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a wallet; and all are as happy as freedom and fresh air can make them. Luke Barclay. is up among the top boughs of the hazels, and the brown clusters, as the wind blows, are bobbing against his very cheeks. Hark! he cries out proudly, 'I am higher than any of you.' There! the slender tree on which he stood has broken, and Luke Barclay, breaking through the boughs below him, has tumbled to the ground."

"He should not have been so proud, then, about his climbing.”

"He has broken no bones by his fall; he is only scratched a little, and his comrades are laughing at his mishap. I am afraid, Edwin, that we are all prouder than we ought to be, forgetting the words of the wise man, 'Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,' Prov. xvi. 18. I must now leave you to think on the pictures I have drawn."

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The sheet of water, the pleasure boat, boat-house, and leaping fish-The old hall-The picture gallery-The armouryThe great kitchen-The hollow oak and the stag-fightThe schoolboys and the chestnuts The high wind-Poor old Peggy Hicks-Christmas-The kindness of the squireThe poor people carrying away their provisions.

"PARK pictures! park pictures!" cried out Edwin, as he met his father in the garden. "I have been into the park and seen the great hall, and the clumps of trees, and the fallow-deer on the wide lawn; and now I

If they are not

want some park pictures. very well drawn, I shall most likely find out the mistake. Please to sketch me some park pictures; and do not forget the fallow-deer."

"If you are such a judge of park pictures, I must be a little careful. A painter does not like to be found fault with. A word or two must be said about the old hall."

"Oh yes, for that is in the park; that must make one of the pictures."

"The hall stands on the slope of a hill, with a wide space or lawn before the court. On the right and left are groves of beautiful trees; while, in front, at the bottom of the slope, is a sheet of water with a boat-house. A pleasure-boat is moored to a post standing by the side of the water. There! what a splash! That must have been a large fish. See how the circles are getting larger and larger in the water."

"I dare say it was a pike."

"The old hall is a fine building; and I look at it with the more pleasure, because, though its owner is rich, he is a friend to the poor and needy. 'Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble,' Psa. xli. 1. I love to look on the fine old park houses, which have been built so many hundred years ago.

'The stately homes of England,
How beautiful they stand,
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land!

The deer across the green-wood bound,
Through shade and sunny gleam;

And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream.'

The old hall has a walled court in front with a large gate, and each of the square pillars at the gate has a falcon on the top of it cut in stone. What with the front and wings ot the old hall, its. painted roofs, its sixsided towers, its square windows with stone stanchions or supporters, and the ivy that covers the whole front, it forms a goodly spectacle. The chambers inside are very numerous; the picture gallery is well furnished; and as to stags' horns and suits of armour, in the great hall and armoury, there are plenty of them. The armour is not kept because the owner of the hall is fond of fighting, but simply because it belonged to his forefathers. Över the fireplace in the great kitchen is the motto-Waste not, want not.'

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"That is a very good motto."

"Yonder is a hollow oak; I should think it was the very oldest in the park. Six or eight men might stand up in it comfortably. Its thick boughs are covered with brown leaves, and three antlered stags are rubbing themselves against its knotted and twisted

trunk. See! two of the stags are fighting. How desperately they dash against each other, and what a rattle they make with their horns! One of them is now beaten, and is running off to hide himself among the trees."

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"Well, I am glad the battle is over." "There is a double row of chestnut-trees, with their scalloped, dark-green, glossy leaves running along close to the park paling; and I never saw the chestnuts so thick upon them before. Half-a-dozen youngsters from the boarding school, taking advantage of their holiday, have crept through a hole in the paling. Some have mounted the trees, and others below are opening the prickly bunches that have fallen, by treading on

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