your eyes and think. She went straight to the dog, received its head in her thick stuff gown, between her knees, and muffling it up, held it with all her might till the men came up. No one was hurt. Of course, she fainted after it was all right.

We all know (but why should we not know again ?) the story of the Grecian mother who saw her child sporting on the edge of the bridge. She knew that a cry would startle it over into the raging stream she came gently near, and opening her bosom allured the little scapegrace. I once saw a great surgeon, after settling a particular procedure as to a life-and-death operation, as a general settles his order of battle. He began his work, and at the second cut altered the entire conduct of the operation. No one not in the secret could have told this: not a moment's pause, not a quiver of the face, not a look of doubt. This is the same master power in man, which makes the difference between Sir John Moore and Sir John Cope.

Mrs. Major Robertson, a woman of slight make, great beauty, and remarkable energy, courage, and sense (she told me the story herself), on going up to her bedroom at night there being no one in the house but a servant girl, in the ground floor saw a portion of a man's foot projecting from under the bed. She gave no cry of

alarm, but shut the door as usual, set down her candle, and began as if to undress, when she said aloud to herself, with an impatient tone and gesture, "I've forgotten that key again, I declare ;" and leaving the candle burning, and the door open, she went down-stairs, got the watchman, and secured the proprietor of the foot, which had not moved an inch. How many women or men could have done, or rather been all this!

MY FATHER'S MEMOIR.

A LETTER TO JOHN CAIRNS, D. D.

"I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive."

request of his trustees and family, and in accordance with what I believe was his own

wish, you undertook my father's Memoir, it was in a measure on the understanding that I would furnish you with some domestic and personal details. This I hoped to have done but was unable.

Though convinced more than ever how little my hand is needed, I will now endeavor to fulfil my promise. Before doing so, however, you must permit me to express our deep gratitude to you for this crowning proof of your regard for him

"Without whose life we had not been;"

to whom for many years you habitually wrote as "My father," and one of whose best blessings, when he was "such an one as Paul the aged," was to know that you were to him "mine own son in the gospel."

With regard to the manner in which you have done this last kindness to the dead, I can say nothing more expressive of our feelings, and, I am sure, nothing more gratifying to you, than that the record you have given of my father's life, and of the series of great public ques

tions in which he took part, is done in the way which would have been most pleasing to himself. that which, with his passionate love of truth and liberty, his relish for concentrated, just thought and expression, and his love of being loved, he would have most desired, in any one speaking of him after he was gone. He would, I doubt not, say, as one said to a great painter, on looking at his portrait, "It is certainly like, but it is much better looking;" and you might well reply as did the painter, "It is the truth, told lovingly " and all the more true that it is so told. You have, indeed, been enabled to speak the truth, or as the Greek has it, åλŋDeveîv ἐν ἀγάπη to truth it in love.

I have over and over again sat down to try and do what I promised and wished to give some faint expression of my father's life; not of what he did or said or wrote not even of what he was as a man of God and a public teacher; but what he was in his essential nature what he would have been had he been anything else than what he was, or had lived a thousand years ago.

Sometimes I have this so vividly in my mind that I think I have only to sit down and write it off, and do it to the quick. "The idea of his life," what he was as a whole, what was his self, all his days, would, to go on with words which not time or custom can ever wither

or make stale,

"Sweetly creep

Into my study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of his life

Would come apparelled in more precious habit