warmth of which the feelings of the town child, dissipated amidst scores of friends and admirers, affords no measure whatever. The admiration amounting to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to some older woman who represents to her all of grace and goodness she has yet dreamed, and who descends every now and then from some far-off Elysium to be a guest in her home, is one of the least read and yet surely one of the prettiest chapters of innocent human sentiment. As to the graver and more durable affections nourished in the old home,—the fond attachment of brothers and sisters, the reverence for the father, the love, purest and deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child and child for mother,—there can be little doubt that their growth in the calm, sweet country life must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can well be elsewhere. And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful and solitary youth soon enters the deeper waters of the moral and spiritual life, and breathes religious aspirations which have in them, in those early years, the freshness and the holiness of the morning. Happy and good must, indeed, be that later life from the heights of which any man or woman can dare to look back on one of these lonely childhoods without a covering of the face. Talk of hermitages or monasteries! The real nursery of religion is one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy, beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other; and where the spectacle of Nature’s loveliness is forever suggesting the thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all the ground his love-tokens of flowers. The happy child dwelling in such a home, with a father and mother who speak to it sometimes of God and the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude into that Holy of Holies, a young soul’s love and penitence and resolution, is the place on earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame of religion. Of the cruelty and wickedness and meanness of the world the child hears only as of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who may roam or crawl in African deserts. They are too far off to force themselves on the attention as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved on pain of moral death. Even sickness, poverty, and death appear oftenest as occasions for the kindly and helpful sympathy of parents and guides.