away--that was the problem which
many have tried to solve. None more successfully than John Cassell.

At a meeting in Exeter Hall he suddenly put a new view before his
audience. "I have it!" he exclaimed.

"The remedy is education. Educate the working men and women, and you
have a remedy for the crying evil of the country. Give the people
mental food, and they will not thirst after the abominable drink which
is poisoning them."

He had hitherto been doing something to assist the temperance cause
by the sale of tea and coffee, and he now turned his attention to the
issue of publications calculated to benefit the cause.

Having, at the age of twenty-four, married Mary Abbott, he became
possessed of additional means for carrying out his publishing schemes.

Cheap illustrated periodicals began to issue from the press under his
superintendence, and copies were multiplied by the hundred thousand.

He never forgot that he had been a working man, and one of the first
publications he started was called _The Working Man's Friend_.

It is not necessary to say more. Though John Cassell died
comparatively young--he was only forty-eight when his death took place
in 1865--he had done a grand life's work; and the soundness of his
judgment is shown by the fact that works which he planned retain their
hold upon the people to this day.

John Cassell had his ambitions, but they were of a very simple kind.

"I started in life with one ambition," he said, "and that was to have
a clean shirt every day of my life; this I have accomplished now for
some years; but I have a second ambition, and that is to be an MAP.,
and represent the people's cause; then I shall be public property,
and you may do what you like with me." This latter desire he would
doubtless have realised but for his early decease.

"A BRAVE, FEARLESS SORT OF LASS."

THE STORY OF GRACE DARLING.

She was not much of a scholar, she could not spell as well as a girl
in the third standard, she lived a quiet life quite out of the busy
world; and yet Grace Darling's name is now a household word.

Let us see how that has come about.

William Darling, Grace's father, was keeper of the Longstone
Lighthouse on the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland.
Longstone is a desolate rock, swept by the northern gales; and woe
betide the ship driven on its pitiless shores!

Mr. Darling and his family had saved the lives of many persons who had
been shipwrecked er