FACTS, HINTS, GEMS, AND POETRY. Four thousand Sanscrit manuscripts have been submitted to the committee of the Asiatic society of Bengal, and among them have been found some new and important works. Since the opening of the present century, eighty-six English patents, and twenty-three French ones, for perpetual motion, have been granted or applied for. Hints. One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself. There are things which we cannot help knowing, but which we must never acknowledge. Fidelity to inward convictions of truth, wherever they may lead, is the first duty to the Master. Truth enters into the heart of man when it is empty, and clean, and still; but when the mind is shaken with passion, as with a storm, you can never hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counsellor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius. Youth, esteem your fathers, for they had talent enough to descry virtue in your mothers, and surely your mothers are the best women on earth, are they not? A fair reputation is a plant, delicate, not rapid in its growth. It will not shoot up in a night, like the gourd of the prophet; but like the gourd, it may perish in a night. Every affection is an avenue which the enemy seeks to answer, and unless men watch and pray, the foe will get the mastery, until every passion will become an engine of war upon the soul. Gems. Religion is not an art, a matter of dexterity and skill, but a new nature. God never made his work for man to mend it. He alone is a man who can resist the genius of the age, the tone of fashion, with vigorous simplicity and modest courage. The dying benediction of a sage to his disciples was, "I pray for you, that the fear of Heaven may be as strong upon you as the fear of man." You cannot help soiling the fingers by handling a dirty substance; and a mean action is as sure to leave its mark upon the perpetrator as upon the victim of it. Pleasure is not often found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance. Poetic Selections. SINNER, COME, SINNER, turn from worldly pleasure, For the barter of thy soul; Here, however sweet the greeting, Pleasure lasts but one short day. Through the long eternity. Then, in these few fleeting moments, POETIC SELECTIONS.-THE CHILDREN'S CORNER. WEARINESS. O LITTLE feet! that such long years Am weary, thinking of your road! Have still so long to give or ask; I, who so much with book and pen Have toiled among my fellow-men, Am weary, thinking of your task. O little hearts! that throb and beat Such limitless and strong desires; Now covers and conceals its fires. O little souls! as pure and white Direct from heaven, their source divine; How lurid looks this soul of mine! The Children's Corner. -Longfellow. THE TWO POKERS. A Fable. I WAS sitting reading one day by my fireside. As it was getting dark, I shut my book and looked at the fire. The black poker and the bright poker were lying side by side in the fender, and by the the firelight I could see the bright poker reflecting angry flashes of indignation on his humble brother. "What are you doing here by the side of me you smokey, black, indelicate poker? Your proper place is down in the ashes there, with your leg under the fire." "Last time they poked the fire they put me here, Sir," said the poor little black poker. "You've no right to be put here on the handirons. coming so near a bright polished poker like me!" The idea of your "Sir, if I am black, it shows I am not idle and useless." "But you smell so disagreeably of fire and smoke, I can't bear you The poor little poker mustered up courage to say; "Sir, if I smell of fire and smoke, it is because, being a poker, I do a poker's work; but you, sir, are clean and bright because you lie here all day long doing nothing. You, sir, are not a poker, but a dummy." Bravo! little poker, said I, and as the fire wanted stirring, I took him up and did it, and then stood him upright in one corner of the fireplace, with his head far above the fine dummy." Before honour is humility. MY MOTHER'S BIBLE. On one of the shelves in my library, surrounded by volumes of all kinds, in various languages, stands an old book, in its plain covering of brown paper, unprepossessing to the eye, and apparently out of place among the more pretentious volumes that stand by its side. To the eye of a stranger it has certainly neither beauty nor comeliness. Its covers are worn; its leaves marred by long use; its pages, once white, have become yellow with age; yet old and worn as it is, to me it is the most beautiful and most valuable book on my shelves. No other awakens such associations, or so appeals to all that is best and noblest within me. It is, or rather it was, my mother's Bible—companion of her best and holiest hours, source to her of unspeakable joy and consolation. From it she derived the principles of a truly Christian life and character. It was a light to her feet and the lamp to her path. It was constantly by her side; and, as her steps tottered in the advancing pilgrimage of life, and her eyes grew dim with age, more and more precious to her became these well-worn pages. One morning, just as the stars were fading into the dawn of the coming Sabbath, the aged pilgrim passed on beyond the stars and beyond the morning, and entered into the rest of the eternal Sabbath-to look upon the face of Him of whom the law and the prophets had spoken, and whom, not having seen, she had loved. And now no legacy is to me more precious than that old Bible. Years have passed; but it stands there on its shelf, eloquent as ever, witness of a beautiful life that is finished, and a silent monitor to the living. In hours of trial and sorrow, it says: Be not cast down, my son; for thou shalt yet praise Him who is the health of thy countenance, and thy God. In moments of weakness and fear, it says: Be strong now, my son, and quit yourself manfully. When sometimes, from the cares and conflicts of external life, I come back to the study, weary of the world and tired of men—of men that are so hard and selfish, and a world that is so unfeeling-and the strings of the soul have become untuned and discordant, I seem to hear that book saying, as with the well-remembered tones of a voice long silent: Let not your heart be troubled. For what is your life? It is even as a vapour. Then my troubled spirit becomes calm; and the little world, that had grown so great and so formidable, sinks into its true place again. I am peaceful, I am strong. SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE. There is no need to take down the volume from the shelf, or open it. A glance of the eye is sufficient. Memory and the law of association supply the rest. Yet there are occasions when it is otherwise; hours in life when some deeper grief has troubled the heart, some darker, heavier cloud is over the spirit, and over the dwelling, and when it is a comfort to take down that old Bible and search its pages. Then, for the time, the latest editions, the original languages, the notes and commentaries, and all the critical apparatus which the scholar gathers around him for the study of the Scriptures, are laid aside; and the plain old English Bible that was my mother's is taken from the shelf. SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE. As long as there is nothing between our soul and our Saviour, as long as we can look him in the face and feel that it is clear and bright between us and Him, we are happy, we are cheerful, we are even gay and jubilant. But by and by there is this little defect, this stirring up of the malign feelings in us. And out of one and another of these things comes more or less of aberration, and larger transgression, till by and by, though we do not stop our prayers, we pray insincerely, and make our petitions general; and so we get into a miserable state of unhappiness, which creates more sin, and at last there must come a time of breaking down; there must come a time when, if we are true Christians, God, as it were, overhauls us, and brings us to account, and we have to go down before him, and repent, and confess, with tears and lamentations. And then comes the sense of peace, the joy of deliverance, and the wonder of God's grace and goodness. And the tenderness of Christ, to our imagination, never seems so sweet as in those moments which follow humiliation, and repentance of our transgressions. Then we think we shall never go wrong again; and many persons keep upon the level a good part of the time. For a secret of happiness is to have your will so co-incident with Christ's will, that you have every day a consciousness that whatever Christ wants will please you, and you can say, "If the Lord thinks it best that I should be poor, that is what I want to be; or, if He wants me to be rich, that is what I want to be. If the Lord thinks I had better live forty-five years, I want to live so long; or if he thinks I had better die when I am thirty years of age, that is the time that I want to die. If the Lord wants me to deny myself SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE. in this or that thing, I am willing to do that; or if He wants me to indulge in such and such things, I am willing to do that. I want to please Him, I never please myself so much as when I please God." Now, I think many of us have too many of the good things of this world to know what the happiness of religion is. I think, sometimes, that persons living, as it were, from hand to mouth, dependent every day on Divine Providence, brought so near to need that every day they feel that God's hand is stretched out to them, are a great deal happier than persons who have so much. I look back to my own Indiana life, when I lived as a missionary in some sense, expecting to live and die there in obscurity, encountering the diseases of the country and the poverty of early settlements; and I know that I used to live for months and months on a very high plain, conscious that if I forgot myself and wandered a little, the first sound of the name of Christ, almost like the first note of a trumpet, brought me back; and I lived jubilant and rejoicing. Though I have had many joys since (for I think I generally live near to joy), I am conscious that care, and business, and so much of the world as I have to handle, interfere with my spiritual enjoyment. Even if they do not cloud the temper of my mind, they take away something of that rare, ethereal, indescribable joy, of that joy unspeakable and full of glory, which it is our privilege to have, which I believe multitudes of Christians do have from day to day, and which all of us will have if we so live that we are reconciled all the time to Christ, and His will is our will. Now, in business, what is it that keeps men worrying so? What is the reason that men are so unhappy in business? What is it that frets and excites them so? I came over the ferry this afternoon, and I never saw such a set of hatchet faces as there was on the boat. I looked all around the cabin, and saw plenty of long-featured, sharp-eyed, nervous-looking men, but I did not see one single round face. The faces were all shaped like my hand. And I said to myself, "They are ground, they are worn down, by care, by excitement, by tension of brain." But I believe that a man can lay out all the strength that he ought to every day, without any anxiety; without any fear and apprehension. I believe that the only way that energetic and nervous and ambitious men can be happy while carrying on business, is to have such a hold on God that everything they do,-whether they eat or drink, or whatever they are called to do,-they shall do to the |