gone down with the bridge. For a moment his breast was filled with unutterable anguish. But it was only for a moment. Quick as thought it flashed upon his mind that it was almost time for the last night-train from the great city above to come rushing along with its living freight. No danger-signal gleamed from the watch-tower upon the bridge, and on they would come, unsuspicious of their peril until it would be too late, and they would be dashed in a moment into the seething flood, more than a hundred feet below. What was to be done? Forgetting for the instant the great woe that had befallen him, Carl decided at once that it was his duty to supply his father's place, and warn the train of its peril in time to save it, if possible. But what could he do? The tempest increased in its fury, and the rain poured down as though it could never stop. Hark, the train is coming. Already he hears it rumbling on toward destruction, and it must be near, or he could not hear it above the storm. He cannot run, with his poor crippled legs, so he throws himself upon the hand-car and nerves himself for a mighty effort. As though his own life were at stake, he begins to turn. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, he drives the car in the direction of the approaching train. On, on dashes the mighty iron-horse; nearer and nearer it comes. Oh! if he can only warn them while there is yet time to stop the train! If only he can get far enough off to save the train from rushing headlong into that terrible grave! Around the mountain-side, on the curving track, the train speeds along. The gleam of its light is now shed upon the valley, and the boy knows that the supreme moment is at hand. On thunders the engine, and the track trembles beneath the heavy burden. Suddenly, around a sharp bend a hundred feet away, full on his sight, bursts the blazing headlight of the engine. Ceasing from his labor, Carl Springel braces himself with one hand, and grasping the red lantern in the other, swings it wildly above his head. "The bridge is down! the bridge is down !" he cries, with all his power. "The bridge is down! the bridge is do—" The engineer has seen him, but cannot save him. With a dull thud, the engine clears the obstruction from the track, and dashes along - but slower and slower now. The hand-car and the boy are hurled fifty feet through the air, and when the boy is found his body is crushed, mangled and lifeless. But the train is saved! Trembling, gasping, staggering, the engine halts-halts not a dozen yards from the mouth of the yawning chasm, and all on board are saved-saved by the unparalleled heroism of this crippled boy, who has given up his life that they may live. Two years ago, in a quiet village cemetery in the south of Germany, I saw the grave in which he sleeps. Upon a modest tombstone at his head, erected by the gratitude of those whose lives he had preserved, is this inscription: CARL SPRINGEL, AGED 14. He died the death of a hero and martyr, A hero and martyr he was indeed, and some time yet bards and poets will sing the story of this brave young peasant-boy of Germany. THE saint is greater than the sage, and discipleship to Jesus is the pinnacle of human dignity.—Dr. F. Hamilton. THE STORY OF LITTLE PAUL. ONCE upon a time, dear Sigismund, there was a little boy, by the name of Paul, who had a beautiful mother. She loved her little boy very dearly, and when she sat before the cottage and knitted, little Paul would run ali around her and play. Just opposite lived the watchman, who had a dog, named Felix, and Felix and little Paul were the best of friends. When his mother had finished dressing little Paul in the morning, she would put a piece of bread in his hand, and the little fellow would run out before the door and call out with his dear little voice: "Felix! Felix !" And it would not be very long before Felix would come springing out, lifting his forepaws like a proud horse, and galloping straight up to little Paul. Then the latter would sit down upon the door-sill, and Felix would lie down before him, with his head resting on his forelegs, as much as to say he would be very glad to play, whereupon little Paul would pretend that he was going to run away, when Felix would run close behind him, and thus they ran and played together, until little Paul was tired and took out his bread. Felix looked first at the bread and then at the boy, and little Paul thought that Felix was like a good child, who never asks for anything, but waits until he is helped. Then he would divide his bread, and give the half of it to the dog; and this happened every morning. But one day Paul's mother became sick, very sick, and the watchman's wife came in and went out very often, and once, when she came out of the house, she had been crying. Little Paul played just the same as ever with the dog. And not long afterward some people came, who brought a large, long box, which was painted brown, and laid it down upon the floor. Little Paul did not know where his mother could be, for he had not seen her in two days, and strange women now gave him his bread. Now, when little Paul woke up next morning his mother was lying in the long box, in a beautiful white dress, fast asleep, and the people came and stood by her and wept. But little Paul came running up and called out : "Wake up, mother! dear mother, wake up!" But his mother did not wake up. Then little Paul asked why his mother was dressed up so fine? But they gave him no answer, except that there was an old colored man, who, when the boy asked this, kissed him on the forehead and said : "Never mind, just wait a while, dear Paul; your mother will certainly wake up again very soon.” With that the wife of the watchman took the boy up in her arms, and carried him over into her house, so that the little fellow could not see what was going on, for the bells up in the church-tower had just begun to toll. But the little fellow soon after this ran away from the watchman's wife, across to his mother's house, crying all the time: "Mother! dear mother!" But there was no mother there. Felix wanted to play again, but little Paul did not care to play any more, and kept on running through the back gate and through the garden to the field, calling out all the time, "Mother, dear !" But there was no mother there. Then little John came up and said to Paul : "I will tell you, Paul, where your mother is. Up yonder in the graveyard, where the gate stands open, and where there is so much fresh earth dug up; your mother is under it." Then little Paul kept on running, and the watchman's wife could not find him anywhere. When it began to be dark, the wind began to whistle, and it grew very cold, because, you see, it was a Winter's day, and the moon shone brightly through the trees. The curfew-bell had rung a long time since, and it was midnight, and the watchman and Felix passed through the village, and when they came to the graveyard, the watchman saw something white lying upon the ground, and Felix quickly started at it, but he did not bark nor come back, as was his habit, but stood by the white thing | and licked it, for sure enough it was his good little friend Paul, who lay upon the grave, crying: "Oh, mother! dear mother!" But the little maid persists the right number, not seven. "What are you doing here, Paul?" said the watchman. the churchyard, in order to prove that they were living. "I want my mother, my dear mother." But the watchman took him up in his arms and carried him to his house, and laid him in the bed, where he soon fell asleep, for the cold air had made him very drowsy and tired. The next morning he received some bread and milk, and asked Felix: "Felix, don't you know where my mother is ?" Beside those graves she would eat her supper of Summer evenings, and knit her stockings, and hem her kerchief; there she would sit, and sing to them that lay below. That authentic voice, argued Wordsworth, "which affirms life as a necessity inalienable from man's consciousness, is a revelation through the lips of childhood." Elsewhere the little poem is recognized as bringing into day for the first But Felix wagged his tail, and the watchman's wife time a profound fact in the abysses of human naturesaid: "Paul, be still; your mother is up in heaven." Then little Paul began to cry bitterly. namely, that the mind of an infant cannot admit the idea of death, cannot comprehend, it, "any more than the fountain of light can comprehend the aboriginal dark "I too, I too, will go up to heaven. I will go where ness." In the words (translated ones) of Leopold Shefer: my dear mother is !" And as soon as it was evening again, little Paul once more escaped from the watchman's wife, and the watchman went up to the graveyard again, for the moon was shining bright and it was very cold. This time Felix sprang on ahead toward the graveyard and the mound of fresh earth, and the watchman saw the dog licking something. But this time Felix barked very loud, and when the watchman came to the dog, he saw at once that barking would do no good here, for little Paul was.frozen. "Oh, dear! And then?" asked my curly, goldenheaded Sigismund, as he looked at me reverently, thoughtfully, and still inquiringly. "WE are seven,” was the persistent answer of the little girl, whom Wordsworth met within the area of Goodrich Castle, in the year 1793, when the poet objected to the childish reasoner that two out of the seven in family being, on her own showing, dead and gone, she was out in her arithmetic, and ought to have returned five as the sum total. Eight years old was that little cottage girl, wildly clad, curly-headed, with a rustic, woodland mien, but altogether of a beauty that gladdened the poet, who met her on the banks of the Wye; and there was real interest in the question he put to her, how many brothers and sisters had she? "How many? seven in all," she said. "And where are they? I pray you tell!" "Two of us in the churchyard lie, My sister and my brother; Dwell near them with my mother." Her numbers are wrong, and her questioner tries to put her right. If two are in the churchyard laid, then is five "Easier to him seems life than A B C, You may teach children the name of death, but they have no idea of what it is; they fear it neither for themselves nor for others; they fear suffering, not death. There are exceptions, of course; such as one of Sydney Smith's children, in delicate health, who used to wake suddenly every night, sobbing, anticipating the death of parents, and all the sorrows of life, almost before life had begun. There is a little girl in one of Lord Lytton's fictions, whom her father visits at the French nunnery from time to time, and who, "whenever monsieur goes," one of the nuns records, "always says that he is dead, and cries herself quietly to sleep; when monsieur returns, she says that he is come to life again. Some one, I suppose, once talked to her about death; and she thinks, when she loses sight of any one, that that is death." In the same story, we read of two brothers, the younger a mere child, that "Philip broke to Sidney the sad news of their mother's death, and Sidney wept with bitter passion. But children -what can they know of death? Their tears over graves dry sooner than the dews." Addressing his daughter Edith, then ten years old, Southey says: Thy happy nature from the painful thought Ever has been, and will be, admired Steele's picture of a bereaved family, with the children sorrowing according to their several ages and degrees of understanding. “And what troubled me most was to see a little boy, who was too young to know the reason, weeping only because his sister did." Still more simply told and touching is Steele's own retrospect of earliest grief. This was on the occasion of his father's death, when little Dick was not quite five years old; and much more amazed he was at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with him. Sir Richard remembered how he went into the room where the body lay, and saw his mother sit, weeping, alone by it; how | about the lessons to be learnt for a dead mamma to hear, he had his battledore in his hand, and fell a-beating the when she comes by-and-by. coffin, and calling papa, having, he knew not how, some slight idea that papa was locked up there. Mary Lamb illustrates the same topic in the first of her stories of "Mrs. Leicester's School," where the little girl takes her newly-arrived uncle straight to the churchyard, as "the way to mamma." So does Caroline Bowles (Southey) in her poem of "The Child's Unbelief," where a heart-sore elder is troubled by the little one's prattling "Yet what, poor infant, shouldst thou know Of time and space-of chance and change- Then, too, we have a record, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of his first acquaintance with the shadow of death; his memory dimly recalling the image of a little girl, a schoolmate, "whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was, I never had any very distinct idea (sic), until one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground, and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole dug down through the grim sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong, red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man was seen through an opening at the end of it." When the lid was closed, and the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the mourners had gone, and left their dead one behind, then our boy-gazer felt that he had seen death, and should never forget him. But this is a stage in advance of the unbelief of childhood. More in keeping with the spirit of "We are Seven" is that passage in one of the "Twice-told Tales " of Dr. Holmes's gifted friend and compatriot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, where we see a comely woman, with a pretty rose-bud of a daughter, come to select a gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before; the mother calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her loss; but the There is an affecting resemblance to the argument of "We are Seven" in the answer of Jacob's sons in Egypt to their brother Joseph, by them not only unrecognized, but assumed to have long since been dead. "We be twelve brethren, sons of our father: one is not, and the youngest is this day with our father in the land of Canaan." One is not; and yet we be twelve brethren. DANCING FOR CHARITY. THE Industrial School Association of Brooklyn was organized in April, 1854, and has since enjoyed a remarkable degree of success. In the first six years of its existence it acquired such prominence, owing to the necessity of the humane labor it had assumed and to the practical manner in which its work was conducted, that it was considered safe to secure ground for the erection of a Home NEW HOME FOR DESTITUTE CHILDREN, BUTLER STREET, BROOKLYN. for Destitute Children, an enterprise distinct from its industrial schools. Six lots were accordingly purchased on Flatbush Avenue, running from Baltic to Butler Streets, and in 1862 the new building was opened with two days' rejoicings. In 1864 the necessity of increased accommodations became so apparent that a wing was added; and now the Home is so overcrowded that another wing must be provided, together with fireproof staircases and other improvements not contemplated in the original plan. It was to raise the money to defray these necessary expenses that the grand charity ball, given in the Brooklyn Academy of Music on February the 5th, 1880, was projected. In addition to the Home proper, of which we publish a view as it now appears, the association has organized and is supporting five industrial schools in various parts of Brooklyn. Schools No. 1 and No. 2 were opened almost simultaneously with the organization of the Society, or within that year. No. 3 was opened and put in working order in 1862, at the opening of the Home. In January, 1866, a school for colored children was transferred from the care of Plymouth Church to this Association. In 1869 a Home for Destitute Children of the African race was substituted for the school. In 1871 this Home was "temporarily suspended." Subsequently the children who were formerly inmates were boarded in the New York Colored Orphan Asylum. Work in this direction was never resumed, as the Howard Orphan Asylum was appointed for the purpose of caring for this class of destitute children. In the Summer of 1878 the property on which this school-building stood was passed over to the use of the aged inmates of Zion Home, at their request. In December, 1869, a school known as the Border Mission, on Bergen Street, near Flatbush Avenue, was admitted into the care of the Association. In 1871 this school was reorganized and placed on the list as No. 4. In 1875 the school in Throop Avenue was opened as No. 5. It is the youngest in the group, and as such is regarded with peculiar interest. The ball given for the benefit of the Home proved a most successful and quite profitable entertainment. The Academy of Music was filled uncomfortably at times with a gathering of dancers in elegant toilets. By placing the admission tickets and the boxes at high prices, the committee succeeded in making the company select, and the wisdom of their action was apparent to all. It was considerably past ten o'clock when the patronesses of the ball, with escorts, went upon the floor for the opening march, to the music of Barnby's "Rebekah." At that time the interior presented a singularly beautiful appearance. The floor was carpeted, and gave the Academy the appearance of a parlor. Around the floor were built two extra tiers of boxes covered with crimson cloth, which were filled with ladies in brilliant toilets. The rear of the stage had the appearance of a luxurious tropical garden. Huge palms and potted plants formed the background, and in the extreme rear of the stage, behind a mass of beautiful flowers, sat Bernstein's orchestra, which furnished the dancing music. The boxes were all filled, and the seats in the balcony were full of spectators. Flowers were arranged profusely and in excellent taste through the lobbies. The arrangements for the comfort and convenience of the guests could scarcely have been improved upon. The order of dances contained twenty-three numbers, the round dances predominating. After each dance came a promenade, the music being given by Wernig's Twentythird Regiment Band, which was placed in the upper gallery. Previous to the opening march selections from Rossini's "William Tell" and from "Fatinitza" were played. The word "Charity," in flaming gas-jets, hung over the stage, and added to the brilliance of the scene. A CALL TO PRAYER IN EASTERN LANDS. "Pray for prayer is better than sleep." EVERY morning, before daybreak, this call, or chant, is heard ringing from the tall minarets or towers in the towns of modern Egypt. "Pray! Prayer is better than sleep, for God is most great and merciful." A simple and solemn truth, which we all love to hear. But there is added, "and Mohammed is God's prophet, His servant and His apostle." And this we Christians do not care to listen to, for we know that Mohammed was but an ambitious, worldly man, who carried the sword and not the cross, who preached persecution and not peace, to all who would listen-and many did. But as there are very many people living in the old Bible lands we so often read about, who are Mohammedans, I should like to tell you a little about them, and how they pray-for prayer, alms and pilgrimages are the three duties about which their prophet has left strict injunctions, in a book called the "Koran," full of laws and promises, which his followers study and believe in as we do the Bible-showing it, I am sorry to say, even more respect than some of us do, I am afraid, to our own holy volume; for they never touch it but with respect, and read it and tudy it daily. Well, these calls to prayer are sounded five times a day, and then the devout Moslem kneels down, wherever be may be-in the shop, street, or on shipboard-spreads out a prayer-carpet, if he has one, stands with his face turned toward the "Holy City of Mecca," and recites the prayers, and performs the "rek'ahs," or inclinations of the head, which the Koran prescribes ; for unlike the Christian faith, that bids us appeal to the Almighty on our knees, with clasped hands and contrite heart, the Moslem believes in many forms, that his prayers are of no avail unless he goes through certain set ceremonies. Therefore, standing as I have said, he raises his open hands on each side of his face, and touching the lobes of his ears, he cries, "God is most great!" Then he places his hands before him, the left within the right, and repeats a chapter of the Koran; then he inclines his head and body, placing his hands on his knees and spreading out his fingers, and prays another set prayer; then he raises his head and body, and says, "God is most great," and "Glory to Mohammed." He then drops on his knees, and saying, "God is most great! God is most great!" places his hands upon the ground before his knees, then puts his nose and forehead also to the ground, between his hands; then, having repeated another prayer, he raises his body, places his hands on his side, and sinks backward upon his heels, saying, “God is most great!" and then he bends a second time forward on to the ground, and prays again, finishing his prayer standing. There is only one of the four "rek'ahs" which the de vout Moslem repeats every time the call is heard ringing through the city, "Come to prayer." He counts his prayers on a string of ninety-nine beads, and if he coughs, or is disturbed, he begins them over again. On Friday, which is the Turkish Sunday, he bathes himself, and goes to the mosque, or church, all decorated with texts from the Koran, and, taking off his shoes, he kneels down oa his prayer-rug-side by side, rich and poor. But there are no women's or children's voices raised to glorify God. Mohammedan laws forbid them mixing with men in the mosque. THE devil himself would be but a contemptible adversary were he not sure of a correspondent and a party that held intelligence with him in our own breasts. All the blowing of a fire put under a caldron could never make it boil over, were there not a fullness of water within it.— South. It was an excellent saying of Austin, "In te stas et non stas" (he that stands upon his own strength shall never stand). A creature is like a single drop; left to itself, it spends and wastes itself presently; but if like a drop in the fountain and ocean of being, it hath abundance of security.—Brooks. IT is recorded in the biography of the Rev. Joseph Pratt, that when a boy, his attention was arrested by the petition in the Litany, "Pitifully behold the sorrows of our hearts." He was wondering what sorrow he had to speak of, when the next petition furnished an answer which the Holy Spirit taught him to apply-" Mercifully forgive the sins of Thy people." WHEN We pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayers should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man. Look not, therefore, upon your prayers as a short method of duty and salvation only, but as a perpetual monition of duty; by what we require of God we see what He requires of us. -Jeremy Taylor. |