread.

I gaze on him and say: He is not dead,
But sleeps; and soon he will arise and
take

Me by the hand. I know he will awake
And smile on me as he did yesterday;
And he will have some gentle word to say,
Some kindly deed to do; for loving
thought

Was warp and woof of which his life
was wrought.

Dr. Frank Crane.

W

Ꮽ Ꮽe

HAT is the law

of nature? Is it to know that my security and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings-by the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of thousands stifling within prisonwalls; by the fears inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against the possible interference of the famishing! Is it to purchase every fragment of bread that I put in my mouth and the mouths of my children by the numberless privations that are necessary to procure my abundance? Or is it to be certain that my piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that every one else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat?-Leo Tolstoy.

He is not dead. Such souls forever live
In boundless measure of the love they
give.

"Mystery," by Jerome B. Bell

Thou washest my heart clean as the Priest's. Thou givest me a holy ambition to do my work well, that I also may be a devout craftsman Thou teachest me subtle ways to resist despair, to master my passions, to heal unworthy weakness; the rare medicine of Thy presence is for me, too, as well as for the cloistered monk or meditating scholar. Teach me to be great among the many who are content to be called great. Reveal to methe satisfaction of virtue, the inner rewards of loyalty, helpfulness, and self-control. Let me be an unusual person because of that simplicity of heart and that lovableness of nature that I learn from Thee.

May I also touch the infinite and share the divine current that thrills all

high souls. Save me from the bogs of INVICTION brings a silent, inde

pettiness, from egotism, self-pity, envy, and all the corrosives that mar life. I do not serve in the temple; mine is no solemn office nor critical station; but I thank Thee that the river of God flows

finable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.-Balzac.

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