little as you have yet seen of human life, you have already felt, if not in your own persons, at least in the case of others, something of the effect produced by sudden and unexpected calamity, bursting like a thunderclap on the heads of its devoted victims. But a few days have passed away since you were witnesses to such an event in the case of two of your school companions. The morning on which it happened shone upon them cheerful and happy as any among you, unconscious of any impending misfortune, undisturbed by any anticipations to mar their peace. Yet, in a very few hours from that time, they were both plunged into the deepest affliction; both by a single blow reduced perhaps to poverty; both suddenly called by the most awful death of a parent of one of them, to return to a wretched family bereft of its chief support, and crushed to the earth in all the helplessness of irremediable wo. Alas! my young friends, how few of you ever think of drawing from such occurrences the many salutary lessons they are so well calculated to impart! How many turn away from them as matters to be banished as speedily as possible from your remembrance; as events never likely to happen to yourselves! Yet every hour that we live--every moment that we breathe--not one among us, no not one single individual, can truly say, "_I_ am free--_I_ am exempt both from present and contingent calamity." Far, very far am I indeed, from wishing you to be so constantly absorbed in gloomy anticipations, as to prevent you in the slightest degree from enjoying every innocent gratification suitable to your respective ages and situations in life. But I would have you all to know and to feel in your inmost heart, that "sweet are the uses of adversity," and that none should think themselves fit to live until they feel prepared to die the death of the righteous before God and man. Hard as this requisition may seem, thousands upon thousands, and of your age too, have complied with it to the very letter. Thousands have furnished angelic examples, even to the aged and hoary headed, that the fresh, the blooming, the joyous period of youth may be dedicated to God, as well as that worn out remnant of life when all power of earthly enjoyment is supposed to be dead within us, and nothing remains to be offered to heaven but exhausted faculties and fast decaying intellects. Has not our blessed Saviour himself declared, when speaking of children, that "of such is the kingdom of heaven;" and in illustration of this truth, are not all the images of cherubim and seraphim presented to our senses, always represented with juvenile countenances, glowing with all the innocence and loveliness of youth? Shall the youth then of the present day--the youth of our own country--but especially the female portion of them, ever adopt the fatal delusion that _theirs_ is an age too immature for the acquisition and exercise of the highest moral and religious attainments. Shall