THE HIVE.

ARREST OF DECAY.-You remember reading how upon a day not many years since, certain miners, working far underground, came upon the body of a poor fellow who had perished in the suffocating pit forty years before. Some chymical agent to which the body had been subjected-an agent prepared in the laboratory of nature-had effectually arrested the progress of decay. They brought it up to the surface, and for awhile, till it crumbled away through exposure to the atmosphere, it lay there, the image of a fine sturdy young man. No convulsion had passed over the face in death-the features were tranquil; the hair was black as jet. No one recognised the face, a generation had grown up since the day on which the miner went down his shaft for the last time. But a tottering old woman, who had hurried from her cottage at hearing the news, came up, and she knew again the face which through all these years she had never quite forgot. The poor miner was to have been her husband the day after that on which he died. They were rough people, of course, who where looking on; a liberal education and refined feelings are not deemed essential to the man whose work is to get up coals, or even tin; but there were no dry eyes there when the grey-headed old pilgrim cast herself upon the youthful corpse, and poured out to its deaf ear many words of endearment unused for forty years. It was a touching contrast-the one so old, the other so young. They had both been young those long years ago; but time had gone on with the living and stood still with the dead.

LEAP YEAR.-You can always know whether it is leap-year or not, by dividing the date of the year by four. If there is no remainder, it is leapyear. If there be a remainder, it shows how many years have elapsed since the last leap-year.

WHOSO is well instructed derives incomparably more from the same reading than is possible to one who is less prepared by mental culture, and this as well by a greater facility and clearness of apprehension as by the collations of memory and thought which connect themselves with whatever is read.

A FARCE was produced in Bannister's time, under the title of Fire and Water." "I predict its fate," said he. "What fate?" whispered the anxious author at his side. "What fate?" said Bannister; "why, what can fire and water produce but a hiss ?"

MUTUAL FORBEARANCE.-The venerable Philip
Henry understood this well, and when his son
Matthew, the commentator, was married, he sent
these lines to the wedded pair:-

"Love one another, pray oft together, and see
You never both together angry be;
If one speak fire, t'other with water come;
Is one provoked? be t'other soft and dumb,"

A JOKE UPON MRS. HOOD.-At breakfast he offered to give my mother a few hints on buying fish, adducing his own superior experience of the sea as a reason for informing her ignorance as a young housekeeper. "Above all things, Jane,"

said he, as they will endeavour to impose upon your inexperience, let nothing induce you to buy a plaice that has any appearance of red or orange spots, as they are the sure sign of an advanced stage of decomposition." My mother promised faithful compliance, in the innocence of her heart, and accordingly, when the fishwoman came to the door, she descended to show off her newlyacquired information. As it happened the woman had little but plaice, and these she turned over and over, praising their size and freshness. But the obnoxious red spots on every one of them still greeted my mother's dissatisfied eyes. On her hinting a doubt of their freshness, she was met by the assertion that they were not long out of the water, having been caught that morning. This shook my mother's doubts for a moment, but remembering my father's portrayal of the Brighton fishwoman's iniquitous falsehoods, she gravely shook her head, and mildly observed, in all the pride of conscious knowledge, "My good woman, it may be as you say, but I could not think of buying any plaice with those very unpleasant red spots." The woman's answer was a perfect shout "Lord bless your eyes, mum! who ever seen any without 'em ?" A suppressed giggle on the stairs revealed the perpetrator of the joke, and my father rushed off in a perfect ecstacy of laughter, leaving my poor, discomfited mother to appease the angry sea nymph as she could.-Hood's Memorials.

HUMILITY.-Humility is a virtue strongly recommended by all, though practised by a very few, and yet it is a subject to which everybody lends a willing ear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servants, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity; but certain it is that nothing makes us so acceptable in the sight of the Deity and man, as to rise high by our own exertions, and yet sink low in virtuous humility.

LIFE'S HAPPIEST PERIOD,-Kingsley gives his evidence on this disputed point. He thus declares:-" There is no pleasure that I have ever experienced like a child's Midsummer holiday: the time, I mean, when two or three of us used to go away up the brook, and take our dinners with us, and come home at night tired, dirty, happy, scratched beyond recognition, with a great nosegay, three little trout, and one shoe, the other having been used for a boat, till it had gone down with all hands out of soundings. How poor our Derby-days, our Greenwich dinners, our evening parties, where there are plenty of nice girls, after that! Depend upon it, a man never experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen as he does before, unless in some cases in his first lovemaking, when the sensation is new to him."

A PARLIAMENTARY return just issued, shows that, within a circle of twenty miles radius, the General Post-office being the centre, there are 234 companies of enrolled volunteer riflemen, with a maximum strength of 23,665, the minimum strength of 14,170, and a mean strength of 18,918. The approximate numerical strength of the volunteer artillerymen in the counties of Kent, Devon, and Hants, amounts to 33 companies, with the mean strength of 2,235. Of rifles in the same counties, the companies are 113, and the mean strength 9,698.

FAMILY COUNCIL.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE COUNCIL.Your definitions of the month continue satisfactory; in many cases we are pleased to mark advance.

The letters are fewer this month, as many of our friends are absent, tripping over the weedy rocks, and searching for matters "rich and strange," on sandy shores, and we are glad, as true friends should be, that our loss is their gain. The pile of letters before us ought to be more welcome, as coming from the faithful few. They are quite up to the average in merit. "Snow" is lively and earnest, but hardly pointed enough, and her letter has narrowly escaped insertion. Illa writes with truth and vigour, but she does not go far enough into the subject-breaks off before completing her good work. Rosa F., Nina Gordon, and Captain J. R., have sent good letters. W. Y. Somerville, thoughtful and carefully composed, but too discursive. Annie Linton's letter is of fair merit, and contains some very sensible reflections.

Our Council should look straight at the subject proposed, and the leading idea of their compositions should be confined to that subject, however various may be the modes of working it out.

MY DEAR EMILY,

least, by silence, you can show your disapproba-
tion of the subject. Really, on leaving those
assemblies, one feels very inclined to say, with
Shakspeare, "Ladies, I leave my character with
you." And I trust that my dear Emily will look
at it in the highest sense, as a want of the law of
love, "the charity that thinketh no evil of their
neighbour;" and, by realizing the entire feebleness
of human nature (of itself) to keep from this
sin, may be led continually to raise the prayer,
"Lord, keep my lips from speaking guile;" and
to remember that we must " do unto others as
we would that they should do unto us." With
the hope that my letter may not prove useless to
my dear niece,
I must sign myself,

MY DEAR BERTHA,

MARGUERITE.

My last letter to you was very brief and hurried, in consequence, as I told you, of my just going off to my Aunt Harcourt's, to spend the evening with some friends whom she had invited. I promised to atone for the shortness of my epistle, by giving you in my next some agreeable reminiscences of that evening; but this I must confess would be a difficulty, solely from the cause that I have very little of an agreeable nature to relate; for upon the whole the time passed away in as intolerably dull and insupportably tedious a manner as it is possible to imagine. You will not be surprised at this, when (who I had never before seen, nor greatly desire I tell you that among the company were some to see again) who monopolized the whole talk, and that on subjects so exclusively personal, that

I assure you

"Twas the most asinine employ on earth
To hear them tell of parentage and birth,
And echo conversations dull and dry,

Embellished with "He said," and "So said I." But it is not my intention to recapitulate this "table talk," for by so doing I should be committing the same faults which I condemn in others, and render my letter as dry and uninteresting to you as their conversation was to me.

From the whole tenor of your last letter, I gather that you have been dangerously wounded by that sneaking scoundrel Gossip, and feel ready to exclaim, "He who steals my purse steals trash," &c. It will not be amiss, therefore, for me to show you how easily one joins in such a pastime (perhaps unwittingly), and point" out some of its evils. Doubtless you will feel amazed, and deny that you ever did such a thing. But wait awhile: you are seated in the midst of some friends round the fire; a few disparaging remarks pass on some mutual, but absent friend; you add surmises, thoughts, &c.; it passes; other subjects are introduced, and you forget about it till long after, when, on hearing it in an exaggerated form, you fail to recognise your own handiwork, now grown to a disgraceful report; and the cause,-merely the surmises of a young lady, communicated in perfect confidence. Every one has suffered during their lives from this deadly enemy. I say "deadly" advisedly; for the strong spirit lives it down, and it leaves to him only a bitterness of heart; but to the sensitive it is, alas! the cause of such misery that death seems their only release; and could we lift the curtain of mystery surrounding the suicide, how many we would find had sought refuge from THIS fiery blast of the Great Tempter, bringing, as it does, dishonour to the merchant, broken hearts, madness, and other agonies too many to mention. But my letter would be useless did it not show how to avoid the sunken rocks, and to stem the tide of wickedness; and to do this, preaching continually on the subject is of no avail, but by storing your mind with valuable information, so that when you observe a tendency to this propensity, you may try and guide the conversation into more useful channels, or, at

Hannah More has well said that "there are few occasions in which we are more called upon to watch ourselves narrowly, and to resist tempta tion, than in conversation;" and nowhere is this remark more applicable than to our social meetings, where so much of the profit and pleasure experienced from these gatherings depends on the mutual converse of those who compose them. An entertainment which promised a considerable amount of social enjoyment, may prove dull, insipid, and unprofitable, and the anticipated pleasure of hosts and guests be completely marred by the obtrusiveness of one among them, who, oblivious of the courtesy and attention due to the rest, will intrude upon them, whether they will hear or forbear, a mass of personal informationsubjects intimately connected with his own private affairs, such as business, or family matterstopics, no doubt, deeply interesting to himself, but of no value whatever to those he is addressing. But what is perhaps worse, and productive of greater mischief, is, when the discourse consists