On the woes and the welfare of earth."

Yes, I believe in the word of promise,
I believe in each holy word,
In the power that clothes the lily,
And that feeds the nestling bird;
"Be like unto children, of such is
God's Kingdom." Ah! well, in sooth,
If all were as little children
In purity and in truth!

To the weal and the woe of the nations
I do not seal my breast,
Tho' my Motherland is dearer
To me than all the rest.
If to fold universal being,
'Neath its wings the mind aspires,
Still the heart needs narrower limits
For the growth of its sacred fires.

REV. JOHN COSTELLO.

* * * * *

JULES JANIN, a witty French writer, nicknamed lobsters "Naval
Cardinals." He probably imagined that lobsters in the sea are as red as
they are when served on our tables or placed in the windows of our
fishmonger's shops. Curiously enough sailors call the ships used to
carry our red-coated soldiers from one part of the world to another,
lobster-boxes.

Tracadie and the Trappists.

The flourishing village of Tracadie, in the county of Antigonish,
Eastern Nova Scotia, well sustains for its French inhabitants, the
prestige, as industrious husbandmen, which their ancestors'
contemporaries established in Western Nova Scotia--the land sung of by
Longfellow in his "Evangeline;" and the much-vaunted superiority of the
Anglo-Saxon, reads like a melancholy sarcasm, in the face of the fact
that the lands from which the inoffensive Acadians were mercilessly
hunted, are, to-day, far, very far, removed from the teeming fertility,
which charmed the land-pirates in the last century. Simple-minded folks
are wont to say, that the lands of the dispersed Acadians, languish
under a curse, nor need we, of necessity, dissent from this theory, if
we consider the manifestation of the curse to be shown, in a lack of
skill, or industry--or mayhap both--in the descendants of those who
profited by that infamous transaction. Certain it is, that these lands
are now much less fertile than of yore.

Arriving at Tracadie, as we drive from the Eastern Extension Railway
Station, we notice as a curious coincidence of alliteration, the sign,--

+-------------------+
| HALF-WAY HOUSE. |
| H. H. HARRINGTON. |
+-------------------+

and remark that with the super-addition of "_Halt Here_," the si