to him less ten percent. The settler may also
lease for five years (within the limit of three
hundred and twenty acres) land adjoining that
he has bought, paying a rent of sixpence an
acre on condition of fencing within eighteen
months, and with the prior right of purchase
while the lease lasts. The act also awards
premiums for cotton growing, namely, a ten
pound land order for every three hundred pounds
weight in bale, of good cleaned Sea Island Cotton,
during three years from the date of the
act's passing, and a land order of five pounds
per bale for the following two years.

There is also a liberal government scheme for
the favouring of immigration, which gives to
every adult male or female immigrant, coming
direct, from Europe (whether Englishman,
Frenchman or German) to the colony, upon his
arrival for the first time, and not at government
expense, a land order for eighteen pounds, and
after two years' residence a further land order
for twelve pounds. But. the immigrant, if a man,
must be under forty, if a woman, under five-and-
thirty, unless bringing five children or more, or
coming out as the relation of a colonist. Two
children of one family, between the ages of four
and fourteen, receive on arrival one land order
between them. Thus, an immigrant who has
arrived in Queensland with a wife and four children,
having paid passage out, will immediately
receive land orders to the value of
seventy-two pounds, and in two years will be
entitled to order for another forty-eight pounds'
worth of land, representing altogether a farm
of one hundred and twenty acres. He may buy
with the land orders whatever ground he may
choose for himself from the agricultural reserves,
or tender them as cash at any of the government
land sales, for any other class of lots he
may prefer.

One honourable bit of Queensland history
we must not pass unmentioned, and that also is
a matter of no trifling moment to the settler.
The first parliament of Queensland voted out
of its slender resources ten thousand pounds
for the establishment of primary and grammar
schools. A telegraphic line also is being set
up for the connection of the capital of Queensland
with the capitals of all other Australian
colonies.

AWAKENING DISCOURSES.

How to prevent people from going to sleep in
church was one of the problems of the middle
ages, and it was solved in part by the use of
anecdotes and tales for the enlivenment of
sermons. A collection of such tales was made in
the fourteenth century, under the title "Gesta
Romanorum"—  Deeds of the Romans. It is
hard to say whether Pierre Bercheur of Poitou,
or anybody else in any other country, made the
first collection. Differing more or less in
different copies and in different countries, there
was that old collection, everywhere substantially
alike, everywhere popular. It was simply a
compilation of good stories, or stories considered
to be good, under such titles as the
compiler gives to the successive sections of a hymn
book for aid in selection: Of following Reason—
of Good Inspiration— of Love— of too much
Pride— of Sinners, and so forth; each story
usually beginning with the name of some
Roman emperor who had nothing to do with it,
perhaps of an emperor unknown to any of the
histories, and closing with a moral application.
This, like the rest, was written for delivery. It
interpreted the characters and incidents into a
religious lesson, and, as the tales come down to
us, it still opens always with the priestly
address, "My beloved."

Thus: An avaricious carpenter stored away
money in a hollow tree trunk, which he always
kept by his fireside. But the sea one night
flooded him and swept his trunk away to a
city where a generous man lived, keeping open
house. Ho finding the trunk, took it home, as
wood that might be useful; and one cold day,
when he was entertaining pilgrims, he began to
chop it up for the fire, when out rolled the gold
pieces. Being an honest man, he put them by
in a safe place till he should find their owner.
Meanwhile, the carpenter travelled from place
to place in search of his hoard, and at last came
to the generous man's house, and the generous
man, understanding that the money had been his
guest's, proposed to find out whether it was
meant that he should restore it. Then the
generous man made three cakes. The first he
filled with earth, the second with dead men's
bones, the third with gold out of the trunk.
And he said to the carpenter, " Friend, we will
divide these cakes, choose which you will
have." The carpenter weighed them. Finding
the one with earth in it heaviest he chose that;
"and if I want more, worthy host," he added,
"I will have this," laying his hand on the cake
full of bones. The host then saw clearly that
to that wretched man the gold was not to be
restored. Opening, therefore, the cake of gold,
he said to the carpenter, "You varlet! Here is
your own gold. But, as you preferred earth and
dead men's bones, I know that you are not
worthy to have it back again." So the generous
man immediately gave all the carpenter's money
to the poor, and drove the carpenter himself away
in great affliction.

This experiment would not occur to a detective
officer in the present day on anybody's claiming
restoration of lost property. But the bearings of
it, lie in the application: "My beloved, the
carpenter is my worldly-minded man; the trunk of
the tree denotes the human heart, tilled with the
riches of this life; the host is a wise confessor;
the cake of earth is the world, that of the bones
of dead men is the flesh, and that of gold is the
kingdom of heaven."

It would not be too much to say that the moral
here is a little obscure and confused. In many
others of the set it is as violently come by. But
for the stories, not for the interpretations of them,
the book of Deeds of the Romans was most popular.
They were a gathering of the good things of
the middle ages, or of that sort of good thing.