LITTLE CORNELIUS.

In one of the rooms of a large lodginghouse in a crowded alley in little Cornelius passed his babyhood. There is very little to tell about those first four years. He only saw the dingy walls of that one ill-furnished room, and the narrow alley, and a little of the broader street beyond. He only knew his mother, who spent most of the time at the washtub or the ironing-board, leaving him to take care of himself more than most babies do; his brother Dick, his sisters Jane and Maggie, and his father, who came home at six o'clock at night, and

went out again to his work at six in the morning.

He was a quiet little boy, with wistful, dark-blue eyes, and uncombed, curly brown hair. When he was four Maggie, who was three years older, took him with her to the Sabbath-school. It was something new, that large, sunshiny room, with its pictures and maps, and its crowd of boys and girls. He understood nothing of the reading or the prayer, and very little of what was said to him; but he stood entranced when the children sang their sweet hymns. But the one new revelation of the day, which surpassed all the rest, was the teacher. Neither the face nor the dress were remarkable, or, rather, they would not have been so to any one who was accustomed to see ladies; but this was little Cornelius's first sight of one, and he felt as one might who beheld an angel. He stood by her knee, laid his little brown unwashed hands in her lap, and looked at her with all his loving heart in those blue earnest eyes. She took the little hands in hers; he had never felt so soft and gentle a touch; she spoke of Jesus, and told him how the Saviour took the little children in His arms and blessed them. He had never heard the holy words before; he had never seen a look which so well agreed with the story; and, ever after, all the Saviour's words to him were associated with that smile. When she told the children about heaven, he asked, "Teacher, is that where you live?"

All the week he asked, "Isn't it Sunday yet? Won't to-morrow be Sunday?" On Wednesday the teacher came to see Maggie and him. He sat upon her lap, and felt too happy to speak. She smoothed back the angled rings of hair from his fair, broad forehead, and kissed him, and asked him to come again to Sabbath-school. He only looked at her, without a word. "Cornelius, why can't you speak to your teacher? Where's your manners?" asked his mother; but he seemed too intent upon the beloved face to hear or answer.

Every Sabbath for a year he came, and never grew weary of it. Few were the questions he could answer; very few the Bible verses he could repeat. It was

his only education, and must needs be slow. But he looked and listened, drinking in every word, though no one could tell how much the little mind could grasp of what he heard; except, indeed, when the room was warm, or the lesson far above him, and then he laid his head down upon the soft fur the teacher wore, and slept till the children sang again. When school was over, he still kept close to her, holding her dress or the little fur tails of her victorine, till he reached the corner where their ways separated, when he watched her go up the long shady street, towards the handsome houses, and the great church whose deep-toned bell was calling her; and then he turned to run after Maggie down the wretched street which led to the dark house he called home.

One Sunday he went there, and she was absent. Another lady took her place, but said the teacher would return in a few weeks. And she did, but the child's place was empty.

As soon as he could go out alone, he found his way to the docks, and used to sit for hours upon the end of the pier, watching the ever-moving vessels in the harbour. Poor little child, over whom there was none to watch, though he was So young and small! Some large boys,

their rough and quarrelsome play, ran against him as he sat there. There was no cry, only a heavy splash, as he fell into the deep water below.

When the frightened boys had succeeded in bringing some men to the spot, nothing was to be seen or heard but the washing of the ebbing tide among the piles. A boat went out in search of him, and some hours after, towards nightfall, it came back slowly to the pier, bringing the little body. There was a happy smile on the still white face, as if he had felt no pang of mortal fear or agony, but had only seen the dawn of the eternal glory. And so Christ took the little loving heart and unformed mind into a better home. His teacher thinks, sometimes, that first among the angels who will come to meet and welcome her, when she goes home, will be her little Cornelius.

THE FLOWERS IN THE WINDOW.

FOR THE YOUNG.

A LITTLE, thin, tired, wistful face, looked out of the window-the back window of the tall, narrow, gloomy old house in W- Street.

Certainly there was nothing pleasant or attractive in the view which presented itself-nothing which could awaken any light in the sorrowful face of the child who looked at the scene. There were the back yards, with the little strips of sodden clay soil, where the pale, sicklylooking grass grew scarce and scattered and then there were the backs of the houses, close, frowning, and mouldy with age and neglect.

You had to stretch your neck to get a glimpse of the sky from the window; there were no soft green vines to clothe the barrenness and decay; no flowers whose hearts thrilled out into bloom and fragrance for a living joy and beauty, as flowers always are. The old houses leaned over, with their rattling windows and broken blinds, with their dead-brown dreary faces as any prison wall, and I think that the face of this little girl grew drearier as she gazed.

She was hardly out of her eleventh year, and her face looked pallid and sickly, with large, brownish eyes that held some trouble in them, and seemed old beyond their time; and the mouth had lost its trick of smiling, if it ever had one, and settled into a kind of sorrowful patience that is very pitiful to see in children's faces.

Hope Loring was an orphan. Twothirds of her life had fallen to her in the country. She was a delicately-organized little creature in soul and body; shy, sensitive, susceptible.

She would never have gained her tenth birthday, if it had not been for the free, careless, out-door life of the woods, and hills, and meadows, in which her widowed mother had allowed her only little daughter to run at her own sweet will, while the mother stayed at home, as mothers will, toiling early and late to keep that wolf so terrible to a woman from the door.

For the strong arm and the loving

heart that would have made "sweet home" for the mother and child were still, under grass of summer or snows of winter. And at last, the mother's was still there too; and with her seventh birthday, Hope Loring was an orphan.

So she fell into the hands of her mother's only brother, a poor man, a hard-working, but not unkindly one, who had more mouths to feed than he could well manage; but he could not let his only sister's only child go starving and shelterless out into the cold of the world. So, the little, lonely, wistful-faced country girl came to live within the thick, close walls of the great city.

She dwelt an orphan and an alien in her uncle's family. Nobody there meant to be unkind to her; in a certain sense each member was sorry for the little homeless, fatherless, motherless child; but, after all, none understood her.

Poor people these were; cramped, and fretted, and soured, and oppressed by poverty. The long, wearisome hand-tohand struggle with toil had worn into the soul of Hope's uncle and aunt, and hardened and made them somewhat coarse; and the children were coarse too; boys and girls ranging down from their teens into babyhood. quarrelsome, selfish, dissatisfied with their lot, and not knowing how to make it better-to be pitied certainly.

And into this atmosphere, with all its discordant elements, in the heart of the hot, noisy, crowded city, came little Hope Loring.

She had carried the home-sickness at her heart in her face ever since. How she thirsted and starved for a sight of the cool, green meadows, with the dandelions winking golden among them! What visions haunted her of fields of red fragrant clover, with the fresh dews sparkling all over them!

How her heart grew sick thinking of the singing birds amid the snow-white apple-blossoms; and the little brook which wound its skein of blue waters among the stones, and then cleared itself out, broad, smooth again, and went on, singing and triumphant, to the river; and the shady country lanes, and the old brown roads wandering past the mills, and up the hill, and round the creek, and

back of the meadows. Oh, hungry eyes, oh, hungrier soul of Little Hope Loring, that went aching and crying for these lost joys in the dark high chambers crowded betwixt the thick walls, where your life had fallen to you!

But, suddenly as the pale, wistful face looked out of the window, a change came over it like a burst of sunlight. A little colour warmed the thin, pallid cheeks. The brown eyes grew dark and warm with a quick amazement and joy.

“O—h, see there!" burst in a quick cry from the tremulous lips.

And there, in the window of the opposite house, stood a small glass pitcher crowded with flowers; roses in a red fire of bloom, and fragrant mignonette, and trailing sprays of honeysuckle, and fuschias; all these, some hand-a small white hand-had just placed in the window opposite.

Hope knew in a moment that it was a stranger's, some visitor's probably, for she had heard that the widow woman who did work with the sewing machine had been ill. The lady down there must have caught the child's exclamation, for she stepped to the window and looked up, and saw the small, eager, delighted face above her. She was a lady to whose heart the way was short and easy. The sight touched her.

"Do you love flowers, my child?" she said to Hope, and the smile with which she said it was beautiful to see.

"Oh, yes, ma'am !" said Hope Loring and something in her voice doubled the assent in her words.

"Well, come down here, and you shall have some of these."

And Hope went, and her heart and feet were light, as they used to be going down to the meadows for dandelions and daisies. And the gentle-faced and sweetvoiced lady gathered from the glass pitcher some of the fairest blooms, and placed them in the thin hand of the child, while the woman who "worked with the sewing machine" lay asleep on the bed.

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Oh, they are like the roses round our back porch!" cried Hope, bending down, and drinking their breath, sweeter than wine.

The old fragrant scent was more than

she could bear. She broke down in a great storm of tears. The small, thin figure shook under the sobs which heaved it to and fro. All the pain and homesickness, the hunger and bitterness of years, were in those sobs.

"Poor child-poor little girl," said the lady, and she smoothed Hope's hair with hands like the dead mother's that were gathering dust; and then when the child had grown calmer, she made her sit down on the little stool at her feet, and won from her the story of her little life.

Hope held nothing back. She found comfort telling it all, in her simple, straightforward child's way, little dreaming what a wonderful pathos her words gave her story, and how the listening lady almost shuddered, as she felt the chill, and gloom, and home-sickness which the child described, stealing, in a sort of magnetic sympathy, over her own soul.

This lady had money, and all life's ease and luxury at her command. She was in mid-life, and had but two children, and these were boys, a little older and a little younger than Hope.

The home of Mrs. Hastings was in the city, but she usually passed about half of the year with her sister, who had a charming cottage home in the country. And it entered into the heart of Mrs. Hastings, at this moment, to take the little, lonely orphan girl with her; and with a swift impulse she said to her,

"Next week I am going into the country, to pass the summer amid the hills, and birds, and flowers. My child, Would you like to go with me?"

"Oh, ma'am !" said Hope.

I believe she stopped here.

*

*

*

Four days had passed. Mrs. Hastings had seen Hope's aunt and uncle, and obtained, with no difficulty, their consent to take the child with her. They considered the offer of Mrs. Hastings an especial "Godsend," for they had felt it was "high time their niece should do something to help herself; but she was such a small, puny thing, that they hadn't the heart to put her at it."

So, one afternoon, Mrs. Hastings

called with her carriage, intending to take Hope home with her, and make some improvements in her wardrobe before she could accompany her to the country. Hope's aunt met her at the door with a face singularly troubled and solemn.

"The child has been very ill," she

said. "The doctor says it is a bad case. She must have had a slow fever in her veins for a long time; and a shock and excitement of some kind, too great for her weak, overwrought system, has utterly prostrated her."

So Mrs. Hastings went up the stairs to the small chamber where the child lay, with her little thin, pale face.

Hope, don't you know me?" asked Mrs. Hastings, tenderly.

A swift light flooded the weary eyes. "Oh, yes, ma'am! you are the lady who had the flowers in the window."

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Well, my dear child, you must make haste and get well, so as to go with me where you shall have birds and flowers at every window."

Hope put out her thin, hot hands, and shook her head.

"No, I shan't go with you," she said. "I am going where I shall have flowers prettier than those in the window, for ever. I shall see them, and walk amongst them, and they will shine on me all the time. I am going to God and my mother." And the gentle lady wept

to hear her.

Hope turned to the lady, and her parched lips smiled joyfully.

There are no brick walls there," she said; "and I shall have the green fields and the flowers always. It is better, even, than to go with you; though that seemed heaven enough before. But I shall not forget you, and some time, perhaps, I shall know you again-the lady who set the flowers in the window."

Mrs. Hastings watched with the child the rest of the day.

That night thelittle, tired, overburdened soul went out on that long path which we must all walk, one by one.

They gathered about the little, still dead face with tears, and murmured that it was "too bad," just as the joy and

happiness had fallen into her life, that she must die.

They did not know what they said. Hope had gone to the warmth and bloom of eternal summer, to the little

children's best home, the peace and freedom, the care and love of God and His angels, and these are wiser and tenderer than even a mother's.

"I GO A-FISHING."

THE evening is closing. Then Peter says to his companions, "I go a-fishing." "We also go with you," was the reply; and no sooner said than done. Until they receive further instructions, they resume their former simple occupation. And why should they not willingly take to their nets again, if such be their Lord's will? The Christian life of faith is here represented to us as one of cheerful contentment with our earthly lot and calling. Whatever be the honest business and work in which we are engaged, we prosecute it with cheerful spirit and energy. For, in the first place, we shall, whilst performing it, regard it as but for a season, from the consciousness of our far higher destiny. But then it will be performed in the name of the Lord Jesus, who assigns to every man his post, and measures out to each his field of labour-who can be served just as well by the day-labourer as by the discharge of any other duty-and whose name can be praised and glorified in the most cir

cumscribed sphere. Furthermore, duty, where incumbent, is to be performed without desiring fame or acknowledg ment; for how does all honour with which the world could reward us fade before that which we already possess, "whose names are written in heaven!' And lastly, we work at it without grief or anxiety, as if the apostle's encourag ing declaration were still heard by us, "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" Listen to what transpires in the houses and cottages around you. Oh, what ill-humour, discontent, sighing, murmuring, and complaining is there everywhere! What is the cause of all this? Simply because people have missed the Gospel source of joy and peace. It is not the outward situation in which any one is placed; no, unbelief is the first and most efficient cause of all the misery. in the world, and the real, inward, cancerous affection which preys upon the whole human race.- Krummacher.

THE GOSPEL IN DELHI. UNDER the able direction of the missionaries, the Revs. J. Smith and J. Williams, the work of God continues to make progress. There are altogether nine stations, in and around Delhi, where Christian natives are found, and whence the word of God sounds abroad among the surrounding idolaters. Pahargunge is one of the stations in Delhi itself. The Church consists of some thirty-three

persons, of whom two were added by baptism during the last year. Most of the members are exceedingly poor. They are able to earn not more than three or four annas (sixpence) a day. Yet they are not wanting in liberality according to their means. Their weekly and monthly collections last year amounted to £3 6s. 6d., out of which they have expended about two pounds for the repair of their chapels, alms to the sick, and provision