Of course I have no business to write all this. It is the province of the preachers to talk of these things, and many no doubt will resent as impertinent even the suggestion of a worldling. And yet it seems so sure to me that in the swift and silent marshaling of the hosts of unbelief and irreligion there is presaged the supremest test that the faith of Christians has ever undergone, that I felt impelled to write. There are men, outside of the active workers of the church, who have all reverence for its institutions and love for its leaders; whose hearts are stirred now and then by a faith caught at a mother’s knee, or the memory of some rapt and happy moment; who want to live, if not in the fold of the chosen, at least in the shadow of the Christian sentiment, and among the people dominated by Christian faith; and who hope to die at last, in the same trust and peace that moved the dying Shakespeare—wisest, sweetest mind ever clothed in mortal flesh—when he said: “I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ON THE OCEAN WAVE. ------- AN AMATEUR’S EXPERIENCE ON A STEAMSHIP. ------- A VERY TALL STORY.—THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS.—A SIDE VIEW OF SEA-SICKNESS.—THE SIGHT OF THE OCEAN.—LAND AT LAST AND GLAD OF IT. ------- [SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE COURIER.] PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 20, 1876.—The ocean is a greatly exaggerated affair. About four years ago, my friend Charles I. Graves and myself were sitting on a country fence, in Floyd County, after the manner of lizards, drinking in the sunshine, when a wagon containing a small box wheeled past us. It had hardly got abreast us when my friend dropped from his comfortable perch as if he were shot, and rushed to the wagon. Then ensued a remarkable scene. You have all seen a well-bred country dog meet a city dog on some green highway. You know with what hurried circumspection he smells the stranger at all points. So did my friend approach the little square box on the wagon. He sniffed at it as if “he would draw his soul through his nose.” I examined the ugly little box closely. It was marked TO MR. BERCKMANS, MONT ALTO, NEAR ROME, GA., U.S.A. It was Rhenish wine shipped from Paris.