steel sharp, pebbles bright, and fitteth
instruments for their appointed tasks. A
grindstone is a useful thing. Some call
it adversity, others the world, and others,
more wisely, action and work. Be that as
it may, he who has been longest held down
to that circular stone is sure to rise up the
best featured man of his day. Would Dante
have ever struck so bold and true a chord—
would Camoens have spoken such sweet, sad,
noble words, unless they had learnt by heart
the worth of work and suffering? So with
us all. The grindstone of work and sorrow
is our noblest stepping-stone to heaven.

My first domestic trial had yet to come.
It was caused by baby-brother. When were
brothers of any good? From the days of
Jacob downwards they have brought little
else except confusion and desolation to a
household; as now one brought to me.
Invested with a jacket, the next step was
school; the one is the corollary of the other:
but so long as I had remained youngest I
should have known neither. Therefore I say
again, the cause of all my after woes was that
helpless bundle of white, known as baby-
brother, who first made my mother understand
that Master Jackey was too old for
petticoats and home. A jacket induces
school; and coticula is a grindstone.

Little did I sleep on my initial night in a
school-bed; and glad was I when getting-up
bell rang, and I was bolstered out of bed.
Marvellously small basins and water doled
out like hippocrene, fragmentary squares of
diaper with rich fringes round central
hiatuses, and odds and ends of a hard white
saponaceous preparation were the whole
accessories of the toilet of some thirty boys.
With a heavy heart and swollen eyes I
sullenly performed the various duties of the
time and place, till I came to the jacket. For
a moment the brass buttons were again golden
amulets; for a moment bright-haired visions
and cherubic anticipations floated round each
stitch and seam; for a moment only: when
a sharp blow from a bilious usher roused me
to my senses, and I found that this coticula
was in very truth a grindstone and a
whetstone, which, by means of schooldom, was to
sharpen and to brighten. Extend the
application, and it is not only boys who wear
jackets and go to school.

Coticula has a third meaning: touchstone,
a thing to try gold. Blue cloth, then, is
moral aqua fortis, testing the value of moral
gold by the strange life, self-dependence,
loneliness, and the strife of will against
circumstance, which are its elements and
conditions. In a school—that miniature world
of men—that small kingdom of wrong and
tyranny, and hopes, and joys—we find out
the properties of the human gold before ever
society has set her hall mark on the link;
we test its purity, weight, ductility, and
fusibility, for what vessel it is best suited,
and of what size might be the mould: we
know all that can be known, and the future
only indorses the judgment of the present.
School is the crucible, the boy is the gold,
the coticula is the test, and man is the result.
The weaver and the tailor are thus the veritable
rulers of man's destiny, the scales
wherein lie the destinies of a generation.
Take the school hero, the golden boy of his
time, and keep him at home. Let his energy
expend itself in mischief, his strategic genius
in the capture of birds' nests, his naval
ambition in floating the best old china punch-
bowl on the duck-pond, his patriotic zeal in
the extirpation of stray poultry, and the
stoning of strange dogs, and his diplomatic
genius be evidenced in smothering his young
soul between two featherbeds of lies, to
conceal his misdoings; let him, in fine, be in
moral frocks and trousers, and the gold
tarnishes, its essence evaporates, and at last it
is transmuted into the basest of brass. But
place him under the hands of a tailor, indue
him with a coatee, then thrust him into the
crucible of school, and you will soon bring
out the hidden wealth and eliminate the
worthlessness of the superficial alloy.

On the other hand, a boy who, at home,
shines in all the lustre of the purest gold,
standing like an obelisk of old Egypt, for all
men to see and admire, comes to school
expecting to be gold there too. He is touched
with the coticula, and found to be but worthless
copper badly gilded over. I once knew
two boys who came to my school under these
conditions. The one arrived with all the
prestige of an honourable name, a fine gilt
shining boy, gold-done to the hand, patent to
all the world: the other brought his own
rope in his pocket, and was ticketed base
Corinthian metal. The coticula was applied
—that unerring test of school criticism; and
the home gilding turned black under the
touch, but pure gold was found underlying
the dishonoured brass. The whole world is
full of these metallurgic revelations, and
history itself is nothing but a series of
experiments by means of the coticula of life.

CHIP.
THE GOLIATH AMONG BRIDGES.

WE know something of the Leviathan
among ships; let us know something also of
the Goliath among bridges.

A bridge of unequalled size is now being
built over the Saint Lawrence, half a mile
west of Montreal, and a short distance
below the Lachine Rapids. Its engineers
are Mr. Robert Stephenson, to whom
photographic reports are sent of the progress
of the works, and Mr. A. M. Ross, engineer
in chief of the Grand Trunk Railway, to which
railway it belongs. The object of the bridge
is to complete the Canadian system of
railways, of which otherwise the line of
communication would be severed by the Saint