POLONIUS TO LAERTES AND these few precepts in thy memory Nor any unproportion'd thought his act. Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertain ment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, Are most select and generous, chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend; And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. THE TEACHER'S VOCATION THERE is nothing which the adversaries of improvement are more wont to make themselves merry with than what is termed the "march of intellect"; and here I will confess that I think, as far as the phrase goes, they are in the right. It is a very absurd, because a very incorrect, expression. It is little calculated to describe the operation in question. It does not picture an image at all resembling the proceeding of the true friends. of mankind. It much more resembles the progress of the enemy to all improvement. The conqueror moves in a march. He stalks onward with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of war; banners flying, shouts rending the air, guns thundering, and martial music pealing, to drown the shrieks of the wounded and the lamentations for the slain. Not thus the schoolmaster in his peaceful vocation. He meditates and purposes in secret the plans which are to bless mankind; he slowly gathers around him those who are to further their execution; he quietly, though firmly, advances in his humble path, laboring steadily but calmly till he has opened to the light all the recesses of ignorance, and torn up by the roots all the weeds of vice. His is a progress not to be compared with anything like a march; but it leads to a far more brilliant triumph and to laurels more imperishable than the destroyer of his species, the scourge of the world, ever won. Such men men deserving the glorious title of teachers of mankind I have found, laboring conscientiously, though perhaps obscurely, in their blessed vocation, wherever I have gone. I have found them among the daring, the ambitious, the ardent, the indomitably active French. I have found them among the persevering, resolute, industrious Swiss; I have found them among the laborious, the warm-hearted, the enthusiastic Germans; I have found them among the high-minded Italians; and in our own country, their numbers everywhere abound and are every day increasing. Their calling is high and holy; their fame is the property of nations; their renown will fill the earth in after ages, in proportion as it sounds not far off in their own times. Each one of these great teachers of the world, possessing his soul in peace, performs his appointed course, awaits in patience the fulfillment of the promises, and, resting from his labors, bequeaths his memory to the generation whom his works have blessed, and sleeps under the humble but not inglorious epitaph commemorating "one in whom mankind lost a friend and no man got rid of an enemy." HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. INGRATITUDE BLOW, blow, thou winter wind, As man's ingratitude; Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, As friend remember'd not. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. A BRAVE RESCUE AND A ROUGH RIDE IT happened upon a November evening (when I was about fifteen years old, and outgrowing my strength very rapidly, my sister Annie being turned thirteen, and a deal of rain having fallen, and all the troughs in the yard being flooded, and the bark from |