SINAI AND ITS DESERT. bedded itself in the sand; sometimes in rugged heaps, like Highland cairns; sometimes well-rounded and rolled; so thickly thrown together, and so thoroughly beaten down by the rain floods and sifted by the wind, as to form a smooth highway, extending for miles; so well macadamized that any European carriage might be driven over it with comfort-nay, twenty, or in some places fifty, might take the road abreast. Occasionally it looked like a vast area of finely laid mosaic; again, like a long stripe of tesselated pavement, formed with all the smooth exactness of Roman art. These varieties of roadway helped often to relieve the monotony of the waste, by breaking up in stripes its vast tracts of white or yellow sand. The desert is not a land without rain. It has its rainy seasons to a certain extent; and our journey, made earlier in the year than is generally attempted, had very nearly given us a specimen of desert floods, as we were warned beforehand at Cairo. There is no such adequate supply as to tell upon the land, save in the way of scooping out watercourses, or abrading the softer parts of the sandstone rocks, or still more rarely, forming an oasis of palms or tamarisks; but still there is rain-much more rain than is known in Egypt-not only in Upper, but even in Lower Egypt. Nay, it would seem as if the rain meant for Egypt is swept right over that level region by the stormy west wind, and attracted by the mountains of the peninsula, pours itself down in water-spouts upon the Sinaitic wastes. It comes in such rushes that it brings no benefit to the soil; and is so unequally distributed that even the spring (much less the summer) gets no refreshment from the winter floods-nay, hardly knows that they have been. If you are bold enough to penetrate the desert during the parched months of summer, you may count with certainty upon rainless skies; and you may pitch your tent where you please, even in the lowest bed of the torrent. But if you are bent upon a winter tour, or even to travel so early as January, you must be on the look-out, not merely for showers, but floods. You dare not pitch your tent in that inviting sandy hollow where the shrubs are waving, and which seems as if just made for a quiet encampment; for, however bright the sunset, if the wind shift to the west in the course of the night, you may find yourself, tents, baggage, provisions, camels, and all, hurrying down a swollen river, of whose possible existence you could not have dreamed, and which, ere the next evening's shadows have come down upon these sands, will have found its way to the POETRY. Red Sea, or wholly vanished in the porous ground, so as to leave no trace of itself, save a few pools in the deeper hollows, which your camel is drinking dry, or a few drops in a hole of yon flat stone, which your Arab is stooping to drink up. Poetry. THE LOST SHEEP. THERE were ninety-and-nine that safely lay In the shelter of the fold; And one was out on the hills away, Far off from the gates of gold; "Lord, thou hast here thy ninety-and-nine, But the Shepherd made answer, "This of mine And although the road be rough and steep, But none of the ransomed ever knew How deep were the waters crossed; Nor how dark the night that the Lord passed through, Out in the desert He heard its cry, Sick and helpless, and ready to die. "Lord, whence are those blood-drops all the way, "They were shed for one who had gone astray 66 ANECDOTES AND SELECTIONS. Anecdotes and Selections. SMALL ENGAGEMENTS.-How much the brightness of Christian honour is dimmed by inattention to "trifles" has, by contrast, an illustration in the following bit of history:-"Sir William Napier was one day taking a long walk near Freshford, when he met a little girl about five years old, sobbing over a broken bowl. She had fallen while bringing it from the field to which she had taken her father's dinner in it, and she said she would be beaten for having broken it; then with a sudden gleam of hope, she innocently looked into his face and said, 'But ye can mend it, can't ye?' Sir William explained that he could not mend the bowl; but the trouble he could mend by the gift of a sixpence to buy another. However, on opening his purse, it was empty of silver, and he had to make amends by promising to meet his little friend the same hour next day, and to bring the sixpence with him, bidding her, meanwhile, tell her mother she had seen a gentleman who would bring her the money for the bowl next day. The child, entirely trusting him, went on her way comforted. On his return home he found an invitation awaiting him to dine in Bath the following evening, to meet some one whom he especially wished to see. hesitated for some little time, trying to calculate the possibility of giving the meeting to his little friend of the broken bowl, and of still being in time for the dinner party in Bath; but finding that this could not be, he wrote to decline accepting the invitation, on the plea of a pre-engagement,' saying to one of his family as he did so, I cannot disappoint her, she trusted me so implicitly." 6 919 He CHRIST'S FULLNESS.-I have found it an interesting thing to stand on the edge of a noble-rolling river, and to think that, although it has been flowing on for six thousand years, watering the fields and slaking the thirst of a hundred generations, it shows no sign of waste or want; and when I have watched the rise of the sun, as he shot above the crest of the mountain, or, in a sky draped with golden curtains, sprang up from his ocean bed, I have wondered to think he has melted the snows of so many winters, and renewed the verdure of so many springs, and painted the flowers of so many summers, and ripened the golden harvests of so many autumns, and yet shines as brilliant as ever; his eye not dim, nor his natural strength abated, nor his floods of light less full for centuries of boundless profusion. Yet what are these but images of the fullness which is in Christ? Let that feed your hopes, and cheer your hearts, and brighten your faith, and send you away this day rejoicing. For when judgment flames have licked up that flowing stream, and the light of that glorious sun shall be quenched in darkness, or veiled in the smoke of a burning world, the fullness that is in Christ shall flow on throughout eternity in the bliss ANECDOTES AND SELECTIONS. of the redeemed. Blessed Saviour, Image of God, Divine Redeemer, in Thy presence is fullness of joy; at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore! What Thou hast gone to heaven to prepare, may we be called up at death to enjoy.-Dr. Guthrie. JESUS'S TEAR.-Jesus wept over the woes of a single city; and do you think that He never wept over the woes of a world? He wept in public, where He would certainly restrain His feelings as much as possible; and do you think He never wept in secret? Could we lift the sacred veil of His solitary hours; of His seasons of retirement, while an obscure workman of Nazareth; of His forty days' fasting and prayer in the wilderness; of His vigils on the mountain tops and in the deserts-what prayers, what intercessions, what tears, what tender and heavenly sympathies with the sorrows and woes of humanity, would come to light! His affections were not limited to Judea; He did not love those merely who loved Him. He wept at the grave of Lazarus, and over the distress of Martha and Mary; and why not over the great congregation of the dead of more than a hundred and thirty generations past, over all the broken hearts of widows and starving orphans from the beginning of the world? Why not over the distress of all the sick, the delirium of the deranged, the agonies of the dying? Do you now see why He went about with restless assiduity to console, to comfort, to bind up broken hearts, raising the dead, curing and cleansing and restoring men to the enjoyment of health, sight, hearing, and reason? How could He do otherwise, with a heart like His? He would have done so, though no man had believed in Him on that account, or returned to Him a grateful word or look.-W. G. Schauffter. EARNEST FAITH.-A sea captain related at a prayer meeting in Boston a short time ago a thrilling incident in his own experience. "A few years ago," said he, "I was sailing by the island of Cuba, when the cry ran through the ship, 'Man overboard!' It was impossible to put up the helm of the ship, but I instantly seized a rope and threw it over the ship's stern, crying out to the man to seize it as for his life. The sailor caught the rope just as the ship was passing. I immediately took another rope, and making a slip noose of it, attached it to the other, and slid it down to the struggling sailor, and directed him to pass it over his shoulders and under his arms, and he would be drawn on board. He was rescued; but he had grasped that rope with such firmness, with such a death-grip, that it took hours before his hold relaxed, and his hand could be separated from it. With such eagerness, indeed, he had clutched the object that was to save him, that the strands of the rope became embedded in the flesh of his hands!" And so it seems as if God had let down from heaven a rope to every sinner on the earth, that every strand was a precious promise, and that we ought to be so intensely eager to secure these promises, as to lay hold on them as if for our lives, and suffer neither the powers of earth nor hell to shake our confidence or disturb our hope. THE FIRESIDE. THE TWO ANGELS.-A traveller, who spent some time in Turkey, relates a beautiful parable which was told him by a dervish, and it seemed even more beautiful than Sterne's celebrated figure of the accusing spirit and recording angel: "Every man," said the dervish, "has two angels, one on his right shoulder and one on his left. When he does anything good, the angel on the right shoulder writes it down and seals it, because what is well done is done for ever. When he does evil, the angel on the left side writes it down, and he waits till midnight. If before that time the man bows his head and exclaims, 'Gracious Allah! I have sinned; forgive me!' the angel rubs out the record; but if not, at midnight he seals it, and the beloved angel on the right shoulder weeps." LUTHER'S TWO MIRACLES.-On the 5th of August, 1530, an awful crisis for the Reformation, when the firmest seemed to swerve and the boldest to tremble, Luther wrote thus to Chancellor Bruch: "I have recently witnessed two miracles. This is the first: As I was at my window, I saw the stars and the sky, and that vast magnificent firmament in which the Lord has placed them. I could nowhere discover the columns on which the Master has supported this immense vault, and yet the heavens did not fall. And here is the second: I beheld thick clouds hanging above us like a vast sea. I could neither perceive ground on which they reposed, nor cords by which they were suspended; and yet they did not fall upon us, but saluted us rapidly, and fled away.' ." These miracles, as Luther called them, filled him with unconquerable trust and joy in God. Well they might. So may they us. We see them wrought before us every night and every day. The Fireside. A CROSS HUSBAND CONQUERED. He came into the breakfast-room one morning, and in a moment it was seen that a cloud was on his brow. There sat the lady-like wife, waiting for him; the table fairly groaned, not with plated silver, but the solid material. The cloth was white as the snow; the family were seated around in pleasant expectancy; everything was smoking hot, and not an article there but even a pampered appetite could revel on. But the man's favourite dish was not there. Closer he came to the table, and with the inquiry, "Did you not know that I wanted a shad for breakfast?" he raised his foot and overturned the whole table on the floor. "It was at the fire, being kept warm for you," replied his noble wife, in her quiet, lady-like, and conquering way. |