[All Papers for this Magazine must be addressed to the Editor, Rev. C. D. WARD, D.D., 54, Bramber Road, Fulham, London, S. W. They must be original productions, written only on one side of the sheets, and in all cases the Editor requires to know name and address of the writer.] The Fisherman. (With Illustration.) M cheap and quick travel, have been to our OST of our young friends, in these days of coasts and seen the sea. Probably you, my reader, went last year, and you have vivid recollections of the watering-place where you gathered beautiful sea-weeds, and enjoyed building castles in the sand, paddled or bathed in the water, promenaded on the pier, jumped among the rocks, and had many an enjoyable sail with some old jolly tar in a fishing-smack or a coasting yacht. I dare say you saw the fishermen go out upon their useful, but perilous mission, and you ran eagerly to the beach on their return, to inspect the fish which a night's toil had enabled them to catch. On the coasts of Lincolnshire and Norfolk and Cornwall this is a very common sight, and one much enjoyed by visitors to the delightful watering-places there; the herring, pilchard, and mackerel fisheries employing large fleets for many months of the year. The late "Fisheries Exhibition" in London has given new life to the fishing trade, and fresh interest in all that belongs to it. If you go to Cornwall be sure and visit MARAZION, a most interesting historical town. It is believed to have been founded by some Hebrews, who escaped from the wreck of Solomon and Hiram's mariners when they came to Britain for tin. Not being able to join with our ancestors in their Druidical worship, they built an altar to the True Jehovah, and called the village, formed by their huts close by that altar, Marazion, or the woe or bitterness or desolation of Zion, where they sang "the Lord's song in a strange land! How different the religious condition of our country now! S. K. D. B My Five Minutes' Sermon for our Scholars. LAMENTATIONS III. 23. oys and girls like new things: such as new clothes, new books, new toys, new sights. I want to show you that you receive from God your Father many things which are just what our text says-new every morning. A little use of your mind will enable you to see that nearly all the things you receive every morning are new. Light-the light of the sun is a beautiful blessing, and it is new every morning, and every moment too. God, by causing this sun to rise, gives us new light every morning; and by making it shine all day gives us new light every moment. The air we breathe, when we enter on the duties and joys of a fresh day, is not the same air we breathed yesterday. Our Father, in a silent and marvellous manner, takes away from the poisonous air or gas we breathe out one of its elements, and the other-oxygen-becomes part of the air we breathe in, and makes it to our bodies vitalizing and invigorating. This is a valuable blessing, and it is new every morning. When you awake in the morning you feel, and are, strong, full of activity, and able to do a great deal of walking and work, running and romping. The bodily vigour with which you awake is a new thing, a thing God has been producing all through the silent hours by means of sleep. There is a beautiful thought in the sentence which ought to read "the" God "giveth His beloved in sleep." He gives you your sleep, and IN your sleep when you are not able to think of the Gracious Giver, He gives you life, takes care of your senses, renews your brain and being all through the night, keeps the world in darkness and silence; and when He awakes you out of your sleep in the morning you are full of new vigour and spirit and purpose. Bodily vigour is a good gift-a new mercy every morning. The food you eat at breakfast is new food, and a new mercy. Some of our food is a wonderful boon. It is sometimes called organic food. Plants feed upon the earth. Trees eat of the soil. They live on matter which has neither organization nor life. We get most of our food from the highest kind of trees and grasses and animals. God transforms dead earths and gases into living plants; and some of these are used as food for animals, which we find to be for us suitable and pleasant food. Human food is the highest used, and it is new every morning. It is a daily gift. If God ceased, even for a short time, to make the grass grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man, a universal famine would set in, and we should all perish of hunger. How numerous must be the mercies of God, seeing they are new every morning! How great is the sum of them! They are in multitude like the stars, which cannot be numbered. Just try to realize for a moment or two the largeness of one mercy for a year, which is new day by day. I mean your meals. You have 365 breakfasts; 365 dinners; 365 teas; making how many meals? Yes, 1095 meals you have in the course of the year, besides such nice treats as biscuits, and fruits, and pleasant drinks. Will you go with me, as you can by the use of your mind, into a large room? We will suppose there are ten tables at which are sitting on each side 55 persons. Look how those tables are supplied. There are bread, toast, tea, coffee, eggs, beef, mutton, vegetables, puddings, apples, pears, oranges, and strawberries. As you look you see by the arrange ment of the different kinds of food, and of dishes, plates, teacups and saucers, that there are spread breakfasts for 365 persons, dinners for 365 persons, and teas for 365 persons. What a splendid display it is! Why, it is a grand banquet we are looking at! We are beginning to feel that we should like to begin to enjoy such a feast. This is a little picture of one of God's gifts to us in the course of the year. Three times a day He supplies our table with new mercies. He gives us every year 1095 meals. What a gracious and mighty Father God is, seeing He provides day by day daily bread for all the boys and girls, and all the men and women in the world. Think a little, my young friends, on these new mercies. You are thankful to those friends of yours who give you Christmas boxes and New Year's gifts; but if you think daily a little on the mercies of God to you, you will be more thankful to Him than you can be to any one else. For God's gifts are uncountable; His gifts are blessings; His blessings are mercies; His mercies are new every morning. J. E. WALSHI. Fancies from the Fields. VIII. THE EARLY BIRD AND WHAT BECAME OF HIM. HERE is one lane in the south of England which you would love well if you knew it. It is not like a northern lane, with a broad ditch, choked by blackberry brambles and backed by hawthorn on one side of it, and with a low wall or close-cut hedge on the other side, allowing passers-by to look down the pastures into the valley. Nor is it like a lane in Devonshire, a deep cutting, shady even in the very hottest days of summer, a great place for lovely ferns, and always with one or two large-eyed, deep-uddered Devon cows looking into it from above. Though the people round about call it a lane, it is really no more than a track going through the wood past the four cottages and up on to the common, where it soon gets lost and never comes out again. It ends at nowhere in particular, unless it is the pond where the geese are. Its two ruts have been worn by gipsies' carts, and the grass and docks half covering it show how few the feet that tread there. If you like quiet places for your walks you should choose this lane. Unless you go there at sunrise or sunset and chance to meet the labourers on their way to and from the fields, you will rarely see anybody in your walk, supposing you do not pass the turn just this side of the cottages. In the wood you will hear no shouting of the labourers' children, no trampling of their busy little feet. They choose to play on the common, where they have the geese at least for company. If they go into the wood it is always all together in a knot. This used to puzzle me very much, for the wood seems a paradise for children. There are hawthorns and wild roses on its skirts, and trees hanging over the brook which at the proper time are quite overhung with honeysuckles. The wild hyacinth makes the ground between some of the trees look like broken fragments of blue sky. The red robin and the ragged robin, the white star, and the scarlet shepherd's warning," grow abundantly along the lane. In one wet ditch flourish great masses of lovely forget-me-nots. In autumn there are red berries, and green berries, and blackberries, and dead leaves. Dead leaves in a town always seem sad. I think they are yellower and more withered there when they fall; they are blown about through dust and mud, and never get into great rustling heaps which we can run through. The things in the wood which I do not like are the nettles, and they grow in great plenty. But to every ill there is a fitting cure at hand, and so with the nettles grows as great a plenty of long leaved docks to use if you should sting yourself, which, after all, there is no need to do. But you should go to the wood yourselves, and see the rabbits, sitting with their ears sticking straight up for a moment, and then bolting so fast that if it were not for the little white tail you could never see them. I often wondered what made the children shun this pleasant wood. I was told it was the snake. Now I forgot to say that there are other disagreeable things besides nettles in the wood, to wit, a few small snakes. Not that these are common, or that you are ever likely to see one, unless you look carefully and in the right places, but still you know that they live there. They are so nearly harmless, however, and so frightened of you, that I could not believe this to be all. At length I got at the truth, and that through an old woman. Many years before, the story ran, a huge snake" as long as the steeple and as thick as a man's body," was believed to have had its den in Bolter's Hole on the further side of the wood. No one had seen it for a long time, even if any one ever had seen it, yet even grown-up people did not care to cross the wood alone in the dark, and so no wonder children kept away in the light. Because the wood was in this way free from robbers of nests (childish, but not the less cruel in their robbing, from not having been taught how cruel it was), many birds made their homes in it. Amongst these, last spring, were papa sparrow and his wife, who had a nest in the top of a wild rose-bush. They had a little family in that nest, or rather four eggs, which would be a family in a few days. Three eggs were like each other, and like all sparrows' eggs, which of course you know by sight, but the fourth was much bigger and quite differently marked. The last, though the sparrows did not know this, was a cuckoo's egg, slipped in by its mother one day while its father provoked both the sparrows to fly after him in a rage and leave the nest unprotected. Papa sparrow led a hard life during the next three days, all day long he was busy flying up and down to find food for himself and his wife, and when he came back with a small worm he did not often get a pleasant greeting. As his wife rested in the nest during most of the day, she was not too tired to lecture him well when he came back at night, although, luckily for him, he was generally too tired to keep awake long, not that he did not deserve lecturing: he was selfish enough for two, and only worked |