they were not ignorant of the doctrine of human rights, and they had a deep, though perhaps a very general, sense of the value of our civil institutions.

If a boy were asked to give his reasons for loving his mother, he would be likely to say, with the sweetest disregard of logic and catalogues, "Well, I just love her." And we must not be too hard on the young citizen who "just loves" his country, however uninstructed he may be. Nevertheless, patriotism should be cultivated; should, in every home, be communicated to the children, not casually, but by plan and of forethought. For too long our children got it as they did the measles- caught it. Now, in the schools, American history and American civil institutions are beginning to have more, but not yet adequate, attention as serious and important studies.

The impulse of patriotism needs to be instructed, guided-brought to the wheel-if it is to do the everyday work of American politics. Sentiment? Yes, never too much; but with it, and out of it, a faithful discharge of the prosy routine of a citizen's duty.

It has seemed to me that a fuller knowledge of our civil institutions and a deeper love of them would make us more watchful for their purity; that we should think less of the levy necessary to restore stolen public funds, and more of the betrayal and shame of the thing.

BENJAMIN HARRISON.

THE SNOWSTORM.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He graduated at Harvard University in 1821. During several years he was a schoolteacher. In 1839 he became minister of the Second Church in Boston. Having resigned thence, he established his home in Concord, Massachusetts. His residence in that town added much to the repute it already possessed. In 1836 his first book, "Nature" was published. At home and abroad it began to make the author famous. Afterwards came the 66 Essays" giving high inspiration to many minds, - a number of other valuable prose works, and two volumes of poems. wonderful insight, and is at times exquisitely melodious. said that he was at all times a poet.

His poetry, like his prose, shows

He died at his home in Concord, April 27, 1882.

It has been

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, inclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come, see the north wind's masonry.
Out of the unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Carves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swanlike form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Mauger the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

TO AN ORIOLE.

How falls it, oriole, thou hast come to fly
In tropic splendor through our northern sky?
At some glad moment was it nature's choice
To dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?

Or did some orange tulip, flaked with black,
In some forgotten garden, ages back,

Yearning toward Heaven until its wish was heard,
Desire unspeakably to be a bird?

EDGAR FAWCETT.

BOYHOOD OF HORACE GREELEY.

JAMES PARTON was born at Canterbury, England, Feb. 9, 1822. While yet a child he was brought to America, and as he grew to manhood he became thoroughly imbued with the love of republican institutions. Here he became a journalist. He was one of the well-known American writers, the author of several biographical works of much merit.

He died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, Oct. 17, 1891.

There was little work to

do at home, and after break

fast the house was left to take care of itself, and away went the family, father, mother, boys, girls, and oxen to work together.

Clearing land offers an excellent field for family labor, as it affords work adapted to all degrees of strength. The father chopped the larger logs, and directed the labor of all the company. Horace drove the oxen, and drove them none too well, say the neighbors, and was gradually supplanted in the office of driver by his younger brother.

Both the boys could chop the smaller trees. Their mother and sisters gathered together the light wood into heaps. And when the great logs had to be rolled one upon another, there was scope for the combined skill and strength of the whole party.

Many happy and merry days the family spent

together in this employment. The mother's spirit never flagged. Her voice rose in song and laughter from the tangled brushwood in which she was so often buried; and no word discordant or unkind was ever known to break the perfect harmony, to interrupt the perfect good humor that prevailed in the family. At night, they went home to the most primitive of suppers.

The neighbors still point out a tract of fifty acres which was cleared in this sportive and Swiss-FamilyRobinson-like manner. They show the spring on the side of the road where the family used to stop and drink on their way; and they show a hemlock tree, growing from the rocks above the spring, which used to furnish the brooms, weekly renewed, which swept the little house in which the little family lived.

To complete the picture, imagine them all clad in the same material, the coarsest kind of linsey-woolsey, homespun, dyed with butternut bark, and the different garments made in the roughest and simplest manner by the mother.

More than three garments at the same time, Horace seldom wore in the summer, and these were, -a straw hat, generally in a state of dilapidation, a tow shirt, never buttoned, a pair of trousers made of the family material. . . In the winter he added a pair of shoes and a jacket. During the five years of his life at Westhaven, probably his clothes did not cost three dollars a year; and I believe that, during the