for a considerable time. But, oh! unhappily
for me, &c."

She also informed Mr. Told that she had a knife
secreted about her when in the Poultry Compter,
and had studied how best to kill herself.
She died, however, Mr. Told assures us,
sincerely devout and penitent. He accompanied
her to the gallows, where she was received by
cheers and storms of curses, especially from
the women, who filled the carts that were
drawn up all down the Old Bailey. The cruel
mob threw stones and dirt, and kept shouting:

"Pull her hat off, that we may see her face."

Told, one of the patriarchs of early Methodism,
after a life of incessant usefulness, died in
December, 1779, aged sixty-eight.

THE IDEAL.

A TALL, majestic lady,
    With locks of deepest dye,
A silken dress, whose gorgeousness
    Delights no other eye,
A pretty little cottage,
    With ivy cover'd o'er,
And she, my pride, my fancy's bride,
    Expectant at the door.

Soft music in the gloaming
    Ebbs gurgling from her throat;
While I lie still, and drink my fill
    Of each love-burdened note.
Days spent in sweet communion
    'Neath shade of leafy trees;
We woo and sing, and ev'rything
    Is poetry and ease.

A tiny fairy being
    Lies nestling on my breast,
As, tired of play, she seems to say,
    "This is my rightful rest;"
And in those baby features,
    So beautiful and mild,
Methinks I trace another face,
    The mother of my child.

THE REAL.

A slight but comely lady,
    With rippling chesnut hair,
A cotton dress, in which, no less,
    She looks extremely fair;
A busy bustling beauty,
    On household duties bent,
Who speaks, the while, with happy smile,
    Of kindness and content.

A little house in London;
    No ivy and no flowers,
But what care we for botany?
    That little house is ours.
And often in the evening,
    When we hear some well-known cry,
Or tramp of feet along the street,
    We smile, my wife and I.

No little fairy daughter
    Nestling confidingly;
Four healthy boys, whose ceaseless noise
    Brings childhood back to me.
Yet these prosaic blessings,
    Of which I have my share,
In peace and love, soar far above
    My castle in the air.

DRY STICKS.

PLOUGHING sea-sand and watering dry sticks
count for much the same things in human work,
and come to about the same results. And yet,
unsatisfactory occupations as they are, they are
indulged in by many beside those amiable
enthusiasts—politicians and others—who
systematically spend their strength in trying to make
dead bodies live, and brute matter into sprightly
organisms. They are indulged in by men of
business sometimes; by parents and guardians and
teachers often; by the dispensers of public
patronage, when there are back-stairs, trodden
by dainty feet or powerful ones, leading to their
warrant-room; by physicians and prison
disciplinarians—these last two with lamentable
waste of force and zeal; by statesmen, clergymen,
and writers; by all manipulators of human
life, indeed, when they press an idea in excess
of material, and decide that Will shall command
Power. Which last clause contains the whole
principle and mystery of watering dry sticks
and ploughing sea-sand.

Take the men who endeavour to resuscitate
a defunct business, as an example. It may be a
brewery noted for a disastrous intimacy with
cocculus and strychnine; a journal in the agonies
of death by atrophy; an agency with clients
once plentiful enough in English houses, but
now only located in Spanish castles; a shop
which customers obstinately shun because of
former ill-repute, or because of the diversion of
trade and traffic. Capital and energy may be
poured out like water on the concern—enough
to have established half a dozen new creations;
but the present plant is only a dry stick, and
not baptism in Jordan itself could bring it to
life again. For all things human seem to have
a certain period of vitality—some longer, some
shorter, according to original constitution, but
all mortal alike. Trades, like men and women,
and societies, like nations, like families, like
individuals, are not to be revived when once fairly
moribund. And the great test of practical
insight is, when a man knows the difference
between the two states of syncope and death;
and what is only suspended animation which
may be set going again by timely stimulants,
and what is absolute decease, which is done
with now and for ever. This, too, will come
in the world of the future, when all human
powers shall be under laws.

What dry sticks are watered by home love
and care!—what sacrificial laying bare of living
roots goes on in families for the better earthing-up
of bits of dead wood, fit only to be thrown
down and cast into the fire!—or, worse still, for
misplaced growths, parasites, or pea-sticks, say,
which develop an unhealthy vitality, and suck
the nourishment from what they were intended