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MR. ALFRED AUSTIN ON IRELAND. THE POET'S FIRST IMPRESSION OF LAND AND PEOPLE. "THAT damnable country phrase once used by au irate statesman-is the title which Mr. Alfred Austin chooses to set off by way of contrast his glowing panegyric on Ireland in Blackwood. He has been to the Emerald Isle for the first time, and returns wistful for the next visit. His cry is, "Go to Ireland and go often. It is a delightful country to travel in."

I do not willingly allow that Ireland is lovelier still than England, but it is. One has said with Æneas, only too often, when Spring came round, Italiam petimus? Yet are not Bantry Bay and Clon-Mac-Nois as beautiful, and as hallowed by the past, even as the Gulf of Spezia and the cyclopean walls of Sora? . . . Neither the Yorkshire nor the Devonshire cliffs can show anything comparable in stern beauty and magnificence with the west coast of Ireland. . .

Even "Irish rain is warm as an Irish welcome, and soft as an Irish smile."

THE TAKE-IT-AISY THEORY OF LIFE.

The Irish people he does not find as lively as repute would have it.

I cannot put aside the impression that sadness is the deepest note in the Irish character... Poverty seems natural, and even congenial, to them. Life is not to them, as to Englishmen or Scotsmen, a business to conduct, to extend, to render profitable. It is a dream, a little bit of passing consciousness on a rather hard pillow,-the hard part of it being the occasional necessity for work, which spoils the tenderness and continuity of the dream.

This so-many-horse-power and perpetual-catching-of-trains theory of life is not one that is accepted by the Irish people; and I do not think it ever will be.... The saying, "Take it aisy; and if you can't take it aisy, take it as aisy as you can," doubtless represents their theory of life; and, for my part, if it were a question either of dialectics or of morals, I would sooner have to defend that view of existence than the so-many-horsepower one.

LITTLE IMAGINATION OR SENSE OF BEAUTY.

The beauty of Ireland is little known, Mr. Austin holds, because it has had no great poet to glorify it :

Irishmen do not seem to love Ireland as Englishmen love England, or Scotchmen Scotland. . . . But in truth I doubt whether the Irish are a poetical people, in the higher sense. They have plenty of fancy, but little or no imagination. . . . The Irish are both too inaccurate and too sad to produce poetry of the impressive and influencing sort.... But just as its people in many respects so gifted, have little imagination, so have they little feeling for beauty.

HOW TO TURN ON WINTER

AS WE TURN ON WATER AND GAS. TOUCHING a button or turning a tap already does for us wonders almost as great as were called up by the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp. The possibilities of transformation which a generation hence will see laid on from mains under the street promise to eclipse the marvels of Eastern phantasy. Here, for example, in Cassier's for August, Mr. Wilberforce Smith tells us how for four years Denver and St. Louis have been supplied with a system of refrigeration from central stations, which on the turn of a small switch will change your water into ice, crystallise your warm moist air into hoar frost, and lower the temperature of your room in the hottest weather by some dozen degrees. In one of the St. Louis restaurants, which the enterprising owner has decorated in a manner suggestive of the Polar regions, pipes upon the walls are connected with the street line, so that in sweltering summer he can turn on the cold and defy the dog-days. The slop and waste of taking in ice and keeping the ice

bunkers replenished is obviated. The genie of frost can be summoned at a touch, and at a slightly smaller cost. Condensed anhydrous ammonia is supplied in mains, and its action when turned on is thus explained:

Ammonia under atmospheric pressure boils at 28 degrees Fahrenheit, and, at ordinary temperatures, is kept liquid by a pressure of ten or twelve atmospheres. In the process of refrigeration, anhydrous ammonia, compressed to liquid form, is allowed to escape very slowly through a minute valve into a comparatively large pipe, called the expansion coil, where, relieved of pressure, it expands to a gaseous form and, in doing so, absorbs heat from its surroundings, leaving them cold.

The cycle of operation is completed by the recovery of this gas, and its recondensation by pressure, in a vessel surrounded by cooling water to remove the latent heat given out in the process of condensation.

The gas is either returned to the central station free and then recompressed, or is absorbed on leaving the absorption coil by weak aqua ammonia, and then at the centre liberated by distillation.

WHAT BOYS LIKE TO READ:

PAST AND PRESENT COMPARED.

AN interesting study in the reading tastes of young Britain now and a generation ago is supplied to the Strand by Frances H. Low. She compares the recollections of distinguished persons of to-day with the confessions of some 300 boys and 150 girls, in schools belonging to the middle and upper-middle classes, who have furnished through their teachers lists of their favourite authors. "Pilgrim's Progress" bulked largely in the childhood of the personages now famous; but only five out of the 300 modern boys, and two out of the 150 girls, mention it.

"Robinson Crusoe" does not occur in nearly one half their papers! But M. Daudet describes it as the sole food of his infancy, the Prince of Wales calls it 'the favourite book of his childhood," it was the companion of John Burns, Gabriel Rossetti, Professor Huxley, Sir Henry Thompson, and Mr. Santley in their childhood; but neither Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, nor Mr. Ruskin give it any place of favour. "The Arabian Nights," the confessed joy of many an early genius, is named by only fourteen out of the 300 boys and by none of the girls. Mr. Gladstone's favourite books at the age of ten, writes Mrs. Drew, were Scott's novels, Froissart's Chronicles, Pilgrim's Progress, and the Arabian Nights. Lord Salisbury says his were Walter Scott's novels, the earlier novels of Dickens, Marryat, l'enimore Cooper, and Shakespeare's plays. Lord Wolseley confesses "It was love of country more than love of heroes which filled my mind." The writer thus states her

concluding impressions :-

Perhaps the moral that is most driven home to one, or, at any rate, to the humble writer of this, is that bad books socalled-meaning books dealing openly with the relations of men and women, and with matters of the world- do not much harm a clean-minded little boy.

Of much greater import, so it seems to me, is the vulgarity of style and sentiment of many of the books favoured by modern boys. There are books-I will not advertise them more than I can help recurring again and again, whose distinguishing characteristics are certain cheap qualities that should recommend them to the servants' hall, but nowhere else. The strain of commonness in humour, the vulgarity of the style, the complete absence of anything imaginative, or high, or heroic, that can inspire and animate and unconsciously educate a boy, are so marked, that it is a marvel that parents should permit such literature in the schoolroom; and their popularity is the severest commentary on the national demoralisation of literary feeling.

COMMAND OF THE INTER-OCEAN CANAL.

The

HOW TO SECURE IT FOR GREAT BRITAIN. "WHAT the Mediterranean was yesterday, the Atlantic is to-day, and the Pacific will be to-morrow. course of empire' moves ever westward." Therefore, urges Mr. Arthur Silva White in the United Service Magazine, let us secure our "needed foothold in the Pacific." But just as the cutting of the Suez Canal altered the international situation, so by the cutting of the inter-ocean canal, whether via Panama or Nicaragua, "the world's commerce will be revolutionized, leading to the re-distribution of trade-centres." The Galápagos Islands, situate under the Equator, in the Pacific Ocean, about 500 or 600 miles both from the Isthmus and the South American mainland, will then become "a possession of the highest political, commercial, and naval importance."

So far as we know, the Galápagos Islands offer all the essential advantages for the establishment of a coaling-station. Drinking-water is probably scarce or bad. But there are good anchorages and roadsteads, and sufficient creeks, bays, and harbours. Their chief value, as such, lies in their unique geographical position, for there are no other islands in that part of the Pacific that could serve as a naval base and coalingstation. Over 3000 miles of sea separate them from the tropical islands of Oceania.

And "Great Britain has absolutely no stations in the south-east Pacific." The canal would further enormously develop the commerce of the western States of South America, whose choice between absorption in the United States and commercial friendship with Great Britain would be affected by the holders of the islands in question.

Mr. White, therefore, proposes that Great Britain should buy them from the moribund State of Ecuador to which they now belong. There is the political bogey called the Monroe doctrine, but have the United States a navy strong enough to uphold it? Mr. White is "in a position to know that the Foreign Office does not contemplate taking any steps towards the acquisition of the Islands"; and, as the United States are sure not to ignore the question, he invokes "the pressure of public opinion" to jog the elbow of the Foreign Office.

STORIES ABOUT GENERAL SHERMAN. SOME personal recollections of General Sherman are well told in McClure's for August. The writer is S. M. Byers, who, while a captive in Libby's prison, wrote the famous song of "Sherman's March to the Sea." This song introduced him immediately on his escape to a place on the General's staff, and to his lifelong friendship. We cite a few of his stories about the General:

He shared all the privations and hardships of the common soldier. He slept in his uniform every night of the whole campaign. Sometimes we did not get into a camp till midnight. I think every man in the army knew the General's face, and thousands spoke with him personally. . . . He paid small attention to appearances; to dress almost none.

"There is going to be a battle to-day, sure," said Colonel Audenreid, of the staff, one morning before daylight. "How do you know?" asked a comrade.

"Why, don't you see? The General's up there by the fire putting on a clean collar. The sign's dead sure."

A battle did take place that day.

Despite reports to the contrary, he was as chivalrous towards women and children in the South as he was towards his own people, and protected them as fully. I recall vividly how once on the march in the Carolinas he caused a young staff officer to be led out before the troops, his sword broken in two, and his shoulder-straps cut from his shoulders, because he had

permitted some of his men to rob a Southern woman of her jewelry.

Once I saw him at Berne when he was boarding the train for Paris. Every American girl who happened to be in the town came to see him off. Not one of them had ever seen him before, but every one of them kissed him; so did some of their mothers.

A copy of Burns lay on his desk constantly. Certain of Dickens's novels he read once every year. He was a constaut reader of good books, and I think he knew Burns almost by heart. He was also fond of music, and went much to the opera. Army songs always pleased him.

He would say. "I almost think it impossible for an editor to tell the truth. If this country is ever given over to socialism, communism, and the devil, the newspapers will be to blame for it. The chief trouble of my life has been in dealing with newspapers. They want sensations-something that will sell. If they make sad a hundred or a thousand hearts, it is of no concern to them.

Let me assuage the fears of compassionate Americans as to the cruelty of this diversion; I cannot call it sport. Most of us, and I know I was of the number, have pictured the deer in the paddocks trembling at the approach of man, shivering with fear in the dark van as it is driven to the meet, bewildered at 'the uncarting, and, after a half-hopeful, fully terrorised flight, finally brought to a last desperate stand by fierce hounds that seek its life-blood. This is the hysterical pen-picture familiar to most readers of the press, but the facts do not support it. The deer, despite its antlers being sawed off, neither trembles at man's approach nor permits the hounds to worry him: indeed, they are frequently on very comfortable terms of intimacy. As for the terrors of uncarting and sight of the crowd, none of the deer I saw gave evidence of being so stricken, and one at least walked about looking at the crowd until some one "shooed" it off. A meet of the Queen's buck hounds is quite, from a sporting point of view, the most ridiculous performance I have ever attended, and though the fields do have a sprinkling of sportsmen who follow for social reasons of varying degrees of pressure, the great majority turn out because it is one of the events of the locality, and very likely because the master and the hunt servants are the only ones in England that embellish their livery with gold lace.

Aladdin's Cave in Western Australia.

THE contribution of Western Australia, says the Australian Review of Reviews, to the history of July is of a very shining quality. In the Londonderry Reef, from a mere trench some 4,000 oz. of gold have been "dollied” in less than four weeks; a single block of golden quartz, a foot square, was broken out so heavy with the precious metal that it took the strength of a powerful man to lift it. The story of the discovery of this reef is a romance. A party of six miners-four from New South Wales, two from Victoria-reached Coolgardie about the middle of March. After six weeks' barren prospecting they were returning, wearied and disgusted, to Coolgardie when, within nine miles of that place, they stumbled on an outcrop of amber-coloured quartz, heay and shining with gold. Two of the finders sold out to their mates for modest sums, and these, in turn, have already refused to sell five-sixths of the mine for £50,000 cash. Here, then, are four miners who, in less than two months, and by what may be described as the lucky blow of a pick, have been lifted from poverty to wealth!

WHO ARE CHRISTIANS?

OR, WHAT IT IS TO BELIEVE IN JESUS. IN a recent number of the REVIEW I quoted some criticisms of Professor Herron's book, "The New Redemption," from an ultra-orthodox point of view. Professor Herron, who occupies the chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa, is the author of a very remarkable book on the "New Redemption," which is a series of very fervent and eloquent discourses intended to rouse the American public to the grave social dangers which confront their country. In the June number of the Arena, Professor Herron writes a letter in which he gives us his definition of a Christian:

I use the term not to define one's creed, but to define a quality of life. For instance, I call John Stuart Mill and Frederic Harrison Christians. They are not such in creed, but they are such in practice. I do not demand that men shall believe all that I believe about Jesus, but I do plead for our trying to get practised His teachings concerning right and wrong. The belief for which I plead is a moral, rather than a theological, belief. I will join hands with any and all men who will work with me toward establishing a Christ quality of human relations on the earth, without ever stopping for one moment to demand of any man that he shall believe as I believe. It is not a man's opinions that I care for, but his purpose and character. If unselfishness is the law of his life, I believe that he is a Christian in the sight of Christ, though he be absolute materialist in his philosophy.

I do indeed believe in Jesus Christ. I believe in Jesus as the one man who has been wholly filled with the Spirit of God, so that He was of one mind with God. I believe in Jesus as the one perfect revelation of what our human life really is. I believe that all the epochs and crises of history are but the process by which the world is being Christ-made. My belief in Jesus is the stay of my reason, my hope for the world, my meat and drink. I do not think there is an hour of my life when I am not conscious of this Jesus as a living, human, saving Christ.. I can make no sense out of life, I can read no sense into the universe, except through faith in Him as the man we are all becoming. My belief in Jesus is the passion and vision of my life. I can find no other personal standard of righteousness than His that is worth having. I find that men who deny His standard as the one altogether unselfish and right, do exactly as you have done in your articlemeasure every other standard by Him after all. The very utmost that has ever been claimed for those who have gone before, or come after, Him, is that there are some things in them and their teachings like the person and teachings of Jesus.

I am driven to Jesus by my passion for humanity. The wrong, injustice, and oppression of the world humiliate, hurt, and crush me. I feel as if the sin of the world were all, somehow, my own sin, and that I myself am responsible for getting it out of the world. The woe and shame of the world break my heart, wrench my brain, and make life a sort of continuous, divine agony. To whom shall I go-and to whom shall any of us go for a way out of all this, except to Jesus? I see more clearly every day that if men would only do as Jesus tells them, if they would only practise His teachings, that there would be perfect justice and peace and right among men, and we should have heaven upon the earth-as I believe we one day surely will have-and perhaps sooner than we think. It is because of my love for men, because I would save the world from the evil and misery, slavery and selfishness I find it in, that I point to Jesus. I can find no other man, no other teachings to have absolute faith in, except Jesus. I do believe that His is the one name under heaven whereby we may be saved.

I think I am one of the last men on earth who would undertake to compel other men to believe exactly as I believe, or refuse to work with men of other creeds. In fact, I have no creed except that I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as incarnating, revealing and teaching the kind of righteousness we must all practise, in order to set this world right and make it a kingdom of heaven.

THE OLD GOSPEL RESTATED.

A PAPER significant of the movement of theological thought is contributed by a writer under the initials J. D. T. to the Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review for July. It is entitled "The Parable of the Garden of Eden." The writer scouts the idea that the serpent was the devil, and maintains that the Fall was the birth of conscience. The Fall, in fact, becomes a rise-a rise to an agonising self-consciousness, a torturing sense of guilt, and a ceaseless conflict with weakness and limitation. Through sin, and the sense of sin, we ultimately struggle upwards to a place of large life not attainable by any less bitter or woful path. He says:

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Not one essential verity need be sacrificed, only reconceived. Sin" is not made one whit less, but more real, for its ancestry is known, and it is seen to be the dominance of the lower nature over the higher in spite of the protests of that higher. “Original sin" and "federal headship" are the scientific truths of heredity and solidarity. "Salvation" is emancipation from the dominion of the lower self; it is that inward condition of energetic moral health in which the man is entirely in harmony with the Divine will, and entirely given up to the Divine purpose. Atonement" is that identification by sorrow and sympathy in which the Christ becomes one with us, realises and bears our sins and carries our griefs, as in our small measure we too may bear the sins and the sufferings of others. 'Justification" is the reckoning of the promise and potency of the new life of the present for that fulness of the future to which it will grow, as the farmer sees the harvest in the sprouting blade. "Forgiveness" is the recognition of the changed attitude of a man towards the law of righteousness and truth-it is, in another view, the sense of peace and rest which that changed attitude towards God's great order ever brings. The "witness of the Spirit" is but another way of putting the same experience. "Regeneration" holds its old place, and becomes even more intelligible as that change in a man's nature, that forward step in his development by which the spiritual or higher element obtains the ascendency over the fleshly or lower principle, so that the seat of rule is shifted, the balance of power is on the side of the nobler nature -this transference of sovereignty requiring all the same for its accomplishment the bending down of a great Divine energy. Faith in the future, if touched at all by our version of the "fall," is made more potent and energetic than ever. Thiview shows us what, through God's grace, are the ultimate tendencies of our life in harmony with Paul's magnificent dream of spiritual evolution.

It would be interesting if we could hear what the Primitive Methodist fathers of twenty, or even ten years ago, would have said to J. D. T.

Professor Blackie's Four Heroes.

AN interview with the venerable Scot, now eighty-five years old, is reported in the Woman at Home, by Mr. Arthur Warren. The conversation, which was of a strictly unconventional order, included lunch :

While we ate, the Professor talked, burst into snatches of melody, rippled in Greek, alternating with thunderous Professor German, laughed and wore his hat! Blackie is not what the anecdote-mongers call a "conversationalist." He does not His converse; he explodes.

talk is volcanic. There comes an eruption of short sentences blazing with the philosophy of life. There is a kindly glow in it all, and the eruption subsides quickly with a gentle troll of song. I well remember the explosion that followed some reference to education. The table shook under a smiting hand, and these words were shot at me: "We are teaching our young men everything except this: to teach themselves, and to look the Lord Jesus Christ in the face!"

Later in the day, he ejaculated to his guest, "Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Apostle Paul,--these are my heroes."

A PRINCE OF SHIPPING.

AN illustrated interview of more than usual interest is furnished to the Strand by Mr. Harry How, the subject being Sir Donald Currie. He is described as a "perfect Scotchman, careful, cool and calm in everything he does." "Earnestness, perfect and complete earnestness, is the great characteristic which has governed and directed his life." He was, it appears, born in 1825. His first school was in Belfast. He recalls the political feuds then active as being of much greater virulence than any known now. James Bryce's father was his teacher. He confesses to

having been always fond of ships, and is inclined to think he had one of the biggest collections of small boats of any of the boys in the school. At fourteen he left school and entered the steam-shipping office of a relative in Greenock. When eighteen he went to Liverpool and joined the Cunard Company's service. On the abolition of the Navigation Laws he organised that company's lines of traffic between the Continent of Europe and America. From 1856 to 1862 he was attached to the headquarters of the company in Liverpool. In 1862 he withdrew and started for himself the Castle Line between this country and the East Indies. In the development of South Africa, especially since 1875, Sir Donald has had a leading share. He has much to tell his interviewer of the celebrities, royal, republican, and literary, whom he has entertained on board his palatial steamers, and a page of most illustrious signatures is reproduced from his autograph-book.

Referring to the famous voyage together of Mr. Gladstone and the late Lord Tennyson, Sir Donald observes, "that when Tennyson talked it was just like one of his own poems. When he was viewing scenery-a moonlight night, or a sunset, or a little bit of impressive landscape -he would sit and look at it silently for a moment, as though drinking it in and filling his soul, only the next moment to tell it all to those whose privilege it was to sit near him." The shipowner cherishes as one of his chief treasures a clay-pipe of the poet's, given him for a keepsake. It appears that Sir Donald is a great lover of the arts, and has a collection of Turners probably unequalled by any private gallery in London.

THE SINGLE-TAX PANACEA.
PROGRESS AT THE ANTIPODES.

"THE Riddle of the Sphinx,"-the problem presented by the social and international difficulties of modern humanity-is read, to his own satisfaction at all events, by Mr. Arthur Withy in the Westminster Review. Having resided himself in New Zealand for seven years, he begins with Australasia. Free trade between the colonies would produce federation-Australasian, Imperial, Englishspeaking, omninational. But by free trade he means not merely freedom to exchange, but freedom to produce, free access to land, therefore the suppression of all rates and taxes by a single-tax on land values. Let the State absorb the full rental value. His statement of the actual progress made in this direction is interesting:

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The principle of the taxation of land values has lately made great strides in the Australasian Colonies. In South Australia a tax of d. in the £ has for some eight or nine years been imposed on the capital value of the land, and during the past year a Bill has passed both Houses of the Legislature empowering local bodies to levy upon the unimproved value of the land. In New Zealand a tax of 1d. in the £ is levied on land values, and a Bill to enable local bodies to rate land values passed the Lower House last session, but was thrown out by the Lords." As the Ministry has been returned to power by an overwhelming majority, the Bill, which was made a test-question at the election, may be considered safe. The Tasmanian House of Representatives also passed a Bill last session taxing land values up to £500 at d. in the £, and over that amount at 1d. in the £. The Bill was rejected by the Upper House, but has been adopted as a plank of the Ministerial platform for the forthcoming election. In Queensland again, a Bill was passed by both Houses last year adopting the land value system of taxation for municipalities, and fixing the amount of the tax at 2d. in the £ . . . In New South Wales, too, progress is reported. The Local Government Bill drafted by the present Government will empower local bodies to tax land values, and a party of 25 out of a Parliament of 141 members has recently been formed with the taxation of ground rents as its principal plank.

He argues that the liberation of labour and capital by the abolition of all other taxation, and the opening up of land to human effort which would result, would give the State first adopting these measures such an enormous advantage in the international market, over other States, as practically to compel them to follow suit. After New Zealand, the Australias, then the United Kingdom, then Canada, then the United States, then the world. He points out that "while the total rates and taxes of the United Kingdom amount to some £128,000,000 per annum, the rental value of the land, as distinguished from buildings and other improvements, amounts to upwards of £160,000,000-an estimate based on the income tax returns."

THE HIGHEST HOUSE IN GREAT BRITAIN

AND ITS MARTYR INMATES.

THE Observatory on the top of Ben Nevis is the subject of a bright and instructive sketch by Mr. Edward Whymper in the Leisure Hour. It was erected in 1883 by public subscription. It is a massive structure, having double wooden walls covered with felt and enclosed by stone walls from four to ten feet thick. The thickness of its walls leaves little room for habitation. "The bedrooms are about the size of ordinary berths in a ship." The little garrison of this stout fortress lead something like a martyr's life. Every hour, summer and winter, day and night, personal observations are made and recorded. Since May, 1884, the hourly duty has been done with scarcely an intermission. The vigils of modern

instruments that calculate weather forecasts?" Occasionally they have almost too much society-at other times none. Taking one year with another, about 4,000 persons arrive on top. Sometimes a considerable number of persons congregate there even at Christmas; in other years no one can go-the ascent is impossible.... Hence it is found advisable to keep several months' provisions in hand, and plum-puddings are sent up in September.

It is pleasant to know that these Simeon Stylites of meteorology are occasionally relieved by volunteer substitutes.

How the Church Beat the Floating Grogshop.

MR. F. M. HOLMES contributes to the Gentleman's a picturesque sketch of what he saw among the Deep Sea Fishermen. He tells of a victory gained by religious common sense, which is worth emphasising:

science are as exacting as those of medieval saintliness. The mean summer temperature is Arctic, being abont the same as that of Spitzbergen. The atmosphere is extremely humid. In the warmer weather the house and its occupants are as a rule in a dripping state. The mist soaks everything. The effect of this moisture in the air is very enervating and depressing. In winter the snow lies from ten to twelve feet deep. The wind sweeps over the summit for days together at the rate of eighty to one hundred, sometimes reaching one hundred and twenty, miles an hour.

If fine weather reigns on the top of the Ben, life there, as on other mountain summits, is extremely enjoyable. . . . These happy occasions are few and far between, and it is scarcely too much to say that the normal life of observers is a perpetual round of discomfort and self-denial. Their diversions are principally confined to assisting exhausted tourists, or to answering such questions as, "Will you please show us the

Once upon a time floating grog-shops, called copers, used to cruise among the fleets, and cause incalculable mischief. They hailed from foreign ports, Dutch, German, or Belgian, and sold an utterly vile and abominable liquor called aniseed brandy, which used to inflame even the strong North Sea fishermen to madness. . . . But in 1882 the practical Mission to the DeepSea Fishermen was started, having as one of its chief objects opposition to the coper. It sold tobacco as the copers did, but much cheaper; it has supplied good and readable literature instead of the vile stuff offered by the floating grogshops; it has attended to the injuries and sores of the fishermen. The Mission vessels, nearly a dozen in number, are floating churches, libraries, and dispensaries, and three of them are well-equipped hospitals for the treatment of serious injuries, such as the breakages of limbs. In a few years the copers were nearly all driven off the sea by the spirited and cheerful opposition.

Were the Church ashore to fight the tavern on its own ground as resolutely as the Church afloat has here done, there might be fewer grogshops ashore.