'Ignorance,' says Ajax, 'is a painless evil;' so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

A proud woman who has learned to submit, carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as 'unbecoming.'

With the poisoned garment upon him, the victim writhes under the torture-he has no thought of the coming death.

There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a brightwinged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.

It is a wonderful moment, the first time we stand by one who has fainted, and witness the fresh birth of consciousness spreading itself over the blank features, like the rising sunlight on the alpine summits that lay ghastly and dead under the leaden twilight. A slight shudder, and the frost-bound eyes recover their liquid light; for an instant they show the inward semi-consciousness of an infant's; then, with a little start, they open wider and begin to look; the present is visible,

but only as a strange writing, and the interpreter Memory is not yet there.

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We have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves, we should not judge each other harshly.-Mr. Gilfil

Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are. And God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, because we only hear and see separate words and actions. We don't see each other's whole nature.-Mr. Gilfil

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Wrong makes wrong. When people use us ill, we can hardly help having ill feeling towards them. But that second wrong is more excusable.-Mr. Gilfil..

We can hardly learn humility and tenderness enough except by suffering.--Mr. Gilfil

Th' yoong men noo-a-deys, the 're poor squashy things—the' looke well anoof, but the' woon't wear, the' woon't wear.-' Mester' Ford.

END OF MR. GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY.'

JANET'S REPENTANCE.

George Eliot (in propria persona).

THE golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Always there is seed being sown silently and unseen, and everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or labour. We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.

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There is a power in the direct glance of a sincere and loving human soul, which will do more to dissipate prejudice and kindle charity than the most elaborate arguments.

The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.

There is an unspeakable blending of sadness and sweetness in the smile of a face sharpened and paled by slow consumption.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.

There are moments when by some strange impulse we contradict our past selves-fatal moments, when a fit of passion, like a lava stream, lays low the work of half our lives.

The seeds of things are very small: the hours that lie between sunrise and the gloom. of midnight are travelled through by tiniest markings of the clock.

Our habitual life is like a wall hung with pictures, which has been shone on by the suns of many years : take one of the pictures away, and it leaves a definite

blank space, to which our eyes can never turn without a sensation of discomfort. Nay, the involuntary loss of any familiar object almost always brings a chill as from an evil omen; it seems to be the first fingershadow of advancing death.

In those distant days, as in all other times and places where the mental atmosphere is changing, and men are inhaling the stimulus of new ideas, folly often mistook itself for wisdom, ignorance gave itself airs of knowledge, and selfishness, turning its eyes upward, called itself religion.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them wofully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution: a self-obtrusive, overhasty reformer complacently disclaiming all merit, while his friends call him a martyr, has not in reality a career the most arduous to the fleshly mind.

The strong emotions from which the life of a human being receives a new bias, win their victory as the sea wins his : though their advance may be sure, they will often, after a mightier wave than usual, seem to roll back so far as to lose all the ground they had made.

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