art and imagination. One of them is grim enough, at any rate, and
awful. It represents a dead person rising from his bier, to announce to
all whom it might concern that, although they were burying him in the
abode of holiness, and were now adoring him as a saint, he was, as a
fact, condemned to hell.

Perhaps one of our own famous modern divines was thinking of this fresco
when he declared that one great source of surprise, to those who went to
heaven, would be to find so many there they had not expected to see, and
to _miss_ so many they had thought to meet.

"NO' THE DAY, HONEST WOMAN!"

Dr. John Erskine, a well-known Scottish divine, was remarkable for his
simplicity of manner and gentle temper. He returned so often from the
pulpit minus his pockethandkerchief that Mrs. Erskine at last began to
suspect that the handkerchiefs were stolen by some of the old women who
lined the pulpit stairs. So both to baulk and detect the culprit she
sewed a corner of the handkerchief to one of the pockets of his coat
tails. Half way up the pulpit stairs the good doctor felt a tug,
whereupon he turned round to the old woman whose was the guilty hand, to
say, with great gentleness and simplicity:--

"No' the day, honest woman, no' the day. Mrs. Erskine has sewed it in!"

A BRAVE WIFE.

In 1872 a storm overtook a Boston ship on the banks of Newfoundland. The
captain--Captain Wilson--had his shoulder-blade broken by the fall of a
mast, and the first mate and part of the crew were at the same time
disabled.

No sooner, however, had the captain been carried to his cabin than his
wife, a woman of one-and-twenty, hurried on deck, told the men to work
with a will, and she would take them into port. The wreckage was
cleared, the pumps manned, and the gale was weathered. Then a jury-mast
was rigged, the ship put before the wind, and in twenty-one days she
reached St. Thomas. After repairing damages there, finding her husband
still helpless, the indomitable woman navigated the ship to Liverpool.

Captain Wilson was never able to resume work, and for seven years his
brave wife supported him and their only child by working as clerk in a
dry goods store. Then he died, and Mrs. Wilson was deservedly appointed
to a custom-house inspectorship by the American Government.

OLD FRIENDS.--The world has few greater pleasures than that which two
friends enjoy in tracing back, at some distant time, those transactions
and events through which