person in the world. Even the open hand with which he dispenses his bounty will not atone for the violence he offers to national vanity. There are other defects, which are visible even in his most favored circumstances. Such is his bigotry, surpassing everything in a quiet passive form, that has been witnessed since the more active bigotry of the times of the Spanish Philips. Such, too, is the exclusive, limited range of his knowledge and conceptions of all political and social topics and relations. The Englishman, the cultivated Englishman, has no standard of excellence borrowed from mankind. His speculation never travels beyond his own little-great little-island. That is the world to him. True, he travels, shoots lions among the Hottentots, chases the grizzly bear over the Rocky Mountains, kills elephants in India and salmon on the coast of Labrador, comes home, and very likely makes a book. But the scope of his ideas does not seem to be enlarged by all this. The body travels, not the mind. And, however he may abuse his own land, he returns home as hearty a John Bull, with all his prejudices and national tastes as rooted, as before. The English the men of fortune-all travel. Yet how little sympathy they show for other people or institutions, and how slight is the interest they take in them! They are islanders, cut off from the great world. But their island is, indeed, a world of its own. With all their faults, never has the sun shone-if one may use the expression in reference to England- -on a more noble race, or one that has done more for the great interests of humanity. NOTES.-Nimrod is spoken of in Genesis (x. 9) as a mighty hunter." Thus the name came to be applied to any one devoted to hunting. Squire Western is a character in Fielding's "Tom Jones." He is represented as an ignorant, prejudiced, irascible, but, withal, a jolly, good-humored English country gentleman. LXXIX. THE SONG OF THE POTTER. TURN, turn, my wheel! Turn round and round, Without a pause, without a sound: So spins the flying world away! This clay, well mixed with marl and sand, For some must follow, and some command, Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change The moon will wax, the moon will wane, Turn, turn, my wheel! All life is brief; What now is leaf will soon decay; The wind blows east, the wind blows west; Will soon have wings and beak and breast, Turn, turn, my wheel! This earthen jar Who wiser is than they. Turn, turn, my wheel! 'Tis nature's plan The man grow wrinkled, old, and gray; Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race, Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun To-morrow the hot furnace flame Will search the heart and try the frame, Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon Too soon to-day be yesterday; Behind us in our path we cast And trodden into clay. -Longfellow. NOTE. Coptic was formerly the language of Egypt, and is preserved in the inscriptions of the ancient monuments found there; it has now given place entirely to Arabic. LXXX. A HOT DAY IN NEW YORK. William Dean Howells, 1837-- was born in Belmont County, Ohio. In boyhood he learned the printer's trade, at which he worked for several years. He published a volume of poems in 1860, in connection with John J. Piatt. From 1861 to 1865 he was United States Consul at Venice. On his return he resided for a time in New York City, and was one of the editors of the "Nation." In 1871 he was appointed editor in chief of the "Atlantic Monthly." He held the position ten years, and then retired in order to devote himself to his own writings. Since then, he has been connected with other literary magazines. Mr. Howells has written several books: novels and sketches: his writings are marked by an artistic finish, and a keen but subtile humor. The following selection is an extract from "Their Wedding Journey." WHEN they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng of trucks and wagons, lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size; there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking faces of its helpless instruments. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of lowhovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man who sat in the shade of a branching, white umbrella, and suffered with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the foot passengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though there were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul, they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there they showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white, flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart-" But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop doors, and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it, but not of it, as they fancied — though there was no reason for this-looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of purpose, they cried with one voice that it was a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the soda fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven degrees!" Behind them, at the door, there poured in a ceaseless stream |