pass away. Now, to every man and woman Christ says that if they have entered in by the door, they shall be saved. Selected.

SPURGEON.

6. The dissipations of social life are blasting and destroying a vast multitude. With many life is a masquerade ball, and as at such entertainments gentlemen and ladies put on the garb of kings and queens, or mountebanks or clowns, and at the close put off the disguise, so a great many pass their whole life in a mask, taking off the mask at death. While the masquerade ball of life goes on, they trip merrily over the floor, gemmed hand is stretched to gemmed hand, gleaming brow bends to gleaming brow. On with the dance! Flush and rustle and laughter of immeasurable merrymaking. But after a while the languor of death comes on the limbs and blurs the eyesight. Lights lower. Floor hollow with sepulchral echo. Music saddened into a wail. Lights lower. Now the maskers are only seen in the dim light. Now the fragrance of the flowers is like the sickening odor that comes from garlands that have lain long in the vaults of cemeteries. Lights lower. Mists gather in the room. Glasses shake as tho quaked by sullen thunder. Sight caught in the curtain. Scarf drops from the shoulder of beauty a shroud. Lights lower. Over the slippery boards in dance of death glide jealousies, envies, revenges, lust, despair and death. Stench of lamp-wicks almost extinguished. Torn garlands will not half cover the ulcerated feet. Choking damps. Chilliness. Feet still. Hands closed. Voices hushed. Eyes shut. Lights out. "Lights Out."1

T. DEWITT TALMAGE.

7. One of our railroad engineers, some years since, was running an express train of ten filled cars. It was in the night, and a very dark night too. His train was behind time, and he was putting the engine to the utmost speed of which it was capable, in order to reach a certain point at the proper hour. He was running on a straight and level track, and at this unusual velocity, when a conviction struck him that he must stop.

1 Copyright, 1900, by Louis Klopsch.

"A something seemed to tell me," he said, "that to go ahead was dangerous, and that I must stop if I would save life. I looked back at my train and it was all right. I strained my eyes and peered into the darkness, and could see no signal of danger, nor anything betokening danger, and there, in the daytime, I could have seen five miles. I listened to the working of my engine, tried the water, looked at the gage, and all was right. I tried to laugh myself out of what I considered a childish fear; but, like Banquo's ghost, it would not down at my bidding, but grew stronger in its hold upon me. I thought of the ridicule I would have heaped upon me if I did stop; but it was all of no avail. The conviction-for by this time it had ripened into a conviction-that I must stop, grew stronger, and I resolved to do so. I shut off, and blew the whistle for brakes accordingly. I came to a dead halt, got off, and went ahead a little way without saying anything to anybody what was the matter. I had a lamp in my hand, and had gone but about sixty feet when I saw what convinced me that premonitions are sometimes possible. I dropt the lantern from my nerveless grasp and sat down on the track utterly unable to stand."

He goes on to tell that there some one had drawn a spike which had long fastened a switch rail, and opened a switch which always had been kept locked, which led on to a track— only about one hundred and fifty feet long-which terminated in a stone quarry!

"Here it was, wide open, and had I not obeyed my premonitory warning-call it what you will-I should have run into it, and at the end of the track, only about ten rods long, my heavy engine and train, moving at the rate of forty-five miles an hour, would have come into collision with a solid wall of rock eighteen feet high! The consequences, had I done so, can neither be imagined nor described, but they could by no possibility have been otherwise than fatally horrible."

"A Premonition."

ANONYMOUS.

8. "Do you see this lock of hair?” said an old man to me. "Yes; but what is it? It is, I suppose, a curl from the head of a dear child long since dead."

"It is not. It is a lock of my own hair; and it is now nearly seventy years since it was cut from this head."

"But why do you prize a lock of your own hair so much?” "It has a story belonging to it, a strange one. I keep it thus with care because it speaks to me more of God, and of His special care, than anything else I possess. I was a little child of four years old, with long curly locks, which in the sun, or rain, or wind, hung down my cheeks uncovered. One day my father went into the woods to cut up a log, and I went with him. I was standing a little way behind him, or rather at his side, watching with interest the strokes of the heavy ax as it went up and came down upon the wood, sending off splinters with every stroke, in all directions. Some of the splinters fell at my feet, and I eagerly stooped to pick them up. In doing so I stumbled forward, and in a moment my curly head lay upon the log. I had fallen just at the moment when the ax was coming down with all its force. It was too late to stop the blow. Down came the ax. I screamed, and my father fell to the ground in terror. He could not stay the stroke, and in the blindness which the sudden horror caused, he thought he had killed his boy. We soon recovered-I from my fright, and he from terror. He caught me in his arms, and looked at me from head to foot to find the deadly wound which he was sure he had inflicted. Not a drop of blood nor a scar was to be seen. He knelt upon the grass and gave thanks to a gracious God. Having done so, he took up his ax, and found a few hairs upon its edge. He turned to the log he had been splitting, and there was a single curl of his boy's hair, sharply cut through and laid upon the wood. How great the escape! It was as if an angel had turned aside the edge at the moment it was descending upon my head.

"That lock he kept all his days as a memorial of God's care and love. That lock he left me on his death-bed. I keep it with care. It tells me of my father's God and mine. It rebukes unbelief and alarm. It bids me trust Him forever. I

have had many tokens of fatherly love in my threescore years and ten, but somehow this speaks most to my heart. It is the oldest and perhaps the most striking. It used to speak to my father's heart; it now speaks to mine."

"The Lock of Hair."

ANONYMOUS.

9. Last summer I saw Moscow, in some respects the most splendid city under the sun. The emperor afterward asked me if I had seen it, for Moscow is the pride of Russia. I told him yes, and that I had seen Moscow burn. I will tell you what I meant. After examining nine hundred brass cannons which were picked out of the snow after Napoleon retreated from Moscow, each cannon deep cut with the letter "N," I ascended a tower of some two hundred and fifty feet, just before sunset, and on each platform there were bells, large and small, and I climbed up among the bells, and then, as I reached the top, all the bells underneath me began to ring, and they were joined by the bells of fourteen hundred towers and domes and turrets. Some of the bells sent out a faint tinkle of sound, a sweet tintinnabulation that seemed a bubbling of the air, and others thundered forth boom after boom, boom after boom, until it seemed to shake the earth and fill the heavens-sounds so weird, so sweet, so awful, so grand, so charming, so tremendous, so soft, so rippling, so reverberating-and they seemed to wreathe and whirl and rise and sink and burst and roll and mount and die. When Napoleon saw Moscow burn, it could not have been more brilliant than when I saw the fourteen hundred turrets aflame with the sunset; and there were roofs of gold, and walls of malachite, and pillars of porphyry, and balustrades of mosaic, and architecture of all colors mingling the brown of autumnal forests and the blue of summer heavens. and the conflagration of morning skies, and the emerald of rich grass, and the foam of tossing seas. The mingling of so many sounds was an entrancement almost too much for human nerves and human eyes and human ears. I expect to see nothing to equal it until you and I see heaven. But that will surpass it and make the memory of what I saw that July evening in Moscow almost tame and insipid. All heaven aglow and all heaven

a-ring, not in the sunset, but in the sunrise. Voices of our own kindred mingling with the doxologies of empires. Organs of eternal worship responding to the trumpets that have wakened the dead. Nations in white. Centuries in coronation. Anthems like the voice of many waters. Circle of martyrs. Circle of apostles. Circle of prophets. Thrones of cherubim. Thrones of seraphim. Throne of archangel. Throne of Christ. Throne of God. Thrones! Thrones! Thrones! The finger of God points that way. Stop not until you reach that place. Through the atoning Christ, all I speak of and more may be yours and mine. Do you not now hear the chime of the bells of that metropolis of the universe! Do you not see the shimmering of the towers? Good-morning.

"The Bells of Moscow."

T. DE WITT TALMAGE.

Velpean, the eminent French surgeon, successfully performed a perilous operation on a five-year-old child. The mother, overjoyed, called upon him and said:

"Monsieur, I do not know how to express my gratitude. May I present you, however, with this pocketbook, embroidered with my own hands?"

"Madam," said Velpean, "my art is not merely a matter of feeling. My life has its necessities, like yours. Allow me to decline your charming gift and request a more substantial remuneration."

“But, monsieur, what do you wish? Fix the fee yourself. “Five thousand francs, madam.’

She quietly opened the pocketbook, which contained ten onethousand-franc notes, counted out five, and politely handing them to Velpean, retired.

1 Copyright 1900, by Louis Klopsch.

ANONYMOUS.