THE SINGLE HEAD OF WHEAT. MRS. L. C. ELDRED. All my daily tasks were ended; Laden with the harvest sweet." This I read, and deeply pondered To be laid before the throne. In the world's great field of labor, With the sheaves that he had won. Gladly then the pearly gateways With a glass of cooling water And another, worn and weary, While the golden moments fled, Came, with weary, toil-worn feet, So with tearful eyes I watched them, Yet I love the Master truly, And I've labored hard since dawn; But I have no heavy burden, Will he bid me to begone? While I questioned thus in sadness, Christ the Master called for me, And I knelt before Him saying, I have only this for Thee. "I have labored hard, O Master! I have toiled from morn till night; But I sought to aid my neighbors, And to make their labor light. So the day has passed unnoticed, And to-night, with shame, I come, Bringing, as my gathered harvest, But a single wheat-head home." Then I laid it down with weeping, Truly, bravely, hast thou wrought. Thus to serve the reaper-band, A GENTLEMAN. Tis he whose every thought and deed Whose generous tongue disdains to speak Who never did a slander forge, His neighbor's fame to wound; Nor hearken to a false report, By malice whispered round. Who to his plighted word and truth And though he promise to his loss, Whose soul in usury disdains LOVE OF COUNTRY.-JOSEPH HOLT. Next to the worship of the Father of us all, the deepest and grandest of human emotions is the love of the land that gave us birth. It is an enlargement and exaltation of all the tenderest and strongest sympathies of kindred and of home. In all centuries and climes it has lived, and defied chains and dungeons and racks to crush it. It has strewed the earth with its monuments, and has shed undying lustre on a thousand fields on which it has battled. Through the night of ages, Thermopyla glows like some mountain peak on which the morning sun has risen, because twenty-three hundred years ago, this hallowing passion touched its mural precipices and its crowning crags. It is easy, however, to be patriotic in piping times of peace, and in the sunny hour of prosperity. It is national sorrow, -it is war, with its attendant perils and horrors, that tests this passion, and winnows from the masses those who, with all their love of life, still love their country more. We honor commerce with its busy marts, and the workshop with its patient toil and exhaustless ingenuity, but still we would be unfaithful to the truth of history did we not confess that the most heroic champions of human freedom and the most illustrious apostles of its principles have come from the broad fields of agriculture. There seems to be something in the scenes of nature, in her wild and beautiful landscapes, in her cascades, and cataracts, and waving woodlands, and in the pure and exhilarating airs of her hills and mountains, that unbraces the fetters which man would rivet upon the spirit of his fellow-man. It was at the handles of the plow, and amid the breathing 2AAAAA* odors of its newly-opened furrows, that the character of Cincinnatus was formed, expanded and matured. It was not in the city full, but in the deep gorges and upon the snow-clad summits of the Alps-amid the eagles and the thundersthat William Tell laid the foundations of those altars to human liberty, against which the surging tides of European despotism have beaten for centuries, but, thank God, have beaten in vain. It was amid the primeval forests and mountains, the lakes and leaping streams of our own land; amid fields of waving grain; amid the songs of the reaper and the tinkling of the shepherd's bell, that were nurtured those rare virtues which clustered, star-like, in the character of Washington, and lifted him in moral stature a head and shoulders above even the demi-gods of ancient story. CHURCH REVERIES OF A SCHOOL-GIRL. I have a new bonnet; I'll go up to church Ah! there goes the sermon,-I must listen with care; I must catch, if I can, the drift of the text; I wonder what beau Belle Laws will have next? Ah, me! how I wish the choir would sing; I'd give something nice for a new diamond ring. |