fill the lungs of many million times as many inhabitants as there are on the earth's surface. As things are, there is not only enough of it to supply every creature that has breath, but such an enormous surplus as to insure that whatever share we need of it we may obtain absolutely pure. No doubt the atmosphere receives contamination. All the smoke that is poured into it from houses, factories, bleaching, and chemical establishments tends to pollute it. The breath that goes out from our lungs is also impure, and tends to make the atmosphere unfit for its purposes. But in the open air, owing to its vastness and the provision for circulating it, these impurities are speedily diluted, and, moreover, there are provisions for absorbing the impurities, and making the air as wholesome as ever. What a boon this is to human beings whose health depends so much on the purity of the air! Without pure air we cannot have wholesome blood, and without wholesome blood good health is impossible. We might suppose that in determining the extent of the atmosphere, the Creator's purpose was to secure that no creature, and especially no human creature, should ever sustain the slightest hurt through want or impurity of air. The next gift is Light. To supply it to us we have a globe a million times the size of the earth, set high in the heavens, shedding down on us as large a share of light as our eyes are capable of receiving. Whatever may be true as to the physical structure of the sun, and however certain it may be, on the grounds of natural philosophy, that one day, in the words of Addison, it will "grow dim with age," and cease to shine, it is certain that since man came on the scene the sun has supplied him with a very flood of light, and there is no reason to fear that the supply will fail while man continues to inhabit the earth. It is true the light lasts but half the twenty-four hours. But twelve hours are enough for doing most of those things for which light is needed, and for the purposes of rest and sleep we are better without it. And if we cannot dispense with it altogether during the hours when the sun is below the horizon, we have moonlight and twilight, and also aurora-light and artificial light. There is certainly no need, so far as God's arrangements are concerned, why man's active life should be spent in darkness, partial or total. And what a good thing the light is, and how pleasant it is to see the sun! Not blind Bartimeus alone, or any one else who has been cured of blindness, but all of us who know anything of the bright and blessed influence with which light cheers our life, may say with Milton, as he recalled the experiences of his better days— "Hail, heavenly light! offspring of Heaven, first-born." The third gift is Water: not equally dif fused, indeed, in all parts of the globe, but certainly not lacking among us. In rivers, streams, brooks, burns, fountains it exists everywhere, and God has made it free. Shall we speak of the blessing of pure water? Physiologists tell us that nine-tenths of the substances of our bodies is water. It is one of the chief ingredients (chemically) of our food, and to many, and those probably the healthiest and strongest of the race, it is the one element which they drink. In how many other ways it ministers to our welfare we need hardly try to tell. It is the great means of cleanliness, and it is one of the chief sources of refreshment. It is refreshing to pour it into our body, and to plunge our body into it. It is refreshing to see it, whether as the wide sea, the calm lake, the purling stream, or the dazzling waterfall; refreshing to inhale the breeze which sweeps over it; refreshing to be borne on its surface, carried beyond the din of cities and the strife of tongues, and in a world of "blue above and blue beneath " get new impressions of the Infinite and All-pure. But where are we? We have got upon the sea, though we did not mean it. We did not mean to speak of the element that furnishes- "Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink," for our theme is fresh water, not salt. We should rather have gone to the banks of the rushing river, or the edge of some vast cataract like Niagara. But, indeed, for our purpose, we need only say one word-man needs abundance of water, and abundance of water has been freely given him by God. Given him, we say, by God. For now we must go on to notice the extraordinary way in which man annuls the gifts of God, and deprives himself of what, above everything else, has been given him by his bountiful Creator freely and richly to enjoy. Begin with fresh air. Observe how man constructs his dwelling. Usually each apartment is so built that the foul air cannot escape, but must remain to be breathed over and over again; any noxious ingredients which have been thrown into it from the lungs of any diseased person in the company being communicated most likely to all the rest. When you come to districts where the dwellings of the poor are crowded together, to some choked-up close or blind alley, you sink into simple despair. Of what avail are our forty miles of air overhead if houses be built on such principles that if we wished pure air, it would be as easy to find it at the bottom of the ocean as in these miserable, unchristian dwellings! Besides this method of counteracting God's gift of pure air, there are unfortunately many more in too common operation. Gas-pipes, imperfectly constructed and allowed to become leaky, present the possible alternative of slow poisoning or sudden explosion. Drainage badly constructed is productive of abominations which make one shudder. Sometimes, instead of being carried off, the sewage matter percolates through the walls, or escapes into the basement of the house. Besides producing nausea and sickness, these foetid exhalations often give rise to typhoid fever, and other deadly diseases. Doctors are often distressed above measure at the amount of sickness and death caused by these bad arrangements. Here our very civilisation Even our finest mansions have hardly any provision for keeping the air pure and sweet; and when you come down to the dwellings of the poor, they seem to have been designed expressly to collect air-poison. Pass into many school-rooms, and you feel as if every fœtid odour in creation had been bottled up for your benefit. Take your place in the crowded church and, after an hour, the same sickening experience comes on you. If fresh. air had been the most expensive of all luxuries, it could hardly have been more difficult to get a breath of it. The very windows, though furnishing the only apertures communicating with the outside, are possibly tightened to the last degree; and though it may be a sultry day in July, there is an irresistible impression in the mind of some crotchety man in authority that nothing in the wide world is so dangerous as draughts. If sickness or fever prevails in some humble abode, instead of open doors and windows you have every opening hermetically sealed, and the poor sick sufferer doomed to breathe an atmosphere charged with disease and possibly death. We have always admired the courage of a doctor of whom we have | becomes our curse. The very arrangements heard, that once, when attending a cholera patient in a low brick slum, finding it impossible to procure fresh air for him by any ordinary means, he sent his foot through the brick wall, driving out some of the bricks, in order to give his unfortunate patient a bare chance of living. We have never been able to exonerate architects of very serious blame in connection with the construction of houses, especially houses for the poor. We hold it to be nothing more nor less than their duty to endeavour to make a due (not an undue) provision for ventilation, and very specially in bedrooms, where fresh air is so urgently needed. What multitudes of lives might have been saved, what an untold mass of suffering and disease might have been prevented, if proper arrangements had been made here! We are thankful to hear of any faint traces of improvement. But that there is infinite room for more is apparent if we observe how the practice of building houses back to back continues to prevail in some quarters, though there can be no right ventilation in them, and how, in traversing unfinished tenements, we not unfrequently find sleeping closets where there is not a vestige of an arrangement for ventilation, where some poor girl from the country will soon get rid of her red cheeks as well as of her healthy lungs and healthy stomach; getting in return, perhaps, scrofula or consumption. we make in civilised dwellings, by means of pipes and drains, to remove all offensive matter out of sight, become the cause of our worst and most fatal disasters. Out of sight, no doubt, the offensive matter is placed, but not always removed. Out of sight it often remains, but only to plot against the health or the lives of the unsuspecting inhabitants. We keep up in our underground drains a manufactory of poisonous gases; we confine them in subterranean reservoirs, where they become as condensed as possible; then we let them into our Windsor Castles and Sandringham Halls, that our princes and nobles may make trial of them; and even long after the most valuable lives have been sacrificed, we go on with the old arrangements, calmly waiting, as it were, for the next great tragedy. O merciful God, when shall men learn to prize this precious gift of thine-this pure, fresh, wholesome air? And when shall things be so arranged that no vile poison shall steal in its guise, whether into stately hall or lowly cottage, sapping at once the strong frame of the parent and the blooming health of the children, filling the neighbourhood with terror and the horne with woe? If the divine gift of air has been thus unworthily treated, that of light has fared little better. It is hardly credible, for instance, that there should be houses without number in the dominions of her most gracious Yet Majesty with no opening for light. And it is not in the remote Highlands Doctors, in classifying diseases as to their The cry of children in the night, for darkness is terrible to man. God knew Has water, as a divine gift, fared better than the other two? Hardly. If men had really prized this gift according to its value, they would have seen carefully to two things: first, that the water was preserved from pollution; and second, that an abundant supply of it was secured, as a first necessary, wherever men congregated in large numbers. Is it thus carefully preserved from pollution? Undoubtedly not: but of course we must make a difference between cases in which the pollution has been produced consciously, and those in which it has come about unconsciously. For man with open eyes to empty his sewers into his rivers is surely to show an absolute contempt for God's good gift. No doubt the cases are more numerous where water has been poisoned unconsciously. It happened to the present writer to be recently paying a visit at a large farmhouse in a border county, situated, as the auctioneers would say, "in a fine airy situation," with many a bright prattling streamrunning along the neighbouring valleys. Congratulating the family on the charming situation, which seemed to revel in the three gifts, air, light, and water, he remarked how happy they were to be so entirely freed from the bad air and smells of the towns, and the bother of pipes and drains perpetually going wrong. "Would you believe it," asked the host, little while ago no fewer than twenty-nine persons on this farm were laid down with fever." No, we could not believe it, till it a was explained that a mile or two up the valley there was a village, the sewage of which entered the stream that had supplied water to the farm. Further explanation was needless, nor did it require to be added that when the water supply was changed the fever disappeared. But one could not help thinking how many an epidemic in past ages may have owed its origin to a similar cause! It is but one case out of a host that have recently come to light. Even milk has not escaped pollution, and we are but too familiar with the disastrous cases of fever spread over whole neighbourhoods, through milk that had been mixed with poisoned water. And what of our water supply in large towns? Why, this has been one of our standing scandals ever since men began to think how large towns were to be treated. We hope we may say that the state of matters is improving daily; but how frightful in our cities have been the evils of water scarcity! How much filth and squalor, how much disease and death, how much languor and drunkenness have sprung from this cause ! Yet ours is a land of fountains and rivers. God has not stinted the supply; but man has thought that he might thrive well enough. though no great supply of water were near him; and the sudden plunge which the illwatered districts of our large towns have made into filth and misery shows the fruit of his wisdom. Thus it is that God's three great gifts of air, light, and water are treated often as if they were but rubbish. We think we can get along without them. If any thing could indicate an angry God, is it not the frightful tragedies that so often come of our neglect? Seldom is the Nemesis more dreadful than when the laws of God founded on these gifts are neglected, and from the neglect a progeny issues of disease, crime, misery and death. the dark wall of the opposite house? If he would revel in plenty of water, what can he do when no free stream is nearer, it may be, than some miles from his dwelling? We admit the questions are unanswerable. Bad Sanitary arrangements are so often pro- arrangements, perpetuated from generation nounced to be purely secular, that one needs to generation, have brought things to the to insist somewhat strongly on the religious present pass. But what we are concerned element involved in them. To us it appears to urge is, that things will quite probably go very plain not only that air, light, and water on for the future as they are now, from geneare Divine gifts, and for that reason deserve ration to generation, if the mass of people to be received and used with much gratitude show utter apathy regarding them. The and care, but that the very scale on which most effectual means towards a remedy will they are produced-the extraordinary abund- be, a due sense of the evil on the part of ance and freeness of them-deepens their those who suffer it. We would have the claim to such treatment. It is as if God had value of these three gifts taught in all our gone out of His way to show how essential day-schools, enforced occasionally in our He judged these things to be for the good of Sunday-schools, and even pressed, as opporHis creatures, by providing them with a ful-tunity may be found, from the pulpit. We ness and a freeness unparalleled in His providential gifts. Must He not be grieved and hurt when He sees them neglected? And, therefore, does not piety to God, as well as regard for the welfare of man, require that they be regarded otherwise than they often are? But to what purpose, it may be asked, do we raise this cry, "Air, light, and water for nothing"? Though God may have given them for nothing, men, and especially poor men, cannot get them for nothing. If the poor man wishes fresh air, is it to be found in the streets or alleys that alone are within the reach of his purse? If he wishes abundance of light, can it be had through the dingy little window of his apartment, so close to would have our most spiritual preachers occasionally to take up the theme. Why, even when they use our triad-air, light, and water-or any one of them, as a symbol of that manifold grace of God which is also so free and so full, they might introduce a word of thankfulness for the symbol as well as for the thing symbolized. It is God who has constituted the material gifts emblems and tokens of the spiritual; and it would be only fitting that in both spheres His bounty should be recognised. Mind and matter are alike His handiwork; He has adapted the one to the other; and it is but a fitting homage to His wisdom that what He has joined together, man should not put asunder. THE LATE MR. JOHN SHEPPARD AND LORD BYRON. An Encident. BY THE REV. W. DORLING. THI HERE died recently at Frome, in Somer- | parents both died when he was young; and setshire, a venerable Christian man, he had but a sister to share with him the Mr. John Sheppard, at the age of ninetythree, having lived for nearly the whole of his life in that west-country town. He came of a respectable and honourable family, many of whose members had connected their names with the welfare of the town in a variety of ways. John Sheppard was born as far back as October 15th, 1785; so that he was old enough to have remembered the French Revolution. He was born some years before the world knew anything of the first Napoleon; and the young Prince met his mournful end in Zululand only three weeks after Mr. Sheppard's death. His כי sorrows of orphanhood. But they were adopted by an uncle, and were privileged with a good education. At an early age, leaving a position in the office of the firm, he went to Edinburgh University, and attended the lectures of Dr. Thomas Brown, Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy. The period of his stay in Edinburgh for educational advantages was the only one during which he was absent from his native town, save for purposes of change and rest. His tastes led him to desire, and his means enabled him to undertake, a Continental tour, in the year which followed the peace consequent |