every sin."

'Twas silence all within the kirk;
The aisle was empty, chill, and mirk.

The chancel-rails were black and bare;
Nae priest, nae penitent was there.

Karin knelt, and her prayer she said;
But her heart within her was heavy and dead.

Her prayer fell back on the cold gray stone;
It would not rise to heaven alone.

Darker grew the darksome aisle,
Colder felt her heart the while.

"Wae's me!" she cried, "what is my sin?
Never I wronged kith nor kin.

"But why do I start and quake wi' fear
Lest I a dreadful doom should hear?

"And what is this light that seems to fall
On the sixth command upon the wall?

"And who are these I see arise
And look on me wi' stony eyes?

"A shadowy troop, they flock sae fast
The kirk-yard may not hold the last.

"Young and old of ilk degree,
Bairns, and bairnies' bairns, I see.

"All I look on either way,
'Mother, mother!' seem to say.

"'We are souls that might have been,
But for your vanity and sin.

"'We, in numbers multiplied,
Might have lived, and loved, and died,--

"'Might have served the Lord in this,--
Might have met thy soul in bliss.

"'Mourn for us, then, while you pray,
Who might have been, but never may!'"

Thus the voices died away,--
"Might have been, but never may!"

Karin she left the kirk no more;
Never she passed the postern-door.

They found her dead at the vesper toll;--
May Heaven in mercy rest her soul!

THE ABBE DE L'EPEE.

It was well said, by one who has himself been a leader in one of the
great philanthropic enterprises of the day,[A] that, "if the truthful
history of any invention were written, we should find concerned in it
the thinker, who dreams, without reaching the means of putting his
imaginings in practice,--the mathematician, who estimates justly the
forces at command, in their relation to each other, but who forgets to
proportion them to the resistance to be encountered,--and so on, through
the thousand intermediates between the dream and the perfect idea, till
one comes who combines the result of the labor of all his predecessors,
and gives to the invention new life, and with it his name."

[Footnote A: M. Edouard Seguin.]

Such was the history of the movement for the education of deaf-mutes.
There had been a host of dreamy thinkers, who had invented, on paper,
processes for the instruction of these unfortunates, men like C