spring, leapt sheer over, without grazing a hoof on the upper rail. The whole drove followed in the same way, even the oldest cows cleared the bars. It was an amusing and singular sight to see what a hurdle race the simple and honest creatures made of it from one end to the other.

UNVEILING BEAUTY TO THE MOON.-A few days ago one of the most beautiful parks in the Midland Counties was opened to a flower-show of the cottagers in the neighbourhood. Only once a year is there admission to this sequestered elysium, and the owner hardly visits it as often as that. Still it is kept in all the perfection that scientific and artistic gardeners can give to it. We never saw any thing before more exquisite than the green carpet of some of the terraces and lawns. It felt under the foot like a real Axminster, fresh from the loom, full an inch thick of flossed silk. This little world of flower-gardens, lawns, lake, grot, temple, ferneries, and cascades is open only at the top for a whole year at a time; and few sweet and lovely wastes ever unveiled such beauty to the moon, for the sun and stars to look at. It is a pity that more human eyes could not feast upon such a scene.

NEW A B C.-We should like to have a good number of the young friends whom we meet in our schoolroom learn two or three new alphabets in the course of the autumn, or, at least, the Hebrew and Arabic. With these two alphabets we can make together a long walk through the Eastern languages. They are very soon and easily committed to memory.

THE CHEAPEST LANGUAGE.-There is no other spoken language so cheap and expressive by telegraph as the English. So the electric wires are becoming teachers of our mother-tongue in foreign countries. The same amount of information can be transmitted in fewer English words than in French, German, Italian, or any other European language. In Germany and Holland especially it is coming to be a common thing to send telegrams in English to save expense and ensure precision. Thus the red, white and blue, the Celtic, Teutonic, and Latin elements of our English language will yet make the tour of the globe, and be the silent speech fitted to the flashing lips of lightning, as well as the tongue which half of the earth's millions will speak within two centuries from the present time.

"DUDLEY POEMS."-This is the title of a small, shilling volume of verse by one of the bards of the Black Country, Mr. Robert W. Thom. It contains several pieces of much merit. The first verse in the collection, if not suggested by the thought of one in Longfellow's "Prelude,” presents a similar train of reflection. It reads thus :—

"O Poet of the latter times,
Heir of the great of old,
Priest in the holy land of song,
Be true, and calm, and bold,

The lips of pride, the eyes of power,
What are they unto thee?

White faces of the dead, that haunt

The midnights of the sea."

"AM I NOT A Man and a BROTHER?" is a question which has passed over from the negro to the Chinaman in America. No human being, without being absolutely a slave, could have been treated worse than the poor emigrant from the Celestial empire in California and Australia. But by the new treaty between the Chinese and American Governments, he is henceforth to be recognised as a man, if not as a brother, before the law in the United States. He is to be put on the footing of men from "the most favoured nation," entitled to the civil and legal rights of citizenship. The thousands of Chinamen going to California in one direction, and to Australia in the other, and carrying back to their country the language and ideas of Anglo-Saxon civilization, will become its best Missionaries to that vast empire. Both England and America can well afford to regard these emigrants in that light, and fit them for that purpose.

A STEADY GAIN.-The returns of the Post-Office Savings' Banks show a promising increase in the deposits made in them by the people of the United Kingdom. These are encouraging and pleasant statistics:

This is good progress, and augurs well for the disposition and ability of the poorer classes of society to make provision for "the rainy day."

A MODEL FARMER'S HARVEST-HOME.

THE size and surroundings of a regular old-fashioned farmer's fireside show the companionships and sympathies that lived and breathed in the society that gathered around it in the olden time. That kitchen hearthstone, depend upon it, was not made so broad and deep for the farmer's wife and children. They constituted hardly half the circle that sat around the red fire-light on a winter's eve; the sun-browned men and boys of the plough, sickle, scythe, mattock, and flail, who tilled his fields and ricked and threshed his harvests, ate his home-made bread and drank his home-brewed beer by that fireside, and shared with him and his family the merry and musical illumination of the yule log. Those were the days when capital and labour, when employer and employé lived in close companionship and much goodly sympathy. But little by little they have receded from each other socially and in common sentiment. There are a thousand old farm-houses in England with kitchen fireplaces large and deep enough, in frontage and sidings, for a goodsized family, and men and boys to till a holding of five hundred acres ; but, in nine cases out of ten, probably, the labourers have been evicted from that hearth-circle by the new customs of fastidious civilization, or have emigrated voluntarily to the frontiers of the farm, or even to distant villages. As capital and labour have thus gradually seceded from each other locally, they have equally seceded in sympathy; until, in many cases, a most unhappy state of feeling exists between the employer and his men; one party trying to get as much labour as possible from the other for the least money, and the other bent upon getting the most money for the least labour. Once in a while this feeling explodes in the conflagration of the harvests which underpaid or ill-used labourers have reaped and ricked for a stingy-hearted farmer.

Now all this is wrong and unnatural, and more so between farmers and their labourers, in a certain sense, than between large manufacturers and the operatives they employ, who must be housed in the whole of a small village. Any custom, new or old, that can be adopted to bring back this old social feeling and companionship is a boon and a blessing to the country. We notice, with much pleasure, the Harvest Festivals that are becoming more and more frequent in agricultural districts. These are very good in their way, and the more of them the

better. But they cannot bring the farmer and his own men together in the old happy spirit of the Harvest Home in his ample kitchen. We had read of these social and festive gatherings from our youth up, but were never present until a few weeks ago, when we were invited to one by a large and well-educated farmer in the neighbourhood of Lichfield. Here it was carried out to perfection in act, sentiment and enjoyment. It was to us a scene of the liveliest interest, illustrating the spirit of our dream of the social life of the olden time. And, what gave zest to the feast, it was not a compensation for a year's fast of friendly intercourse and sympathy on the part of the host towards his men; it was the crowning expression of his good will and care for them through the past months of labour. Having made himself a model farmer's home, surrounded and embellished with what a cultivated country gentleman could desire, he had attached all his men to him by his generous thought and care for their comfort. While making grottoes, ferneries and fountains for the enjoyment of himself and his own family and friends, he was laying out recreation grounds for his labourers hard by, where they might play at skittles or other healthy games after their work for the day was done. It was as pleasant a sight as any social life we ever read of could produce, to see him at one end of the long table and his foreman at the other, and the space on each side filled with all the men and boys he had employed on his farm. We should like to have had the whole scene photographed to the life of all its features,-the faces with all the hot harvest red upon them, the surroundings and overhangings of the large kitchen, the deep sides of pendent bacon over the table, and great hams hung at intervals between them; the side walls garnished with kitchen ware of polished copper and tin; the grand old fireplace with its social histories legible to the mind's eye, and the happy light of thorough enjoyment which seemed to beam from and upon every countenance. It was a sight that did one good to look at and remember in the toil and endeavour of business life. Then the spread of good things the table presented was both the picture and original of large-hearted and broad-handed hospitality, giving all a quickened appetite by its sight and savour. "The Roast Beef of Old England" was here not only in song, but in substance, grand and luscious. It was represented by a round that weighed forty-five pounds before it was put to the fire, and never could such a bulk of English beef have been roasted to more even and thorough perfection. Few men, we fear, ever arose to say grace over such a feast in a farmer's kitchen. What a knife was that he passed