but I _should_ like to be a
big strong man like father.'

"'Please tell me what tune it is?' said the little boy, addressing me.

"I told him, and he turned to his little sister, saving, 'Come,
Lizzie, we must go; mother said we must be home by half-after seven,
and it's most that now;' and he put his arm lovingly around her neck,
and she put hers around his waist, and they walked away towards home,
talking about the leaves and the blossoms on the trees, the merry
little birds, the bright sunshine, and the pleasant time they had had
in the park that morning.

"It was a pleasant thing to see those two little children, so
confiding, so earnest and true in their young affections, clinging to
each other so closely, as if no shadow could ever come between them,
or tarn their hearts from each other. How natural was that simple
question put by that little girl to her brother, 'Wouldn't you like to
be a little bird?' It was the thought of a pure young mind, that sees
only the bright sunshine of to-day, whose life is in the present, and
to which there is no forebodings of darkness in the future. There was
philosophy, too, in the answer of her brother, a simple but suggestive
sermon, 'But the sun' said he, 'don't always come up bright and clear;
the mornings aint always warm; the leaves and blossoms aint always on
the trees. The cold storms, and the winter come and kill the blossoms
and scatter the leaves, and what would you do then?' To finite minds
like ours, it would seem to have been a more beautiful arrangement of
nature, could it have been, that we could always have the spring time
in its glory with us; if the leaves and the blossoms were always young
and fresh and fragrant; if the cold storms of winter could never come
to 'kill the blossoms and scatter the leaves;' if the sun would always
come up bright and clear; if the birds were always merry, and their
glad voices always on the air. This world would be a paradise then,
and one older and wiser in the learning of the schools, but not wiser
or better in the heart's affections, than that little girl, might well
wish to be a little bird, to fly around among the branches, the green
leaves, and the blossoms on the trees. And yet what presumption in
finite man to sit in judgment upon, or criticise the wisdom of the
Omnipotent God! How know we but that a single change, the slightest
alteration of a simple law, would go jarring through all the universe,
throwing everything int