"I am going to be married, sir,' said the young work

man.

"More fool you,' growled the master; but if you are, you are not going to leave off work, I suppose ?'

"No, sir,' replied the man; 'I mean to go on working as hard as ever-harder, if I can.'

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Why do you tell me you are going to leave my employ, then? I suppose you mean it for a trick to get your wages raised; but you are out in your reckoning.'

"No, sir; I had no meaning of that sort,' the man answered.

"What do you mean, then? Are you going to leave the town? or have you got work anywhere else?' the master wished to know.

"I am not going to leave the town, sir,' said the man ; 'the truth is, I am going into business for myself.'

"You! you go into business!' cried the master, bursting into a loud laugh: how do you mean to go into business, I should like to know? Where's your shop; and where's your money to start with?' He said this rather insultingly, and rattled the money that was in his own pocket as he spoke.

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"Well, sir,' said the young man, 'I have found a shop that will do very well, and I have hired it; and I have got a little money to begin with.'

666

"Oh !' said the master; and where have you got money from, I wonder? Going to marry a fortune ?—is that it ?' "No, sir; not in the way you mean,' the young workman answered. 'I shall have no money with my wife; but I have happened to save a little myself.'

"Saved money!'—you have, have you? If I had known that you were saving money to set up against me, I would have taken care you should not have saved it,' said the master, angrily.

"I don't see how you could have hindered it,' the young man replied, rather too proudly, perhaps; but you see he was drawn and provoked into a controversy. 'I have

earned only fair wages,' he continued, and I was not obliged to spend all I earned. And as to setting up against you, sir,' said he,' I don't consider that I am doing that. There seems to me to be room for us both in the town without doing one another any harm.'

"I'll take care you don't do me any harm,' said the master, and I'll have you look out for yourself. You had better go on with your work steadily; you will only get into trouble by starting in business. Why, I'll wager you anything you like, the savings you boast of do not amount to five pounds.'

"The young man was too wise, however, to lay a wager about it; and so the talk ended. In the course of the following week he was married; and the week after that he began business for himself, on a capital of eighty pounds."

When Mr. Johnson named this sum, there was what may be called "sensation " in the company; and he was not slow to perceive this.

"You start at this," said he; "but do you not think it possible for an unmarried man to live comfortably enough on fifteen shillings a week ?"

"Ye-es, sir; I don't know but he might," replied our speaker, hesitatingly. Not that he doubted it, however, but because he saw to the bottom of the argument.

"I should say that there is no doubt about it at all,” Mr. Johnson went on. "Why, look at labouring men who are not mechanics. Many of them, of course, have wives and families-some of them large families-to keep out of less than fifteen shillings a week wages, to say nothing of lost time." "But how do they do it, sir ?" asked Frank. "A wretched, starving sort of life it must be."

"Not a very luxurious life, I believe and am sure," continued our employer; "but they do it somehow; there is no mistake about that."

"But you could never wish your workmen to do as they do, sir," said Frank, with a tinge of the old jealousy and suspicion.

"Have I ever acted as though I wished it?” "No, sir, no," said several of us, quickly.

"Well, then, to come back to my story again. The young man had lived, and with comfort too, on fifteen shillings a week, and had laid by ten in the savings bank. Ten shillings a week is twenty-six pounds a year; and three times twentysix makes seventy-eight. Add interest to this, and you have over eighty pounds."

"He was a single man, and that made the difference," said one of the men.

"The difference between saving and not saving, you mean. Very true it did make some difference; but we have all been single men at one time or other," said Mr. Johnson, pleasantly; "and as the young fellow was married soon after he was twenty-four, there was no time lost, after all. You see he did not think so much of saving as to make him afraid of having a wife to keep. But what I have told you about his savings proves that he had no extraordinary good luck, as some would say. He had no better opportunities of being the owner of eighty pounds than hundreds of young working men have-not as good opportunities as many. But he took time by the forelock, you see, and made hay while the sun shone, although it did not shine so brightly after all. Why I lay so much stress on this," continued our employer, "is to meet the objection that there is no chance for a working man to rise in the world.

"Well, the young man went into business; but I almost believe that, if he had known all the difficulties and hardships which lay in his way, he would have shrunk from the experiment. I am bound to say this, though, perhaps, it goes against my own argument. It would take long to describe these difficulties, so I shall only say that they arose, in some measure, from the young man's inexperience. He might be a good workman, and I believe he was, but he knew nothing about the management of a business. His little capital was soon sunk in necessary outlays: there was no difficulty in this; the problem was how to get a

return for it. He had plenty of work to do, and he was soon obliged to employ two or three pairs of hands besides his own; but he very often could not get his money for the work when it was done. Advantage was taken of his inexperience by others; and before the first year was out, he had lost more by bad debts than the whole amount of his capital.

"His old master, too, made strong efforts to crush him, and spread reports about him which were as false as illnatured, and so raised the suspicions of those who had it in their power to assist the struggling young adventurer. He was one of those employers who think that working men have no business to aspire; and, besides, he was unnecessarily and unreasonably afraid of being injured by another person's

success.

"These were some of the things which the young fellow had to contend against; and he had no earthly friend to take him by the hand, or to speak an encouraging word to him, excepting his own relatives, and they, at that time, were as poor as himself.

"If he had lived frugally before his marriage, the young man had to practise still closer economy afterwards; and if it had not been for his wife, who nobly braced herself up to the same task, he must have sunk beneath his heavy burden. But she did this, and more; she encouraged him when he was downcast and despairing, and set such an example of patient endurance and constant cheerfulness, as I wish every working man's wife could have seen.

"I ought not to omit one source of help and comfort that was open to the young man," continued Mr. Johnson, after a moment's thought, when he had got as far as this in his story. "He had faith in God. He had been, as I hope and believe, led by God's blessed Spirit to Christ as his Saviour, and through Him he had access to the throne of grace,' where he was able to seek and obtain 'grace to help in time of need.' I am afraid," Mr. Johnson went on, looking round him, and speaking seriously and sorrowfully,

“I am afraid that some of you may call this 'cant,' or some such name; but that young man would have told you that, whatever others may think of it, it is a blessed thing to have Bible promises to lean upon, and God Himself for a helper in time of trouble and difficulty."

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

The White Frill.

OULDN'T you put a little white into your mourning?" said Ellen Douglas to Lucy Hayne, one bright morning in June. "I mean just a frill or something. Mother says it's so dreary to see you going about all in black. Sick people get fancies, you know, and that's a fancy of mother's; though, perhaps, she wouldn't be pleased at my telling you."

The speaker was a good-tempered girl of about seventeen; and, though the words may seem hard, they were not unkindly spoken. Ellen was a farmer's daughter, a healthy, happy girl, and very fond of her cousin, who had lost her mother a little before Christmas. Lucy's father had died when she was a baby, and in losing her mother she had lost her home, and was now living with her uncle and aunt Douglas.

Lucy made no answer. The tears came into her eyes, and she felt, it must be owned, a little hurt. But she was a good girl, and loved her aunt dearly; and, indeed, she had much cause to do so. It happened that very afternoon her uncle gave her a beautiful white rose, and she pinned it into her dress, on purpose to try and make herself look brighter for her aunt.

Mrs. Douglas noticed it directly, and said, "I'm afraid Ellen hurt your feelings, my dear, by what she said this morning. She told me afterwards she wished her words back again the minute they were spoken. But she did not mean to be unkind; only she is too anxious to give in to