The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water. A few more moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in the prospect. On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is healthy music of voices. Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that reunited even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds. HELEN CORRIE.—LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A CURATE. Having devoted myself to the service of Him who said unto the demoniac and the leper, “Be whole,” I go forth daily, treading humbly in the pathway of my self-appointed mission, through the dreary regions, the close and crowded streets, that exist like a plague ground in the very heart of the wealthy town of L——. They have an atmosphere of their own, those dilapidated courts, those noisome alleys, those dark nooks where the tenements are green with damp, where the breath grows faint, and the head throbs with an oppressive pain; and yet, amid the horrors of such abodes, hundreds of our fellow-creatures act the sad tragedy of life, and the gay crowd beyond sweep onward, without a thought of those who perish daily for want of the bread of eternal life. Oh! cast it upon those darkened waters, and it shall be found again after many days. There we see human nature in all its unvailed and degraded nakedness—the vile passions, the brutal coarseness, the corroding malice, the undisguised licentiousness. Oh, ye who look on and abhor, who pass like the Pharisee, and condemn the wretch by the wayside, pause, and look within: education, circumstances, have refined and elevated your thoughts and actions; but blessed are those who shall never know by fearful experience how want and degradation can blunt the finest sympathies, and change, nay, brutalize the moral being.