ty to pride. If so, you must remember that the
peculiar traits you now cultivate are forming within you the one or the
other. By a thousand little kind acts, you can diffuse happiness in your
homes; and all the while you are disseminating these virtues, you are
acquiring these lasting graces, in _yourselves_, which will spring up,
like the violet and sweet clover, leaving a fragrancy and beauty
wherever you have trodden.

A TALK WITH THE CHILDREN.

Dear children,--although I am _almost_ a stranger among you, yet I feel
a true interest in your welfare. It gives me great pleasure when I enter
the Sabbath school to meet your happy countenances and smiling faces.
Children, you do not assemble together for the purpose of passing an
hour that perhaps might pass unpleasantly elsewhere. It is for a higher
and nobler purpose. It is to gain useful and religious instruction from
the _Bible_, the best of all books. You should not be content with
learning and reciting your lessons, but you should try to remember what
you learn. And when you grow up to be men and women, you will never
regret it. It is in the _Bible_ that we are taught to love God, and all
mankind.

When we enter the Sabbath school, may we learn to say, To-day is the
Sabbath day, ever blessed and beautiful; welcome to its holy and happy
influence! Welcome, thrice welcome, the day of sweet repose, and sweeter
meditation. Spring is sometimes compared to childhood. In spring, when
the brooks fall gurgling down the mountain side, when the earth begins
to be covered with its verdant robes, when the birds are joyfully
singing around, the trees gently waving in the breeze, and all is gay
and gladsome, we sometimes wish that it could always be spring. So in
youth, we sometimes wish we could always be young; but it cannot be. But
as each season in its turn, spring, summer, autumn, and even winter,
clothed in its robes of snow, has its own pleasures, so each season of
life is wisely invested of God, with its own peculiar joys.

Though it is now spring-time, it will soon be autumn with you, when you
must impart that useful knowledge you will have gained in spring and
summer. Now is the time for you to store up that knowledge. If our
childhood and youth are rightly employed, age will compare no more
unfavorably, as regards its joys, with youth and middle age, than does
winter with spring. Endeavor, then, to acquire that useful knowledge
that will teach you so to live