"That is just about as correct as anything I get in this country. I sent for a baker, and I get a missionary." There happened to be two loaves of bread on the table, and Mr. Hamlin said, "I presume it is bread you want, and you don't care whether it comes from a heathen or a missionary." "Exactly so," answered the doctor. After some sparring between the American missionary and the English officer, Mr. Hamlin agreed to furnish bread for hospital use, and, taking up the printed contract to do this, in order to sign it, noticed that it said, "To deliver bread every morning, between the hours of eight and ten, or at such other hours as may be agreed upon." Dr. Hamilin paused a moment, and then said: "It will be necessary to insert in this contract the words 'except Sabbath,' after the word morning.' The bread can be delivered Saturday evening, say at sunset.' "The laws of war do not regard Sabbath," replied the agent of the English government, curtly. "I cannot change "I cannot change a syllable in that contract." Very well, sir, then I will not furnish the bread. I have not sought the business.' To the hospital this refusal meant the loss of fresh food, to the missionary a loss of hundreds of dollars for the cause for which the good missionary had given his life. Nevertheless, he did not flinch, so the other had to give way. 66 'The chief purveyor," said the doctor, after a pause, "is a good Scotch Chrisiian, and he will arrange with you for that." So Mr. Hamlin furnished bread on his own conditions. Later a large camp of the English army was formed at Hyder Pasha, and again r. Hamlin was engaged to supply bread ..a rate of twelve thousand pounds a day for a time. The first delivery at the camp was dran.atic. The soldiers were waiting impatiently to receive it. They seized the loaves ravenously and tasted them. Then the bread was hurled high in the air, and the joyful cry rang through the ranks, "Ooray for the good English bread!" The provost of the camp was overbearing and rude, and some trouble was anticipated over the double Saturday delivery. On the first Saturday a sunset, Mr. Hamlin, preceding the long line of carts, saluted the provost, and said, "As it is Saturday, I deliver the supply of bread for the Sabbath; as at the hospital, so at the camp." This was met with a volley of oaths, and the order to take the bread back and deliver it in the morning. Mr. Hamlin, unheeding the order, left the bread and departed quickly. To the missionary's astonishment, the next Saturday morning the provost wrote on his receipt, "Remember the double Saturday delivery." This illustrates a fact which is noteworthy that it is rarely the case where a man stands conscientiously firm to right principles that he will meet obstacles to prevent his carrying them out in any enterprise in which he may be engaged.Youth's Companion. BIOGRAPHY OF APPLE TREE. BY F. W. CARD. N my garden stands an apple tree. It IN is not prepossessing nor promising, for it has grown old and decrepit. Yet the old apple tree has not lost heart. Year after year it puts forth its bloom and ripens its fruit. Listen to its history. At the base of this old tree much of the bark has decayed away. Some borer has made the tree its home; perhaps a fungus has later found a footing and wrought still greater devastation. But somewhere there is still a live connection between the roots and the trunk, through which the water taken from the soil by the tiny little rootlets is carried up to the leaves playing in the sunlight. The water is there broken up and combined with the carbon-dioxide of the air, forming starch. Although so poisonous for us to breathe, carbon-dioxide is a very important food for plants, and they get it all through their leaves. Here in these hundreds of laboratories, every leaf being one, the sun prepares the food for the old tree, adding the mineral matter dissolved from the soil by the water and root-acids, forming food; it is then distributed to all parts, even down to the tiny rootlets which first took the water from the soil. A foot or so from the ground is a long cleft showing where, years ago, a gashing wound was made. Perhaps some careless plowman let the whipple-tree tear off a large strip of bark; or perhaps a boy with a new hatchet tried its edge | on the tree to see how well it would hew. Year after year the tree has been building out new wood from the edges of this wound in the attempt to entirely cover it. Success will soon crown its efforts if its life is spared. All about the base of the tree are springing up young shoots, which are striving to appropriate the food that belongs to the old tree. This is because the injury to the bark already mentioned prevents rapid passing of the food and threatens its life. If the old tree should die, any one of these young sprouts stands ready to push forward and take its place. The scales of rough bark which clothe the trunk serve to protect the seat of life beneath, but, unfortunately, they also harbor, tucked away in their silken beds, many of the old tree's enemies, which during summer have been despoiling its fruits. For whenever we find a fat pink worm in an apple this winter we may be sure that it is because he was caught napping and did not have time to leave the apple and spin himself a cocoon in some crevice about the tree. If you will look beneath the hoops of an apple barrel you may find some of them nesting there. In spite of their snug quarters many come to an untimely end when such birds as the chickadee and nuthatch go creeping around the trunk of the tree in search of their breakfast. But we must reserve the biography of this little fellow for some other time, and also that of the insect, the eggs of which we might find closely glued to some branch and carefully varnished to keep out the rain. Farther up there is the remnant of a dead limb, long since broken or cut from the tree. The tiny little spores of some fungus found a lodgment there and the little colorless plants, developed from these, fed upon the wood, causing it to decay. Gradually the hole grew deeper while the old tree was trying to cover it. Even if it succeeds now it will be too late to prevent this diseased spot from extending farther and farther towards its heart. Still higher up there are two swellings, one on each of the large branches, and had you been here in the autumn when the apples were ripe you would have seen that above these swellings the old tree bore Baldwins, but below them little bright red crabs. What a mystery is here! How can the tree do that? What has happened? If the old tree could tell us it would doubtless say that one day, years ago, when the March winds had begun to soften, and the blue-birds had come back, a man with a saw climbed into the tree and cut off those branches. Then with a chisel or knife he split them down at the centre. After that he inserted two little cions from a Baldwin tree into each of these splits. He took care that the line between the wood and bark should agree with the same line in the branch. Then he covered the wound with wax so that the winds and rains should not have access to it. By and by when the new spring life came creeping through the tree it pushed on into the little cions, and they began to grow. The old tree took kindly to these adopted children and fed them so well that they soon became larger than the branches had been which were cut away. some such way every Baldwin apple-tree in the whole country has grown from a piece of some other Baldwin tree taken and adopted by a tree of another kind. Yet the old tree below these grafts remains the same, and will produce only crabs as long as it shall live. In I cut a branch from the old tree and I wish we could all gather around and listen to the story which it has to tell.* It carries many side-branches or fruitspurs, but how crooked and gnarly they are. At every attempt to grow they seem to have been thwarted and obliged to turn their course. There are many scars, each of which marks the scene of a tragedy, To one spur clings the remains of an apple-blossom. The petals fell away, but the calyx, stamens and pistil still remain. On several an apple started to grow but was overtak by an enemy and destroyed. A robbe. plant gained entrance and only a mu my is left to tell the tale. It looks dead, but I suspect that it is teeming with life, and that this same robber-plant has ripened its tiny spores which are ready to attack other apples next year. along these little branchlets are to be found scars where leaves have once grown. Wherever the branch stops and starts off in another direction are other scars, showing that flowers were produced there, and that just below them a All * Excellent studies of apple and other twigs may be found in Bailey's "Lessons with Plants." C bud came out at the side. You will see that the same thing has happened this year at the end of each spur. These scars are nearly all small; the little flowers never reached applehood. One or two buds became ambitious, when the blossoms above them failed, and grew into long slender shoots, bearing only leaf-buds. But a few of the spurs show larger scars, and if you will hold the stem of an apple against them you will see what they mean. About each scar are clustered several very small ones which show where other blossoms fell by the way. The buds just below these larger scars are usually small and slender. On other branches where no apples grew this year, you may find some that are large and plump. From these the blossoms of another year will come and another struggle will begin. The old apple-tree might tell much more if we understood its language better.-The better. The Nature Guard, Rhode Island College, Kingston, R. I. MODERN LACK OF COMMON M BY HOMER H. SEERLEY. ODERN civilization, though much in advance as compared with the past, is still lacking in much that good common sense indicates would need to be otherwise. These things are in our educational methods, in our home affairs and in our social and civil life. Much of it grows out of wrong conceptions of the real purposes of education and of training, but more of it grows out of false ideas of labor, of utility and of living. With the hope of calling a halt and of instituting a reform at least in an occasional life, these words are written. them. The banker, the grocer, the carpenter, the minister, the lawyer, the doctor, all are more useful to the world if they will set the standard of manhood above the standard of their vocations. 2. Among teachers there is a waste of courage and of self confidence that overvalues the so called recommendation by assuming that it is of great importance. So much is this true that they estimate their standing and their success by the kind of papers they can collect. The credential craze, the gathering of testimonials of character and of experience, has lowered the tone of the teaching profession, and has made the teachers underestimate their own real value as men and women. It is time to quit this idolizing of written estimates, and individualize one's efforts so that the work they do will talk for them, and they will not need to be further bolstered up in manliness and womanliness by written recommendations. 3. There is also great waste in not keeping mentally alive by studying something new all the time, and thus by daily growth keep in touch with the world. The teacher needs a constant diet of the best things in history, science, literature, music and art to keep up with the procession in progress, and thus, by constantly putting on new life, prevent degeneration, decay, disintegration and death. There are plenty of fossils that are of no use to the educational world except to be labeled and placed in the museum. Some people who want the teacher's field of usefulness reach the museum state too early in life to make even good, respectable fossils, such as the curator desires to have. 4. There is a large waste of energy, health and strength by foolish and unnecessary habits in teaching. (a) Among these I might mention the criminal practice of constant standing in the presence of a school or class. It is certainly suicide for many women who are found practicing it, either from false notions regarding government or cruel requirements made by school authorities. Success at such a price is too dearly bought. (b) Another thing is an acquired nervous condition developed by over-strain and over pressure, so a teacher gets no relax 1. There is a waste of manhood and of womanhood by process of degeneration that values professional development and success beyond real manhood and womanhood. There is need of full grown, fullrounded men and women of affairs for the schoolroom and to take the place of the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses that have allowed themselves to be dwarfed and stunted by the business. The call is for men and for women, notation, and rest is not relief but pain. people who have sacrificed the highest and freest development in power and in character for that which has degenerated They acquire a sensibility that compels them to be unhappy unless they are constantly occupied. There is more of this nerve irritability among teachers than is usually admitted. A woman on the very verge of nervous prostration will insist that she "never was better in health in my life," while her very uneasiness indicates a tendency toward insanity or hysteria. There are too many hours of worry, of exhaustion and of frenzied application for the enfeebled constitution to bear, and a break down is a consequence. There is an evident indication of pride in modern life among men and women that they have overdone and have broken down. I have met five women in the last month who spoke exultingly of having broken down nervously, as if it were a tribute to their womanhood, instead of a crime against nature and God. 5. There is also a lack of common sense in the waste that is going on in methods. The educational world is all agog for new methods in every line of teaching. Our cities and towns hardly use one method long enough to get it thoroughly into practice before another is put in its place. The present teacher in the schools can not leave five years and be able to go back again without finding an entire new ideal in everything. Change is not necessarily progress; it may be retrogression. There is really too much change, too much modification just to modify, too much variation just to vary, rather than the application of the principle, "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." If we are able to judge fairly from manifest indications, there are no good things actually found out in the past twenty years that are permanent product in educational thought and practice. Experimentation is the watchword, and the teacher is the sufferer, as she is kept in a constant fever heat of excitability to keep up with the current topic and the latest demand. The writer believes in improving and in progress, but he does think that there should be a stop to much that is believed to be progress, as it is not genuine in its results and is very destructive to time, to money and to human life, in both teachers and pupils, if not also to the happiness of the parents who are more frequently suferers than is known or appreciated. What is needed in all these things is a better judgment, a more serious application of common sense and a more reasonable consideration of the real ploblems of life. Method has its place, but the prog ress in education of recent years has come more from a change of method. It is the spirit, the life, the purpose that needs to be emphasized, and modern educators should not omit the greatest and the best things in their struggle for place and power.-Midland Schools. THE VALUE OF DEBATE. BY W. W. DAVIS. THE London editor, Henry Labouchere, divides the House of Lords into three classes: The mentals, the ornamentals, the detrimentals. Rhetorical exercises at school, the old-fashioned Friday afternoon declamations and compositions, are sometimes deemed ornamentals. But they are not ornamentals, they are essentials. Let us see. Declamation, for instance, is good. If a pupil learns one piece a week, in the school year of forty weeks he will learn forty pieces, and in twelve years, 480 pieces. If these are carefully chosen, he will have 480 selections of poetry and prose, gems from the orators and poets. Much of his studies, all of the trash he reads, he may forget, but these gems will cling to his memory forever. Declamation gives self possession on the platform, ability to speak in public. Lawyers and ministers are not the only classes, as fifty years ago, who require facility in speech. Teachers, engineers, farmers, W. C. T. U., Y. P. S. C. E., even mothers, meet nowadays in conventions, and some one must preside, some one must be prepared to speak. No more awkward or disagreeable situation in life than to rise before an audience with heart in your mouth and your knees in a tremor. Next to ready the most serSo few can put Compositions are good. talking, ready writing is viceable art among men. their thoughts gracefully upon paper. Unless this practice is begun in school, it will, perhaps, never be acquired. It must be line upon line, day after day, as the regular lessons in music. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. All great works of literary excellence are the result of careful composition. Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Macaulay's History of England, Emerson's Essays. exhibit the tireless toil, the finest finish Bishop Simpson. These are leaders in every body that shape legislation. They arouse the slow, they decide the irresolute. There is a tide in the affairs of men, of those master hands. Even the best | Douglas, Blaine, Thaddeus Stevens, orators write the speeches which they deliver with so much fluency. Purely extemporaneous eloquence is rare. Although uttered apparently on the spur of the moment, these glowing passages were all cut and dried in the library. Wendell Phillips and Colonel Ingersoll, two of our most fluent orators, used the pen much in the preparation of their speeches. Some of our popular ministers, who use no notes in the pulpit, use plenty of them on their study tables. The diligent use of the pen has given them a mastery of the subject. Now we come to an exercise which combines the best features of declamation and composition, the debate. To be a good debater, one must be a good writer and a good speaker. He must write to put his material into the best form, and he must speak to set forth his arguments to the best advantage. Of all intellectual contests, the debate is the most stirring. It arouses every faculty and summons every power into service. And it is not dangerous. Debate never broke a rib, fractured a skull, sprained a leg. Perfectly safe and thoroughly bracing. The debate encourages as nothing else, the spirit of research. The question once given leads to untiring examination of every authority that may give information on the subject. Libraries are ransacked. No stone is left unturned. A search light is thrown in every direction. We are glad that this splendid discipline finds so much favor with our colleges, and that the questions selected for discussion bear upon current events and timely issues. For instance: Princeton was pitted against Harvard on, Is a closer alliance advisable between England and United States? Harvard against Yale: Is the present method of electing United States senators preferable to election by popular vote? The Chicago High School discussed, "Should the mayor have the power of appointing his officers without necessity of confirmation ?" Joseph Choate, our minister to England, took part in twenty-five debates at Yale, and was successful in every discussion. In great assemblies of church and state, when vital issues are at stake, who are the men to take the lead, "The applause of list'ning senates to command ?" The debaters, the speakers ready in reply, prepared to give and take: Pitt, Fox, Luther, Chalmers, Patrick Henry, Clay, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Macaulay believed that the training of the youth who listened to the debates between the master minds at Athens, was superior to that afforded by any university. Lord Bacon said reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, writing an exact man. The debate does all this. We hope the day will soon come when debating will be a regular feature in our high schools, and that contests for the championship will be the highest form of our popular entertainments, like the Olympic games in Greece two thousand years ago.—Sterling (Ill.) Standard. Jack! on all days a problem-that day altogether intolerable! His teacher, whose patience had seemed limitless and whose sympathy had been unfailing, sternly reproved him and sent him home in disgrace. The next morning she found on her desk the folded paper with the double columns of words, written with care and patient toil to please the teacher's eye. Upon the other side of the paper Jack's inscription. Ah, Jack! it is the unwritten message that I read with wet eyes and choking throat. You and I are set to learn the same lessons, lad. "The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I |