given to drink, is, on the whole, a vast improvement upon the uneducated horse doctor of former times. A really good vet is a tower of strength to the horse owner, and something little less than a guardian angel to the ordinary purchaser who buys a horse of a dealer, and employs the vet to examine him for soundness. Occasionally, the modern vet is a little too much of a fine gentleman; but in his best estate he has a peculiar, an indefinable stamp of his own. Perhaps

it might be described as a professional air tempered slightly by rakishness. The ideal vet has the grave look of a physician, and yet in the cut of his hat, in the color of his necktie, in the shape of his coat, or in some other trifle there will be a picturesque suggestion of horsiness, which, upon careful examination, will be apparent also in the expression of his face. The same distinct and pleasant air, semi-medical and semi-sporting, is found, too, in the equipage of the vet. And what a good horse he drives! Commonly, he affects a cob; not one of your coarsebred, fat, chunky cobs, such as figure in magnificent harness at horse shows, but a well-bred cob, with thin, flat legs as

hard as iron, a cob that is broad between the eyes, and has delicately cut ears which flash forward and backward, indicating a lively but docile disposition. Vets, to their credit be it said, become fond of their horses, and seldom change them. I never knew one to drive a stupid animal; and some of the best, and perhaps I may add truest horse stories that I have ever told related to nags that were in this line of business.

I fancy that the profession of a vet tends to become hereditary; I know several families, at least, in which that is the case. And certainly, in these days of overcrowded professions and trades, a man might do worse than to bring up his son to this calling. To begin with, the vet always has his office in a stable, - a fact very captivating to a well-regulated, boyish imagination, and not without its charm even for certain persons of mature years. His occupation is a manly, wholesome, outdoor one; he is subjected to no extraordinary temptations, and he has many opportunities to relieve the suffering of dumb and innocent animals. Of all professional horsemen, the vet deserves best both of men and horses. Henry Childs Merwin.

WHEN I first saw the little oblong pewter disks used in the Presbyterian Church a century ago, in the preliminary arrangements for the celebration of the Lord's Supper, and called Presbyterian checks or tokens, I fancied them a most curious and extraordinary religious emblem employed only in the Presbyterian church in Pelham, Mass., in olden days; but since the publication of my book The Sabbath in Puritan New England, in which I speak of these Pelham tokens, I have received many letters asking questions about the tokens, and giving me

much information and some curious specimens. I find, to my surprise, that the use of communion tokens is as widespread as the Christian Church, though perhaps at the present day the more special custom of different and usually of remotely settled branches of the Presbyterian denomination. It is a custom fast becoming extinct, and indeed is wholly unfamiliar, and even unknown, to many Presbyterians to-day; but its memory should be kept green out of honor to the pious Presbyterians of the past, and as one of our few curious church customs.

An explanation of the use of communion tokens in the Pelham Presbyterian Church will indicate the manner of their employment elsewhere. It was thus told to me. At the close of each Sabbath service throughout the month, the deacons walked up and down the aisle of the meeting-house and doled out these pewter tokens, until each worthy and godlywalking church member had received one. Upon the communion Sabbath (the holy rite being held but once in two or three months, usually quarterly) the recipient must present this token as his voucher or check, or literally his ticket of admission, ere he could partake of the communion, either at his own or a neighboring church of the same denomination. Without this check he was temporarily unhouseled.

The Pelham checks which I was shown were rude disks of pewter, about an inch and a half long, stamped with the initials P. P., standing for Pelham Presbyterian. These tokens had been made and used during the pastorate of that remarkable rogue "Rev." Stephen Burroughs, who, like several of his parishioners, proved such a successful counterfeiter of the coin of the commonwealth at the close of the eighteenth century. I could but think, as I looked at the simple little stamped slips, so easily manufactured, so readily counterfeited, that many a spurious communion check could have been passed in, unsuspected and undetected, to the deacons and elders of neighboring churches by the clever coinmakers in the Pelham congregation; and a very comic picture arose in my fancy, of the pious deacons confidingly dealing out these simple little tokens to the bland and rascally counterfeiters in the pews.

This Pelham church was an offshoot of the Scotch-Irish Church of Londonderry, N. H., a mother church, in which all the Scotch Presbyterians for miles around convened twice a year to partake of the Lord's Supper. To this

communion the Pelham parish folk went at least once a year. Preparatory solemn services, days of fasting, were held in Londonderry on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday preceding the communion Sabbath, and unleavened bread was baked for the use of the communicants. Men working afield on these days were prosecuted and fined for "ungodly carriage," as they would have been for working on Sunday in any Puritan community. On the communion Sabbath long tables spread with snowy cloths were placed in the aisles of the church, and the seats at these tables were filled and refilled with communicants, each presenting in turn his token. Aged and honored members of the community filled the first table. Often the services occupied the entire day, and must have been most impressive to see, as well as most exhausting to the ministers. This solemn Sabbath gathering of good Presbyterians was followed on Monday by a universal exchange of visits and neighborly intercourse, and much jollity and mirth; a day of thanksgiving, in which our everpresent and ever-welcome old friend, New England rum, played no small or unimportant part.

The Presbyterian churches in Scotland universally used the token long before any church members came to America, and it is a curious fact that Scotch tokens, especially made for Scotch congregations, are to be found in America, some dating as far back as the year 1661. Many of these Scotch tokens bear the rude figure of a chalice; others have the initials of the name of the church or the pastor. They were doubtless used as a letter from church to church. These religious gatherings in Scotland were, in one sense, a much-prized recreation, a meeting-place for friends. Frivolous and soul-careless English servants, in binding out for a term of years, stipulated to be allowed to attend a certain. number of wakes or fairs yearly; but canny Scotch ploughmen and milkmaids

piously bargained to go to the sacrament. Occasionally, an ungodly backslider risked his soul by compromising for two fairs in the place of the sacrament, but very rarely; the church gatherings were too attractive. In Scot land the tokens were called "tickets." Elders stood at the doors and "tried," as they termed it, the tokens or tickets; for counterfeits were sometimes offered by wicked Scotchmen, or tickets were borrowed from good-tempered or timeserving friends.

Sometimes relatives

lent tokens to delinquents, to save them from the disgrace of not partaking of the communion. The presentation at the communion table was called "lifting the token." The tokens used in Scotland were usually of metal,―tin, pewter, or lead cast in a mould or cut by a stamp; sometimes merely printed pasteboard tickets. "Token moulds are often seen in inventories of church properties. Scotchmen also had "stock tokens," engraved or stamped with suitable texts, which could be used in any Presbyterian communion, as well as special parish tokens.

Tokens were often refused to Scotch church members, not only to men who became "evil livers," but to those who had walked in Masonic processions or had ridden in the cars on Fast Day, or to a man and his wife who were reported as "living on no very amiable terms," showing how rare marital infelicity must have been in that neighborhood, and how severely reprehended. Sometimes would-be communicants dared to present themselves at the Lord's table without a ticket. Mr. Robert Shiells (who has given me many of the facts I have stated), in his interesting little book The Story of the Token, tells of one bold American woman who did so at a Wisconsin Presbyterian church; but she was promptly set outdoors by the scandalized and outraged deacons. The chronicler said that she had sinned by "promiscuous hearing," not promiscuous

talking, please note, but by promiscuous listening, apparently a most negative offense. I have seen the notice, however, of many excommunications and withholdings of the token from men, not merely for innocuous listening, but on account of their offensive words and deeds. Boswell states that one undaunted and belligerent Scotchman brought a lawsuit against his parish minister for refusing him admission to the sacred ordinance.

The

The use of tokens was at one time common in Holland, especially in the Walloon Church, which was composed of French and Flemish refugees. It seems doubtful whether they were ever used in the Lutheran churches. They were employed in French Huguenot churches as early as the year 1600. Rev. Charles Frossard has published a description of forty-one different tokens used in the communion of the Reformed French Church. Of these, thirty bear the figure of a chalice. French tokens were made of pasteboard, wax, leather, glass, but generally of lead or brass, and are thoroughly French in character with their beautiful and appropriate legends, "Fear not, little flock," and "My sheep know My voice and follow Me." The Bulletin of the French Protestant Historical Society gives a full account of these French tokens, and some very striking and picturesque details of church discipline of the times.

Metal tokens used by Baptist and Methodist churches are not rare, and may be found in collections. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Episcopal churches in Scotland used tokens, as well as did their Presbyterian neighbors. St. Andrew's Church, Glasgow, distributed tokens stamped with a cross. Tickets and tokens have also been used in certain Roman Catholic churches, among others the Cathedral Church in Glasgow, and at early dates in Continental churches.

The use of the token was common in

66 a sacra

the Church of England. The "token books" of St. Saviour's Church of Old Southwark for the years 1588 to 1630 nearly all still exist. These are account books of common writing paper, one for each district. The churchwardens went once each year to every house in the parish, and in these books they entered, against the name of street, court, or alley, the names of all residents of sixteen years or older, who were bound by law to take the sacrament at the parish church, or abide the severe consequences, namely, imprisonment or exile. A ticket of lead or pewter mental token " was given to each person, to be delivered at the communion table. These books form now a valuable statistical and topographical record of that part of London, and have for us another interest; for in that parish, at that time, Shakespeare lived, and to him must have been delivered these tokens stamped with the letters S. S., -St. Saviour's. In these token books are the names of sixteen of the actors whose names are also printed in the first edition of Shakespeare's plays. Backsliders are noted: one an Anabaptist, another a Brownist, another a "badd husband and cometh not to communion." At Henley-on-Thames the tokens were called "communion half-pence." The Newbury tokens were stamped with a Bible.

There seems to be some indication that sacramental tokens were also used as a medium of exchange, possibly as a sort of poor-ticket. It was a day of tokens; trade tokens abounded.

In Ireland, England, the Isle of Man, Australia, New Zealand, Cape Breton, India, Canada, Newfoundland, wherever there are Presbyterian churches, the tokens have been commonly used. On the island of Santa Cruz, in the Church of the United Brethren, an octagonal copper token was given to an intending participant in communion, and if he successfully passed the speaking" he could receive the full ticket, a handsome ma

hogany token. One from Antioch, Syria, bears a motto in Arabic; how readily it suggests to us the text, "And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch"! A Reformed Dutch church in St. Thomas long used oval pewter tokens. They were doubtless introduced by some Scotch minister who was in charge there.

In America the use of the token has widely prevailed, especially in New Hampshire; not only in Londonderry, but in Antrim, Salem, and sister churches. In Massachusetts, I know of their use in Pelham, Chelsea, and Sutton, and I hear that one church in Boston still demands tokens from communicants. They are employed in many of the United Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania, and were for a long time used in Philadelphia. Philadelphia tokens were stamped with a heart.

It was not in small communities only that these tokens were employed. Ivory tokens were used until recently in the First Reformed Church in New York city, and until 1870 in the Fourth Presbyterian Church. The wealthy church of Charleston, S. C., had cast, in the early part of this century, beautiful silver tokens almost as large as a silver halfdollar, bearing on one side the design of a table with chalice and paten, and the text"This do in remembrance of Me;" on the other, the burning bush, and the legend "Nec tamen consumebatur;" on the edge, the words "Presbyterian Church of Charleston, S. C." Though white and black church members sat at the same table, in this church, before the late war, and communed from the same vessels, the church provided tin tokens for its negro members. During the civil war, the Northern troops looted the church property, and may have thought the church tokens Confederate money.

Collections of church tokens have been made in Scotland and in America. Mr. John Reid, of 13, Well Meadow, Blairgowrie, Scotland, has nearly five thou

sand tokens. Mr. Shiells, of Neenah, Wis., has a large and interesting collection.

Many curious and varying opinions exist in the Presbyterian Church in regard to the propriety and advisability of employing these tokens. One Presbyterian clergyman writes to me that he always much deprecated their use, having seen the effect of their employment in the first church over which he was settled in Pennsylvania. He found that many of the congregation, especially the older women, bowed the head upon receiving the token, and, like a good Presbyterian, he promptly and characteristically feared that they regarded it with much the same feeling as a Roman Catholic regards some of the symbols of his church. Another minister, settled over a new parish, at the first weekly meeting which he attended — I think a prayer meeting in the middle of the week - asked if anything more should

be said to the congregation ere the meeting closed. An aged deacon arose, and, presenting him with a bag of tokens, said, "Will you now distribute the tokens?" Taking the bag, the determined parson opened the door of the "pulpit closet" (the well-known "black hole" under the pulpit of many old churches) and threw bag and tokens to the further end, saying that such was the only use he would ever make of church tokens. What proved the sequel of this high-handed proceeding was not related to me, but it could hardly have been a very ingratiating or propitious entrance of a new minister into a new church community.

Other clergymen regard the use of tokens as a time-honored and solemn custom, "never giving a token without a trembling hand and a throbbing heart,” and they regretfully relinquish it, believing it a dignified and sacred part of their church symbolism.

Alice Morse Earle.

WHEN, last year, the present writer made a journey throughout French Barbary, that is, from the frontiers of Morocco to the eastern Tunisian littoral, and by the routes of the Sahara as well as through the hill regions of Kabylia, -he took particular note of the great work done, and being done, by the "White Army," founded, organized, and for so many years sustained by the late Cardinal Lavigerie.

The rumor of the great deeds of this indomitable soldier of the cross has spread throughout the civilized world; but neither in America nor in Great Britain is the story of his career and his achievement in Africa adequately recognized. Indeed, there seems to be an idea current that with his death the "redemp

tion of Islam" lapsed from a grand crusade to a disorganized, casual, and generally futile missionism.

As a matter of fact, the "White Fathers" are to-day a better organized, better directed, and more influential body than they were in those first years of hardship and fiery ardor which were the outcome of the passionate eloquence and not less passionate zeal and enthusiasm of the Archbishop of Algiers. It is true that visitors to Algiers and Tunis — and it is surprising how relatively small is the number of those who go further afield in Algeria or Tunisia than to these picturesque and popular cities, and their kindred smaller towns along the Barbary coasts, from Oran to Susa — may see little or nothing of the " Army of the