and their government so beneficent as they say-ah! surely there should be room enough for these few poor children. But none will fetch them in." The father's voice grew hoarse with deepened emotion: the dark eyes of the children moistened with a tear; they knew not why, but that their father wept.

I could have wept too-but I replied, "Perhaps the prince your fathers so much offended, forbade your re-entrance on those lands: perhaps its new incumbents hold it on condition never to admit you; or surely they had not so long left you here unfriended?"

"It may be so," the old man answered, fixing a a look of lorn despair upon his children; paused a moment; then, as if a hopeful doubt had broken in upon his sadness, added, "I never heard it. I have heard he loved our fathers: they who love the fathers are not used to hate the children. It may be so-but when you go back again to yonder halls, if you see that there is any thing to spare; if there be room enough in their chambers, and food enough on their board, ask if they are forbidden to take in my few poor children."

Readers, I have fulfilled my commission. If you were the possessors of some rich tenement, given by a sovereign, as in former times it often has been, the forfeited property of his traitor subjects, to those he makes his friends; while you enjoyed the gain of their disloyalty, should you feel nc pity for their need? Should you leave their children to perish at your gates? I believe you would not. There is nothing more moving to our natural feelings, than to look on the residue of fallen greatness. If a suffering pauper be pointed out to us as the child of one who was of rank and birth superior to our own, a stronger emotion of pitv is

excited for his degradation; for we contrast his fortunes with our own, and measure his fall as what ours might be. Still more, if you were the gainers by that change, and held the property that was once his father's would you not hold out to the deprived and degraded offspring, some pittance of your well-spared abundance? You would go out of those pleasant lands to the bleak forest I have described, to look for those poor children that were perishing on the waste, and bring them in, to live on your estates, and be at least your servants. Now believe me it is no fiction I have told.

Jehovah has a garden that he cultures with especial care, as unlike the heathen lands that lie around it, as the dwelling I have pictured to the country that was about it. He cast out in anger the original inhabitants, and put you in unearned possession of what once was theirs. A few of their outcast children, innocent of their father's sin, ignorant of the real cause of their degradation, and not knowing by what means to be reconciled to their offended Maker, are straying about your streets, and lurking round your doors, and you have taken no notice of them. You have not gone to their dwellings to offer them a portion of the word of eternal truth, on which you feed so richly. And you have not sought out their children to separate them from their miseries and rear them to a better state, before habit has confirmed them in their errors, and reconciled them to destruction. You know their high original; you trace, with lively interest, their distant pedigree, and are proud to call yourselves by the name of their fathers: it is your boast and glory to observe the law of Moses, their legislator, and Christ who was born of them. And yet you disregard them, individually, if not as a people; and feel

no emotion when you see them perishing without those moral and religious advantages you possess in such rich abundance, and have never been forbidden to communicate. On the contrary, you know there would be joy in heaven itself to see the offspring of a Hebrew become a spiritual Christian. The only way in which an inhumanity, not natural to our hearts can be accounted for, is thoughtlessness of the circumstances in which we stand respecting these people, or ignorance of the means by which we can amend their condition.

These thoughts were suggested to me when, on a late occasion, I went to listen where the holders of the rich blessings of the gospel were assembled to consider the claims of these children; and deeply was my mind struck with the contrast of their condition and privileges with our own. They were not, indeed, unfed and naked in their land of barrenness, for pity had brought them in; but they were sitting there, the suppliants for a small share of that which once was all their own. The children of Abraham were in the dress of charity; their eyes cast down and often filled with tears, while their wants and claims were urged upon the gay crowd before them; gay in the ornaments of superfluous wealth: which, spared to them, had not been missed and gay in the consciousness of moral dignity and enjoyment of spiritual good, that, divided with them, had surely not been lessened, Who are these children of Abraham? Abraham, four thousand years ago, worshipping God on the only altar he had upon the earth, the temple of Jerusalem in all its splendour ; his own presence shining in the midst, while our unknown forefathers were wandering somewhere inthe wilds of uncultured ignorance.

In determining to represent to Christians the

duty of instructing Jews in general, and Jewish children in particular, in the principles of the gospel of Christ, I have left the grounds on which more has been said than I can say. I have left to others the strength of Scripture language, and the mysterious voice of prophecy, and put in the plea of feeling, justice, and humanity.

NOTE. The closing remarks of this story, descriptive of the condition of the Jews in Europe, are not applicable to their circumstances in our highly favoured land of civil and religious privileges: yet the children of Abraham are to this day witnesses of the truth of prophecy. And they, who were once the chosen people of God, have, for eighteen hundred years, been scattered, persecuted and enslaved among almost every nation. And now nearly twelve millions of Jews are scattered over the earth, almost without a home, or a government which they can call their own.

It has been beautifully said by the poet

"The wild Dove hath its nest,

The Fox his cave;

Mankind their country:
Israel but the grave."

INCONSISTENCIES.

I HAD a short time since resolved that I would make an effort to describe, if possible, the beauty, and loveliness, and excellence of CONSISTENCY. But when I would have gone to work to paint the portrait, I found myself in no small difficulty for where was the original? Had I any acquaintance with it? Had I ever seen it? Imagination may make a drawing, but a portrait it cannot make. And what would it avail me to describe an imaginary being, whose features none would recognise, when I profess to draw always from the life, and describe only what I hear and see? What was to be done? I could think of but one way of emerging from this great difficulty. If there were such a thing as CoNSISTENCY, (and I had never heard it doubted) it must be somewhere to be found; why not look after it? I must, of course, have seen it often, and my ignorance of its exact features, and the contour of the countenance altogether, must be the result of inattention or forgetfulness. This might be repaired, as ignorance mostly may, by diligent research; and I resolved that it should be so. I resolved to listen every where, and look at every thing, and inquire of every body, till I should find my subject, and so have no more to do but to paint the resemblance of it. I put my pencil in my pocket-and my Indian-rubber lest I should sketch a feature wrong;