POETIC SELECTIONS.-THE CHILDREN'S CORNER. I HEAR it singing, singing sweetly, Night and day it sings the sonnet, Sits upon the grave and sings it, Sings it when the heart would groan, Farther on? How much farther? THE LONG WHITE SEAM. As I came round the harbour buoy, And I marked my love by candle-light Sewing her long white seam. It's awe sewing, ashore, my dear; It's reef and furl, and haul the line, I climbed to reach her cottage door; Like a shaft of light her voice breaks forth; As the shining water leaped of old, But never a song she sang like this, Fair fall the lights, the harbour lights, And peace drop down on that low roof And the voice, my dear, that rang so clear, For oh! for oh! with brows bent low The Children's Corner. THE KISS THAT MADE A PAINTER. THE great artist, Benjamin West, said: "A kiss from my mother made me a painter." We will give the anecdote referred to : "A little boy, named Benjamin West, living in Pennsylvania, was set to watch a baby, asleep in a cradle. He looked at it kindly, and felt pleased to see it smile in its sleep. He wished that he could draw a picture of the baby; and seeing a piece of paper on a table, with pen and ink, he tried what he could do. When his mother came in he begged her not to be angry with him for touching the pen, ink, and paper; and then he showed her the picture he had made. His mother saw baby's likeness, and was so pleased that she kissed her little boy. Then he said, if she liked it, he would make a picture of some flowers she held in her hand; and so he went on from that time, trying to do better and better, until he became one of the best painters in the world." In after life, he said that it was this kiss from his mother that made him an artist. MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. THE clock of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois sounded over silent Paris. Its ominous peal awoke an awful clamour, such as the earth had never witnessed before. A clang of bells responded from every tower and belfry, the adherents of the Pope seized their arms, rushed to the houses of the Huguenots, and murdered every inmate, from the sleeping infant to the gray-haired grandsire and the helpless maid. The city had been suddenly illuminated, and from every Catholic house the blaze of torches lighted up the labour of death. Beneath their rays were seen women unsexed, and children endowed with an unnatural malice, torturing and treating with strange malignity the dying and the dead. It is impossible, indeed, to narrate the details of this awful event, over which Catholic kings and priests rejoiced, and for which the infallible Pope at Rome gave public thanks to God. Within the palace of the Louvre itself, where a few days before every saloon had rung with festivity, and where mask and dance and throngs of gallant knights and maidens had greeted the nuptials of Henry and Marguerite, now echoed the groans of the dying Huguenots, and the shrieks of the terrified queen. In the evening Marguerite had been driven by her enraged mother from her presence and from the arms of her sister Claude, who would have detained her, and was forced to go trembling to the apartment of her husband, lest her absence might excite suspicion. She lay awake all night, filled with a sense of impending danger; she pretends that she knew nothing of the approaching event. Henry's rooms were filled with his companions in arms, who passed the night in uttering vain threats against the Guises, and planning projects of revenge. Toward morning they all went out in company with the king; and Marguerite, weary with watching, sank into a brief slumber. She was aroused by a loud cry without of "Navarre! Navarre!" and a knocking at the door. It was thrown open, a man wounded and bleeding, pursued by four soldiers, rushed into the room, and threw his arms around the queen. He clung to her, begging for life. She screamed in her terror; the captain of the guard came in and drove off the soldiers, and the wounded Huguenot was allowed to hide himself in her closet. Marguerite fled hastily across the halls of the Louvre to her sister's room, and, as she passed amidst the scene that MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. had so lately rung with the masks and revels of her wedding night, she saw another Huguenot pierced by the spear of his pursuer, and heard the clamour of the general massacre. Faint and trembling, she went to her mother and the king, threw herself at their feet, and begged the lives of two of her husband's retainers. Meantime, when Henry of Navarre had left his room in the morning, he had been arrested, and carried to the king's chamber; but of the throng of Huguenots who had attended him in the night only a few escaped. Each man, as he passed out into the court, between two lines of Swiss guards, was stabbed without mercy. Two hundred of the noblest and purest reformers of France lay piled in a huge heap before the windows of the Louvre; Charles IX., Catherine, and her infamous train of maids of honour, inspected and derided them as they lay dead. All through that fearful Sabbath-day, the feast of St. Bartholomew, and for two succeeding days, the murders went on; the whole city was in arms; every hat or cap was marked with a white cross, and every Catholic was converted into an assassin. Charles, a raging lunatic, rode through the streets laughing and jesting over the fallen; the streets were filled with corpses; the Seine was turned to blood; many Catholics grew rich by the plunder of the Huguenots; and it was believed that the king and his brother Anjou shared the spoils of opulent merchants and skilful goldsmiths. The papal nuncio, Salviati, overjoyed at the spectacle, wrote to the Pope that nothing was to be seen in the streets but white crosses, producing a fine effect; he did not see the heaps of dead, nor the scenes of inexpiable crime. Charles IX. shot at the flying Huguenots from his bedroom window. The rage of the murderers was chiefly turned against women and infants. One man threw two little children into the Seine from a basket; another infant was dragged through the streets by a cord tied around its neck by a throng of Catholic children; a babe smiled in the face of the man who had seized it, and played with his beard, but the monster stabbed the child, and, with an oath, threw it into the Seine. For three days the massacre continued with excessive atrocities; a month later Huguenots were still being murdered in Paris. It is computed that several thousand persons perished in that city alone. In every part of the kingdom, by orders of the king, an effort was made to exterminate the Huguenots; and Lyons, SINAI AND ITS DESERT. Orleans, Bordeaux, and all the provincial towns ran with blood. Four thousand reformers are said to have been killed in Lyons. At Bordeaux, Auger, the most eloquent of the Jesuit preachers, employed all his powers in urging on the work of slaughter. "Who," he cried, "executed the divine judgments at Paris? The angel of the Lord. And who will execute them in Bordeaux? The angel of the Lord, however man may try to resist him!" The number of the slain throughout France has been variously estimated at from ten to one hundred thousand. History has no parallel to offer to this religious massacre, even in its most barbarous periods. SINAI AND ITS DESERT. It is of some importance to get a correct general view of the desert in some of its broader features; and it is worth while to amend some of the false, or at least one-sided, ideas in common currency regarding it. Few take the trouble to inquire what the desert really is. They are content to think of it merely as a region of sandy desolation. The desert is not one vast level area, stretching over an immense tract of country, in unrelieved, unbroken monotony of plain. It not merely swells and undulates, but it rises into wide table-lands, nay, it bursts up in all directions into the magnificence of cliff and ridge and mountain. There is far more of the mountain than of the plain in it; and for one broad valley or strath such as Ramleh, there are at least a hundred hills; and these of a form and size truly Alpine. The desert hills of Africa are low and rounded; but the Sinaitic highlands exhibit some of the noblest specimens of mountain scenery which earth contains. One wady (or valley), I remember, was lined or walled with cliffs of hideous grandeur; and in these enormous cuts and notches, it seemed as if the whole region had been tossed up by the shovel of some huge giant, and then kneaded, and pinched, and broken, by his fingers into the most grotesque yet terrible magnificence that can be conceived. The wild barrenness, the unclothed and savage emaciation of these hunger-bitten hills, the gloom of their ravines, the tall, bold sharpness of their peaks, coloured of every hueblack, white, green, yellow, red, alternating with each other—are altogether indescribable. Another broad wady, I remember, with hills and cliffs and terraces on each side, while down from these SINAI AND ITS DESERT. there swept long slopes, cut or dug into what one can call nothing but a succession of stupendous quarries. Then the valley takes a noble bend, and fronts you with huge terraces and hideous precipices. Then a vast semicircle of yellow rock, towering up for hundreds of feet, seems to bar your way. Then come miles of sloping rocks, chiefly white or slightly yellow. The softer parts have been abraded by the torrents, so that the harder parts come out in full relief like rows of Egyptian gods, sitting in silent state, with their hands upon their stupendous knees. Then comes a long row of Gothic buttresses, planted almost erect against the walls of some enormous cathedral. Then comes another semicircle of sheer precipice, which might embrace a city in its sweep. Then up starts a tall sandstone peak, first tawny, then red, then white, then red again, then black as charcoal, till it pierces the blue heavens with a dark yellow spire. The desert is not a region of mere scorching calm, without a breeze or a tempest. Oftentimes at noon, even in the very heart of some valley, a quiet breeze would steal along by our side, fanning us and cooling us as it passed. And more than once the storm of the wilderness swept over us, trying the patience of our camels by day, and the strength of our tent-cordage by night. Once we encountered a tempest which quite arrested us for some hours, and made us glad to take refuge in some place of partial shelter, where we stood watching its fury. Blasts in succession rushed eastward, hurrying along with it a whole sea of sand-drift, which tossed and eddied in the blast. One gray wave after another swept past us, scattering its yellow spray. Now the sand-wave rose, now it fell; now it poured itself along in streams over the undulating slopes around; now, united in one torrent, it scoured the plain; now it threw up its yellow wreaths to the rain-clouds above, producing a dense sky of gloom, quite indescribable. Then in a fierce hail-storm it exhausted itself. The desert is not a mere region of sand. No doubt you find sand in abundance in the hill slopes, and in the beds of the valleys and the broad plains. There are vast reaches of unbroken sand. But still you are struck, as you move along, with the amount of rock and stone interspersed, at frequent intervals, extending sometimes for miles, and overspreading and concealing the sand. Sometimes these are found isolated, a large rock having shot down from the cliffs into the valley; sometimes they are found in level patches, the debris of the hills having thus spread itself out, and |