ensure moderation. But the disdain of many pleasures is a chief part of
what is commonly called wisdom.

It is with waking and sleeping, with talking and walking, with eating
and drinking, with toil and labour, with all the acts of life, that
moderation or obedience to the laws of Nature requires some little
sacrifice in their observance; but it is quite certain that without this
obedience there is neither health nor happiness nor longevity.

SONNET.

Who said that there were slaves? There may be men
In bondage, bought or sold: there are no slaves
Whilst God looks down, whilst Christ's most pure blood laves
The black man's sins; whilst within angel ken
He bears his load and drags his iron chain.
The slaves are they whom, on His Judgment Day,
God shall renounce for aye and cast away.
Oh, Jesus Christ! Thou wilt give justice then!
A drop of blood shall seem a swelling sea,
More piercing than a cry the lowest moan.
Come down, ye mountains! in your gloom come down,
And bury deep the sinner's agony!
Master and slave have past; Time, thou art gone:
Eternity begins--Christ rules alone!

JULIA KAVANAGH.

THE SILENT CHIMES.

NOT HEARD.

That oft-quoted French saying, a mauvais-quart-d'heure, is a pregnant
one, and may apply to small as well as to great worries of life: most of
us know it to our cost. But, rely upon it, one of the very worst is that
when a bride or bridegroom has to make a disagreeable confession to the
other, which ought to have been made before going to church.

Philip Hamlyn was finding it so. Standing over the fire, in their
sitting-room at the Old Ship Hotel at Brighton, his elbow on the
mantelpiece, his hand shading his eyes, he looked down at his wife
sitting opposite him, and disclosed his tale: that when he married her
fifteen days ago he had not been a bachelor, but a widower. There was no
especial reason for his not having told her, save that he hated and
abhorred that earlier period of his life and instinctively shunned its
remembrance.

Sent to India by his friends in the West Indies to make his way in the
world, he entered one of the most important mercantile houses in
Calcutta, purchasing a lucrative post in it. Mixing in the best society,
for his introductions were undeniable, he in course of time met with a
young lady named Pratt, who had come out from England to stay with her
elderly cousins, Captain Pratt a