TAKING POSSESSION. UGE boats, built upon the Indus, were in readiness: and the stream bore them down forty miles within ten hours. Whilst glid VOL. I.-No. 4. ing down it, the Bishop rose upon the deck, and, looking towards the territory of the Punjab, then scarcely known, exclaimed aloud,"I take possession of this land in the name of my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ." It seemed little likely at the time that we should have any inheritance to put our foot on. But this incident is surely very remarkable, when connected with our speedy possession of the whole territory, the favour able prospects of our missions there, and the help and deliverance Christian England drew from thence in her extreme necessity. It seems to shew how faith has power with God, and still prevails. THE LITTLE BLACK FIGURE. A flourishing Temperance Society existed at Kurnaul, patronised and chiefly supported by one excellent officer whose history was singular. Originally gay and worldly, to say no worse, his change of mind, and conversion to God, were very mark ed. He was in company where reckless gambling was going on, and on a very large stake being proposed, one of the players took from his bosom a small hideous black figure, intended to represent the devil. He addressed himself to it; called it his best and only friend; coaxed, pleaded, threatened, and prayed for success, in terms of fearful blasphemy. The captain was horrorstruck. He left the company at once, and that night found him prostrate in tears of penitence before God. Nor did he join the world again till his prayers were heard, his eyes opened, and his soul had found peace. He was now a believer in Christ, and ready to every good word and work. THE BLIND ELEPHANT. Tell my grandchildren that an elephant here had a disease in his eyes. For three days he had been completely blind. His owner, an engineer officer, asked my dear Doctor Webb if he could do anything to relieve the poor animal. The doctor said he would try nitrate of silver, which was a remedy commonly applied to similar diseases in the human eye. The huge animal was ordered to lie down ; and at first, on the application of the remedy, raised a most extraordinary roar at the acute pain which it occasioned. The effect, however, was wonderful. The eye was, in a manner, restored, and the animal could partially see. next day, when he was brought, and heard the doctor's voice, he laid down of himself, placed his enormous head on one side, curled up his trunk, drew in breath just like a man about to endure an operation, gave a sigh of relief when it was over, and then, by trunk and gestures, evidently wished to express his gratitude. What sagacity! What a lesson to us of patience! The his Death in a Lighthouse. not. Punctually, as the sun set, it seemed to leave a fragment of its fire gleaming in the lantern glasses, which burnt there till it rose again, shewing this much at least, that some one was alive at the Smalls; but whether both the men, or which, no anxious mother or loving wife could tell. Four months of this, and then, in calmer BOUT the year 1800, the watch was kept by two keepers; and, for four months, the weather shut them off from all communication with the land. The method of talking by signals was not developed anywhere into the complete system it has now become, and does not appear to have been in use at all among the light-wea her, а Milford boat house people; but, in the brought into the agency at course of a week or two Solva one lightkeeper and after the storm had set in, one dead man. What the it was rumoured at several living man had suffered can of the western ports that never now be known. something was wrong at the Whether, when first he Smalls. Passing vessels re- came distinctly to believe ported that a signal of dis- his comrade would die, he tress was out; but that was stood in blank despair, or all they knew. Many at- whether he implored him on tempts to approach the rock his knees, in an agony of were made, but fruitlessly: selfish terror, to live; the boats could not get near whether, when, perhaps for enough to hail; they could the first time in his life, he only return to make the be- stood face to face, and so wildered agent and the very close, to death, he anxious relatives of the thought of immediate burial, keepers more bewildered or whether he rushed at and more anxious, by the once to the gallery to shout statement that there was out to the nearest sail, peralways what seemed to be haps a mile away; at what the dim figure of a man in exact moment it was that one corner of the outside the thought flashed across gallery; but whether he him that he must not bury spoke or moved, or not, they the body in the sea, lest could not tell. Night after those on shore should quesnight, the light was watched tion him as Cain was quesfor, with great misgiving tioned for his brother, and whether it would ever shew he, failing to produce him, again. But the light failed should be branded with Cain's curse and meet a speedier fate, is unrecorded. What he did was to make a coffin. He had been a Cooper by trade, and, by breaking up a bulk-head in the living-room, he got the dead man covered in; then, with infinite labour, he took him to the gallery and lashed him there. Perhaps, with an instinctive wisdom, he set himself to work, cleaned and re-cleaned his lamps, unpacked and packed his stores. Perhaps he made a point of walking resolutely up to the coffin three or four times a day, perhaps he never went near it, and even managed to look over it rather than at it, when he was scanning the whole horizon for a sail. In his desperation, it may have occurred to him that, as his light was a warning to keep vessels off, so its absence would speedily betray some ship to a dangerous vicinity to his forlornness, whose crew would be companions to him, even though he had caused them to be wrecked. But this he did not do. No lives were risked to alleviate his desolation; but when he came on shore with his dead companion, he was a sad, reserved, emaciated man, so strangely worn, that his associates did not know him. The Lame Cobbler. acquainted with this source of true enjoyment, their lot in life seemed to be one of uncommon misery. Poor, old, and feeble, the mother toiled hard for her daily bread; and a sad accident had made her son a cripple, just when his aid would have been most efficent in her declining years. So far as human wisdom could foresee, things looked dark and dis one of the seaport towns of England, among the lofty buildings that luxury and refinement had reared, there stood a low shed-like dwelling, whose tottering wooden walls sheltered two beings, poor as the estimate of the world goes, but richer far than many of their neighbours; inasmuch as their wealth consisted not in the perish-mal enough: but there was ing things of earth, but in that which gave them a title to treasures incorruptible, and a crown of glory that fadeth not away. To those who were un a sunbeam in that cottage, a life and energy in the crushed and maimed form of the afflicted youth, that seemed to hail in the dim distance a light ahead. |