children, may be blessed with external and eternal happiness.

"Dear Sir, let your dying chaplain recommend this truth to you and your family, that no happiness or solid comfort can be found in this vale of tears like living a pious life. And pray ever remember this ruleNever do anything upon which you dare not first ask the blessing of God. "WM. MOMPESSON."

In two months after, he again wrote a letter to another friend, in which appears the following descriptive passage:

"The condition of this place has been so sad that I persuade myself it did exceed all history and example. I may truly say that our place has been a Golgotha-the place of a skull; and had there not been a remnant of us left, we had been as Sodoma, and been like unto Gomorrah.' My ears never heard such doleful lamentations, and my eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles. Now, blessed be God! all our fears are over, for none have died of the infection since the eleventh of October, and all the pest-houses have been long empty. I intend (God willing) to spend most of this week in seeing all woollen clothes fumed and purified, as well for the satisfaction as for the safety of the country." Again he writes: "Here has been such burning of goods that the like I think was never known; and indeed in this we have been too precise. For my part, I have scarcely left myself apparel to shelter my body from the cold, and have wasted more than needed, merely for example."

But to return to the narrative. Nothing daunted by his close bereavements and trials, this good pastor still pursued his godly course; and for better security, instead of preaching in his spacious steeplehouse, he assembled his hearers within the narrow precincts of a very deep dell, whilst himself stood high above them, in a natural cavern or curiously-excavated rock, of flinty combination, with several arched apartments twelve or eighteen feet high. From this unhewn edifice he raised his voice on their behalf in testimony and in prayer. In honour of the awful and solemn

event, this singular rock has ever since been known by the name of "Cucklet Church." All the regulations prescribed by William Mompesson were conceived, fraught and carried into effect with uncommon wisdom and prudence; and they were adopted to the letter. For instance, the congregations, who were gathered at least two days in the week for the solemn purpose of divine worship, assembled in Cucklet Dale, in the open air, without touching one another. An imaginary cordon was drawn around the village, "beyond which none ever passed," says the native poetess before alluded to. Springing wells and running streams were selected, on the sides of which the people from the country, living beyond the prescribed circle of half a mile on every side of the infected village, placed provisions and other requisites at the dawn of morning; when, at a fixed but remote period of the same day, certain of the poor inhabitants went and put their money in the waters and fetched the articles there left for their support. The points chosen were on all sides, in order that the pestilential effluvia might not be altogether in one direction, or as the wind blew. This arrangement was doubtless contrived to meet, in a measure, the many alarms in which the neighbouring people indulged; in some instances, of a very curious character. One of these remarkable anti-contagious receptacles may be found northward of Eyam, and is to this day called "Mompesson's Well." The plague has long since disappeared, we hope for ever; but this beautiful little fountain and water-course still con tinues to bubble and to flow within half a mile of this village of the Peak. May it ever contribute towards the health of the inhabitants, and be the preserver from every defilement of the body-the plague of intemperance included!

"Few or no instances are on record," says William Wood, a living native poet, historian, and weaver, "of the extinction of life, in a joint number of mortals, attended with such trying and appalling circumstances, as the plague at Eyam in

July, August, and September of 1666. During these dreadful months, the terrific sufferings of the inhabitants almost defy description. Parents beheld their children fall in dreadful succession by the hand of this insatiable and purple-faced destroyer. Children turned aside, with fearful dread, at the distorted features of their parents in death. Every family, while there were any left, buried their own dead; and one hapless woman [Elizabeth Hancock, senior], as we shall hereafter see, dug the graves for and buried with her own hands her husband and six children! Appalling as such a circumstance must be, it is, however, only one of very many of a similar description occurring on that awful occasion. We are now arrived at the period when the fury of the pestilence attained its maximum-when it threatened the terrified villagers with utter extermination."

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Up to the seventh month, every family (as before stated) had of necessity been compelled to bury their own dead. When the last of a family died, or when one in a house expired and the rest were in a dying condition, some person was obliged to undertake (however disagreeable and dangerous the task) the charge of removing the corpse and instantly burying it. For this hazardous but necessary purpose," says William Wood, "the all-wise Providence had endowed with sufficient nerve, hardihood, and indifference the person of Marshall Howe, a man of gigantic stature, a native of the village, and of most courageous calibre. During the greatest fury of the plague he filled the fearful office of burier of the [coffinless] dead.

Such was the awful occupation of Marshall Howe. He, however, tasted the bitter draught, by burying, with his own hands, his wife on the 27th and his son on the 30th of August of the fatal 1666!" And he was noticed to smooth the raised mound and pat the sods of these two graves with much more neatness and precision than the graves of those bodies with whom he appeared to have no sympathy. "For a generation or two after the plague, parents in Eyam

endeavoured to bring their children to rule and obedience by telling them that they would send for Marshall Howe!"

From the west we entered this primitive-looking village, now containing about 1000 inhabitants (at the beginning of its extreme suffering, about one-third that number), and were surprised to discover that the present race of occupants were unwilling or unable to tell us anything about the plague of '66. We entered by a sweep of the road, exhibiting in its curvature varied scenery of wood, mountain and rock in striking relief; within a short mile is situated that extraordinary Petrea of England, Stoney Middleton, presenting a continuous wall of rocks rising in perpendicular grandeur to the height of three and four hundred feet, leaving little more than a road between, and where resides upon his own estate one of England's brightest ornaments of jurisprudence, Lord Chief Justice Denman-the honest, wise and valiant advocate (upon her trial for life) of the late Queen Caroline. Many of the houses are built within the rocks. One of the most striking of these giants of limestone and flint is called the "Lover's Leap," from the well-authenticated circumstance of a young woman, under the effect of disappointed love, having, in the year 1760, dashed herself" from the summit into the chasm beneath. Incredible as it may appear, she sustained but little injury from the attempt; her face was a little disfigured, and her body bruised by the brambles and the rocky projections that intercepted her fall."(Rhodes.) She repented of her rashness, led a very exemplary life and died advanced in years. Her name was Baddeley.

Between Eyam Dale and Middleton Dale there stands a mountain tumuli called the Riley Graves." Here in a large green field adjoining a wood, were deposited the remains of many who died of the plague; and in the centre of the meadow we saw a circular or heart-shaped fence inclosing seven tombstones commemorative of nearly a whole family which was exterminated by the dis

ease in one week-three of them in one day! They were buried as they died, without shroud-without coffin -without ceremony! One lone woman, the wife and mother, had to scratch up the earth with her own hands; and at the shallow sepulchres of her own making, near her isolated dwelling, she had to perform all the solitary duties of interment to those most near and dear to her. The sufferings of this poor woman, in some respects, resembled those of the patriarch Job. She was the Elizabeth Hancock, senr., before spoken of, and here follow the inscriptions to be seen at this day. The first victim was her daughter, "Elizabeth Hancock, buried August 3, 1666." "John Hancock, senr., buried August 4, 1666." "John Hancock, jr., August 7, 1666." "Oner Hancock, buried August 7, 1666." "William Hancock, August 7, 1666." 'Alice Hancock, buried August 9, 1666."

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"Ann

Hancock, buried August 10, 1666." What a mournful picture of domestic calamity do these few headstones present! On the four sides of the tomb which contains the ashes of the father of this family are the words, Horam nescitis. Orate. Vigilate. (You do not know the hour. Pray! Watch!) Equally unshrined and unshrouded, both with and without stones of memorial, were many other victims deposited in this and the neighbouring lands. Very different the sepulture of the wife of William Mompesson, interred beneath a handsome raised horizontal grave-stone, having an ancient and richly-sculptured Saxon cross placed near it, and which was found buried in the earth, and afterwards set up by John Howard the philanthropist. The inscription, when translated from the Latin, in which it was composed by Mompesson, runs thus: "Catherine, the wife of William Mompesson, the Rector of this church, the daughter of Radolph Carr, late of Cocken, in the county of Durham, knight. She was buried on the 25th day of August, in the year of our Lord, 1666." "Cave, nescitis horam." (Take heed, for ye know not the hour.) "Mihi lucrum." (A gain to me.)

"In Eyam the plague was," in the

language of Roberts, "the concentration of all the more dreadful features of that dreadful visitation in London, without its palliatives." Indeed, it seems exceedingly strange that Eyam, a little mountain city, an insulated Zoar, secluded among the Peak mountains, and 150 miles from the metropolis, should have been visited by a pestilential disease which had scarcely ever occurred except in great and populous cities. It is, however, matter of fact that "this terrible plague was brought from London to Eyam in a box of old clothes and some tailor's patterns of cloth; and that George Vicars was the person who opened the terrible box," the first seized, and the first victim to the baleful disease. The population of Eyam, at that juncture, consisted of about 330 inhabitants, of whom 259 fell by the plague.

Finding that the unerring sun had gnomoned one of the suicidal Tors, absurdly designated "Lovers' Leaps" (so numerous in the Peak country), into a most gigantic shadow on the ground, our party took the broad hint to be looking westward. With my long-tried, faithful companion on my arm, we walked the length of Middleton Dale, whose white limestone tower-shaped rocks and deep umbrageous shadows from the declining sun, When buttress and buttress alternately Seemed framed of ebon and ivory, produced a most lovely scene. paced to Tideswell (a distance of five or six miles), and ere the turn of another morn found ourselves snugly seated in our comfortable lodging at Buxton, myself rich in the possession of 300 good specimens of the finelymarked land-shell called the Helix arbustorum, which I had that day gathered.

We

TESTIMONIES TO THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.-"I can speak it from experience," says the celebrated Erasmus, "that there is little benefit to be derived from the Scriptures if they be read cursorily or carelessly; but if a man exercise himself therein, constantly and conscientiously, he will find such efficacy in them as is not to be found in any other book whatsoever." "The genuine philosophy of Christ," says the same author, "cannot be derived from any source so successfully as from the books of the Gospels and Apostolic Epistles; in which, if a man philosophize with a pious spirit, praying rather than arguing, he will find that there is nothing conducive to the happiness of man, and the performance of any duty of human life, which is not, in some of these writings, laid down, discussed and determined, in a complete and satisfactory manner." "That which stamps upon the Scriptures the highest value," says Bishop Porteus, "that which renders them, strictly speaking, inestimable, and distinguishes them from all other books in this world, is this: that they, and only they, contain the words of eternal life. In this respect, every other book, even the noblest compositions of man, must fail; they cannot give us that which we most want, and what is infinitely of more importance to us than all other things put together-ETERNAL LIFE."

FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES.-My heart was heavy, for its trust had been abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong; so, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, one summer Sabbath day, I strolled among the green mounds of the village burialplace; where, pondering how all human love and hate find one sad level, and how, soon or late, wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face 'and cold hands folded over a still heart, pass the green threshold of our common grave, whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart awed for myself, and pitying my race, our common sorrow, like a mighty wave, swept all my pride away, and, trembling, I forgave.J. G. Whittier.

THE EVILS OF BAD TEMPER.-A

bad temper is a curse to the possessor, and its influence is most deadly wherever it is found. It is allied to martyrdom to be obliged to live with one of a complaining temper. To hear one eternal round of complaint and murmuring, to have every pleasant thought scared away by their evil spirits, is, in truth, a sore trial. It is like the sting of a scorpion, a perpetual nettle, destroying your peace, rendering life a burden. Its influence is most deadly; and the purest and sweetest atmosphere is contaminated into a deadly miasma wherever this evil genius prevails. It has been said truly, that while we ought not to let the bad temper of others influence us, it would be as unreasonable to spread a plaster of Spanish flies on the skin and not expect them to draw, as to think of a family not suffering because of the bad temper of any one of its inmates. One string out of tune will destroy the music of an instrument otherwise perfect; and if all the members of a Church, family and neighbourhood, do not cultivate a kind and affectionate temper, there will be discord and every evil work.

SABBATH DESECRATION AND RUIN. A gentleman in the State of New York, who had been a very successful merchant and farmer, died, and left a large estate to his sons. They were sober, industrious, active and enterprising; they prospered in their business and rapidly accumulated property. The accumulation increased the desire for more, and they made haste to be rich. They grew uneasy at resting on the Sabbath, and began to continue their business on that day. They hired labourers to work on the Sabbath, and in some cases could get them cheaper than they could other days. Their whole souls seemed to be swallowed up in the one idea of accumulating wealth. But they had not continued long, after they began to do business on the Sabbath, before it was evident they were losing as to character. They began also to lose as to property; and one loss followed another till, through mismanagement and losses, they became bankrupts, and finally abandoned, vicious and miserable men. Said a most intelligent and