"Tut! never thought of such a thing." "Then what do you mean to speculate with, or to invest?" progress! Mr. David Waddle here smacked his | conscience-never very easy on the matter-began to lips expressively before he continued. "They have prick and to smite him. since temporarily gone down to their original price. We say deliberately "temporarily!" Our emphatic advice is, Buy as fast as you can! We also recommended the newly-discovered Platina Mines in Patagonia, which are started under influential management. We are still of the same opinion. The only miserable objection we have heard against this mine of wealth and wealth of mine, is that, judging from past experience, the natives might eat up the miners sent out from this country. But surely it has not yet come to this, that British enterprise is to be checked by such difficulties! We believe in the progress of civilisation, and we expect that if this mine Thus recalled from the unknown regions of speculation to that on which her common sense enabled her to judge, Mrs. Waddle had no hesitation in replying. Lifting her truthful eyes to his flushed face, she said, slowly and distinctly, "I would have no confidence whatever in them, David." "No confidence in them after that!" and Mr. Waddle slapped the "Safe Guide to Wealth." "I understand nothing about business," continued Mrs. Waddle, not heeding the interruption; "but if it is so easy to get rich, and if these people know all about it, why don't they become rich themselves instead of sending out these circulars?" That was a puzzle! Mr. Waddle gave himself a hitch back on his chair, and scratched his pate for a solution. Yet, to do him justice, the same difficulty had more than once perplexed himself; but it would not have done to have given way on such a secondary point. "Graham tells me- " he commenced, "What! Peter Graham? What can he know?" Mr. Waddle was getting angry. "Graham does know; he has had great experience, and is doing an enormous business in stocks. He tells me it is not proper for agents to invest on their own account, and that explains it all. I am much obliged to Graham, for he clearly proved to me how every person ought to make three, if not four, dividends on his money every year." "I thought there were only two halves to each year?" "Of course; but this is the way. You get your dividend from one thing-say in January. Down goes the thing. Well, you wait till it comes up again; then you sell and buy another thing, which pays another dividend-say in April. That is two! Down goes the thing, up it comes again; you sell, you buy another thing for July-that is a third dividend! You do the same for October-that is a fourth! and so you have four dividends instead of two in the year, and our £300 a year would at once become £600. Eh! wouldn't you like that?" Surely, David, you would not risk what we have to live upon-we and 'Pussy '?" She said this in a tone of such real alarm that Mr. David Waddle's All unwittingly, poor Mrs. Waddle had just led up to the subject on which, of all others, Mr. Waddle most wished to speak to his wife, and which yet he most dreaded to approach. But the claims of truthfulness are paramount, and there are those who can discover even the leadings of Providence in any opportunity that offers for carrying out their own pet schemes. So Mr. Waddle put on the boldest yet kindliest face he could. "You know, my dear, there is your Uncle Nicoll's legacy of £2,000. They have kept us out of it as long as they could-the full year the law allowed them-but now it has been lying idle in the Greenwood Bank these three weeks-" Mr. Waddle paused for his wife's reply, but her utterance was checked. All that for the last few years had been the burden and sorrow of her heart fell upon it with cruel weight. When, thirty-five years before, she had begun, to use the country phrase, "to keep company "with David, she was a blooming lassie of twenty, and he a strapping hardworking lad of nearly the same age. Ann Nicoll (for such had been her maiden name) had been left an orphan, and was tolerated as the drudge, with hands or head, as occasion might require, in the house of a distant relative. David Waddle was foreman in the tannery, to which afterwards he succeeded. At that time, which was close upon the period when the two married, the income of the couple amounted to just £60 a year, with a dwelling attached to the tannery. Very improvident to marry on such a provision! So thought Ann Nicoll's distant connection-or, at least, very inconvenient. Accordingly a report had been sent to Ann's two uncles, who had just commenced business in London, sufficiently unfavourable to affect the much-hoped-for wedding-present. Would it be a dozen horse-hair chairs, or a sofa, or even a sideboard? It was neither one nor the other, but a long letter, in which the incipient broker brothers severally and jointly "washed their hands" with invisible moral soap of all the possible stains with which their niece's folly might have defiled them, and then withdrew their so-cleansed hands into the appropriate receptacle of their own pockets. But neither David nor Ann were more than temporarily disappointed or discouraged; they worked all the harder, and loved each other all the better, that they must be all in all to each other. No, not all in all, for the two had resolved, come what might, they would not neglect the soul's concerns. So they had on the day of their marriage reared their family altar, and kept on, through good report and through evil report, in joy and in sorrow, with God's light of love shining into their hearts and upon their path. He had given them several children and taken them away again; and they had joyed and wept, yet not without joying, when they laid their treasures in safe keeping. At last "Pussy" had been given, and remained to them to be the darling of their hearts, the centre of their aims and thoughts. Then, after many long years of hard toil, better times had come; David took up his former master's business and throve in it. Somehow the Uncles Nicoll must have heard of it; at any rate, ever afterwards there came on New Year's Day a Christmas card for Mrs. Waddle with "Andrew Nicoll's best wishes." At last Andrew Nicoll himself arrived one day-not directly at their house, but at the hotel in Greenwood, to spend the afternoon with them. He was very reserved and very still, but evidently well pleased with "Pussy," and, what Mrs. Waddle appreciated still more, he was respectful towards her husband. Poor Andrew Nicoll! With that presentiment which men sometimes have of their approaching end, he was visiting what few relatives were still left him, although he had neglected them during all his busy life. His next expedition was to the widow of a brother of his own, to whom the two London brokers had long made a scanty allowance, on which she had managed to bring up and educate her son James, now a youth about five years older than "Pussy." A close and most loving intercourse had been kept up between the widow and the Waddles, which led to frequent visits, and an intimacy between James and "Pussy," like that of brother and sister, dating from their childhood. A year more, and Andrew Nicoll was laid in his grave, and soon afterwards also the widow. When Andrew Nicoll's will was examined, it was found that while he bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to his brother and partner John, he had left a legacy of £2,000 to Mrs. Waddle, and another of £4000 to his nephew James, with which the latter now intended to commence on his own account in London a business to which he had been trained in his native town. Now it was this legacy to which Mr. Waddle had so bitterly referred, as kept from him to the utmost term the law would allow, and with which he intended to speculate; and Mrs. Waddle's deep feelings on the subject arose not from any inordinate attachment to or pride in the first money she had ever been able really to call her own, but from quite other causes. So long as the two had striven upwards in poverty and hard toil, no shadow of doubt or misgiving had ever rested on Mrs. Waddle's heart. It was otherwise when success began to attend their work. It was then, and increasingly as they advanced towards it, that Mrs. Waddle became alive to it, how desirable success was, and how rapidly any little help from without, like a favouring puff of wind in the sails of a ship, would carry one to the longed-for harbour. When she looked at Mr. Waddle, as he nightly returned weary and worn from his work, and still further at "Pussy," as she grew up so pretty and so promising, her heart sadly misgave her. Could it be that she was the obstructive to the prosperity of those whom most she loved? Like other noble-hearted women of the same calibre, her estimate of her husband was as extravagantly high as that of herself was depreciatory. There was scarcely a position to which, with his talents, energy, and perseverance, he might not have attained. Not that Mr. David Waddle had ever given his wife the faintest cause for suspecting that he had repented his early choice, or would make another if it were now open to him. But none the less, perhaps all the more keenly, did the good woman feel it. When that unexpected legacy at last came, Mrs. Waddle felt the burden in some measure lifted from her spirit. To add £100 a year to her husband's £300 was a relative position not unsuitable for a wife to occupy. And as for "Pussy," a prospective dowry of £400 a year, not to speak of "the premises and walled garden," constituted a superadded worldly charm, in Mr. Waddle's forcible though figurative language, "not to be sneezed at!" This money was now, in Mrs. Waddle's opinion, to be frittered and trifled and speculated away! But bitter as the disappointment was, it was not for the loss of the money to themselves and to "Pussy," nor for the sudden dissolving of her short-lived consolation, that she now mourned. The very prospect and planning of these speculations had brought the first jar of discord to their home; it had engrossed and absorbed her husband's mind and heart; it had unfitted him for everything else; it was literally like a worm, eating out the core of his heart's religion; it was becoming a passion, a mania. What would it be when he was once fairly plunged into the vortex, and helplessly whirled about in it? Better, far better, there never had been such legacy left them; better, far better, even labour than such rest. Assuredly, it is in this as in all other matters, that experience best confirms the truth of Scripture. Alike those who feel themselves poor and those who feel themselves rich will be the most ready to echo the inspired sentiment, "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me." But Mr. Waddle, ignorant of what had been passing through his wife's mind, could not be expected to understand her silence. For a while he stared in her face, and then an ominous frown gathered on his brow. "Well, Ann, if you cannot trust me with your money-" he commenced, somewhat bitterly. "Trust you? I would gladly trust you with all I have or love on earth, and a thousand times more, if I had it; but-” Mrs. Waddle could not finish her sentence. That she, who of all things in life had longed to be able to give something to her husband, should be suspected of unwillingness to entrust that paltry money to his keeping! The tears started to her eyes. Mrs. Waddle had never been addicted to scenes. Probably her husband had not seen her weeping, except for joy, since they had stood side by side at the grave of their last buried child. Nor had the demon ofwhat shall we call it ?-not covetousness, but gambling and wealth-hunger, as yet so fastened upon the man as to hold him in permanent and absolute sway. Mr. David Waddle put his arm round his wife's neck, and pressed her to his heart. "There now, Ann, I didn't mean it. I am afraid I am a little hasty. I know you are the best and most loving of wives; and you and I trust each other just as much as we did when, thirty odd years ago, we began life together-don't we? And you and I love each other just as much as then-don't we?" What manner of answer Mrs. Waddle made to these interrogations it were highly unbecoming in the present writer to disclose. Suffice it to have put down one of the longest and strongest speeches Mr. Waddle was ever known to have made since the day of his marriage, and to add that sweetest music never fell with such grateful soothing on the ear as did her husband's words upon Mrs. Waddle's heart. And so there was once more a truce; and so Mrs. Waddle had given her consent to her husband's employing her £2,000 in speculation. Yet, after all, Mrs. Waddle had not even approached the subject on which she had originally come to speak. But it must be done, and the present seemed of all others the most propitious moment. "David!" Mr. Waddle looked up from the calculations to which he had returned with fresh zest. "James Nicoll is going to London. He must come through this; and, you know, he might ask Uncle John Nicoll's advice in London about your proposed investments." Poor Mrs. Waddle! She had used an artifice, and in her earnestness to attain her purpose even seemed to enter into her husband's schemes. But, as so often in similar circumstances, she was singularly unfortunate. What she had intended for an argument and a plea became a trap and a snare. Of all things, Mr. Waddle least desired that Mr. John Nicoll should become acquainted with his speculations. Curiously enough, though Mr. Waddle saw no harm, but the opposite, in his plans, yet he instinctively felt how justly and indignantly Uncle Nicoll would denounce them. Besides, Graham had warned him by way of anticipation against the old school of brokers, who were not up to modern undertakings. Last, though by no means least, he did not want James Nicoll in the house; he did not wish the intimacy to continue; quite the opposite. He had now other plans, other views, other hopes and prospects for "Pussy." Was it not for her he was accumulating all that wealth-there on the paper? No, no! Mr. Waddle had been all that morning counting not only the eggs which lay for him in such speculative baskets as the Great Wheal Bang and the Patagonian mines, but the chickens which presumably were within these eggs; and not merely those chickens-no, not even when they had arrived at hen's estate-but the eggs which they in turn would lay, and the chickens that in turn would be hatched from them-and so on, till the concen trated cackling of that gigantic barnyard, and the AMONG the posthumous poems of Cowper, there proverbial difficulties of threading one's way through so many eggs, became far too great for ordinary powers of reasoning not to succumb to them. And so Mrs. Waddle understood it, that she must not even mention the letter which "Pussy" had at breakfast deposited between her own teacup and that of her mother. Sonnets of the Sacred Year. BY THE REV. S. J. STONE, M.A. ELEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other."-St. Luke xviii. 14. TOGETHER, well: in prayer together, well: Well that they know and seek One LORD above: Well that they know Him or in wrath or love: And well that each should his heart's story tellThen-all the difference 'twixt Heav'n and Hell In utterance and in access! So they prove If the world's spirit or the Eternal Dove For ban or benison within them dwell. One prays, and all his words are blatant pride, Not prayer, the deep sad cry for sinners meet; Not the confession at the Father's feet, Of him who passeth homeward justified! O'er one, Heaven darkens and his angel sighs, O'er th' other, jubilant anthems fill the skies. is one with the above title; which poem has many points of interest, both from the circumstances of its discovery by Hayley among his manuscripts (for it was never known he had written on the subject), the merits of the piece, and the high antiquity of the tree thus celebrated. "The copy that I had the delight of discovering," says Hayley, "is written on a loose half-quire of large quarto paper, with so many blotted lines and so many blank leaves that it might easily have been passed over as waste paper. I never saw any of his compositions more carefully or more judiciously corrected. It is impressed with all the marks of Cowper's most vigorous hand. It affords a striking exemplification of most of the excellences and defects of his peculiar style, and may be fairly quoted as an excellent specimen of his manner: "Thou wast a bauble once; a cup and ball Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay Time made thee what thou wast-king of the woods! No flock frequents thee now; thou hast outlived This oak stood at Yardley Lodge, between two and three miles from Weston, just beyond Killick and Dinglederry, mentioned in Cowper's "Needless Alarm." The poet thus writes in 1788 to his friend Samuel Rose:"Since your departure I have twice visited the oak, and with an intention to push my inquiries a mile beyond it, where, it seems, I should have found another oak, much larger and much more respectable than the former; but once I was hindered by the rain, and once by the sultriness of the day. This latter oak has been known by the name of Judith many ages, and is said to have been an oak at the time of the Conqueror." 66 Mr. Gilpin, in his " Forest Scenery," mentions some oaks "which chronicle on their furrowed trunks ages before the Conquest." An older and more classic author, Mr. Evelyn, in his "Sylva," records that an oak cut down near Newberry, in Berkshire, was of such astonishing magnitude that its trunk ran fifty feet clear without a knot, and cut clean timber five feet square at its base; its consort gave forty feet of clear straight timber, squaring four feet at its base, and nearly a yard square at its top. Dr. Hunter, in his edition of Evelyn's Sylva," after describing a gigantic oak then in Sheffield Park, says: "Neither this nor any of the oaks mentioned by Mr. Evelyn, bears any proportion to one now growing at Cowthorpe, near Wetherley, in Yorkshire, the dimensions of which are almost incredible. Within three feet of the ground it measures sixteen yards, and close to the ground twenty-six yards. Its height in its present ruinous state (1776) is almost eighty-five feet, and its principal limb extends sixteen yards from the bole. Throughout the whole tree the foliage is extremely thin, so that the anatomy of the ancient branches may be distinctly seen in the height of summer. Compared to this, all other trees are but children of the forest." Dr. Hunter's description was good for the tree as it stood sixty years afterwards, but its subsequent history and its present condition we do not know. In most parts of the country are ancient trees, famous in their localities. Gilbert White, in his ever fresh and charming "History of Selborne," celebrates the old oak of that classic village: "In the centre of the village, and near the church, is a square piece of ground, surrounded by houses, and vulgarly called the Plestor. In the midst of this spot stood, in olden times, a vast oak, with a short squat body, and huge horizontal arms, extending almost to the extremity of the area. This venerable tree, surrounded with stone steps, and scats above them, was the delight of old and young, and a place of some resort in summer evenings; where the former sat in grave debate, while the latter frolicked and danced before them. Long might it have stood, had not the amazing tempest in 1703 overturned it at once, to the infinite regret of the inhabitants and the vicar, who bestowed several pounds in setting it in its place again; but all his care could not avail, the tree sprouted for a time, then withered and died. This oak I mention to show to what a bulk planted oaks also may arrive; and planted this tree must certainly have been, as appears from what is known concerning the antiquities of the village." Many parts of England can boast of gigantic or venerable oaks. Those of Windsor Forest and of Sherwood Forest are well known. Mr. Staunton, in his notes to Shakespeare, says: "With regard to Herne's Oak, the fact is now established that a family of the name of Herne was living at Windsor in the sixteenth century, one Gylles Herne being married there in 1569. The old tradition was that Herne, one of the keepers in the park, having committed an offence, for which he feared to be disgraced, hung himself upon an oak, which was ever after haunted by his ghost. "The earliest notice of this oak, since immortalised by Shakespeare, is in a 'Plan of the Town and Castle of Windsor and Little Park,' published at Eton in 1742. In the map, a tree marked 'Sir John Falstaff's Oak,' is represented as being on the edge of a pit (Shakespeare's fairy pit!) just on the outside of an avenue which was formed in the seventeenth century, and known as Queen Elizabeth's Walk. The oak, a pollard, was described in 1780 as being twenty-seven feet in circumference, hollow, and the only tree in the neighbourhood into which the boys could get. Although in a rapid state of decay, acorns were obtained from it as late as 1783, and it would in all probability have stood the scath of time and shocks of weather, but that unfortunately it was marked down inadvertently in a list of decayed and unsightly trees which had been ordered to be destroyed by Gerge III, and fell a victim to the woodman's axe in 1796." Through the split trunk of one of the oaks in Robin Hood's county the writer, some years ago, remembers to have ridden, with good clear roadway; and many wonderful trees were pointed out in the region of the Nottinghamshire Dukeries." The Shire Oak, so named from its standing on a spot where the counties of Derby, Nottingham, and York join, is one of the largest in the kingdom, covering an area of seven hundred and seven square yards. The great oak in the Holt is also one of the very largest, measuring in circumference, at seven feet from the ground, thirtyfour feet. It was computed by Mr. Marsham, of Stratton, near Norwich, an authority in such matters, to contain, at fourteen feet length, one thousand feet of timber. An oak is mentioned by Dr. Slott, in his History of Staffordshire, as standing at Rycote, in that county, which would overshadow with its boughs four thousand three hundred and seventy men. The circumference of one of the oaks at Ampthill Park, Bedfordshire, is upwards of forty feet at its base, and at its centre nearly thirty feet. It is hollow, and would admit four or five persons to stand upright within it. One branch equals some large trees in size. To this oak is affixed a plate with the following inscription: "Majestic tree, whose wrinkled form hath stood Arm after arm shall leave thy mouldering bust, SELSEA OAK. These are rather commonplace lines, but express the feelings with which ordinary spectators view these venerable trees. Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, in more unusual strain thus addresses a blighted oak overmantled with ivy : "Hast thou seen, in winter's stormiest sky, The trunk of a blighted oak, Not dead, but sinking in slow decay Beneath Time's resistless stroke, Round which a luxurious ivy had grown, And wreathed it in verdure no longer its own? "Oh! smile not, nor think it a worthless thing, Should aught be unlovely which thus can shed So much for oaks still flourishing, or of which the living remains are to be seen. But the most wonderful oak ever known to have grown on English soil was probably that dug out of Hatfield Bog, a description of which was given in an early volume of the "Philosophical Transactions," and is quoted by Evelyn in his "Sylva." This tree was a hundred and twenty feet in length, twelve in diameter at the base, ten in the middle, and six at the smaller end when broken off; so that the butt for sixty feet squared seven feet of timber, and four its entire length. In the "Sunday at Home" for September, 1873, a picture is given of a celebrated tree called traditionally Wycliffe's Oak, and sometimes Whitfield's Oak, and locally Crouch Oak, probably from the low crouching form of its chief branches. It is at the side of the road near Addlestone, in Surrey, and formerly marked the boundary of Windsor Forest in CROUCH OAK, ADDLESTONE. "Perchance thou hast seen this sight-and then, As I at thy years might do, Passed carelessly by, nor turned again But now I can draw from that perishing tree CHAPEL OAK, ALONVILLE, NORMANDY. this direction. Queen Elizabeth is said to have dined under its shade. The article in the "Sunday at Home" contains interesting notices of "Reformation Oaks" and of "Gospel Oaks," so named from the gospel of the day being read under them during processions on "gang days," and in perambulations in marking parish boundaries. All the oaks we have referred to are British. But other countries have memorable or notable trees, one of which may be mentioned as it is indirectly associated with English history. At Alonville, in Normandy, there is an oak which is more than thirty-five feet round the trunk. Extreme age bas destroyed all its interior. It is supported only by the outlayers and bark, though bursting into foliage in the summer. Within the hollow trunk a chapel has been formed. entered by a flight of steps. It |