In the records of individual experience, as well as in the history of the world, there are certain points of time which are rendered memorable by important events. By referring to a chronological table, the young reader will see the great events which have marked the progress of civilized nations from the lowest depths of barbarism up to their present enlightened state. Every individual, if he had the requisite wisdom, could make up a list of epochs in his own experience. Perhaps he would attach too little importance to some things, too much to others; for we cannot always clearly perceive the influences which assist in forming the character. Some trivial event, far back in the past, which inspired him with a new reverence for truth and goodness, may be forgotten. The memory may not now cherish the look, the smile of approbation, which strengthened the heart, when it was struggling against the foe within; but its influence was none the less potent. "It is the last pound which breaks the camel's back;" and that look, that smile, may have closed the door of the heart against a whole legion of evil spirits, and thus turned a life of woe and bitterness into a life of sunshine and happiness. There are hundreds of epochs in the experience of every person, boy or man--events which raised him up or let him down in the scale of moral existence. Harry West had now reached one of these epochs in his pilgrimage. To meet a little girl in the woods, to kill a black snake, and thus relieve her from a terrible fright, to say the least, was not a great event, as events are reckoned in the world; yet it was destined to exert a powerful influence upon his future career. It was not the magnitude of the deed performed, or the chivalrous spirit which called it forth, that made this a memorable event to Harry; it was the angel visit--the kindling influence of a pure heart that passed from her to him. But I suppose the impatient reader will not thank me for moralizing over two whole pages, and I leave the further application of the moral to the discretion of my young friends. Harry felt strangely--more strangely than he had ever felt before. As he walked back to the cabin everything seemed to have assumed a new appearance. Somehow the trees did not look as they used to look. He saw through a different medium. His being seemed to have undergone a change. He could not account for it; perhaps he did not try. He entered the cabin; and, without dropping the train of thought which Julia's presence suggested, he busied himself in making the place more comfortable. He shook up the straw, and made his bed, stuffed dried grass into the chinks and crannies in the roof, fastened the door up with some birch withes, and replaced some of the stones of the chimney which had fallen down. This work occupied him for nearly two hours, though, so busy were his thoughts, they seemed not more than half an hour.