died. A few weeks afterwards a subscription was set on foot to erect a monument to his illustrious memory. The Prince Consort headed the list with a donation of £50, but other subscribers were limited to the amount of two guineas each. Remittances poured in from all parts of the country. Nor would the liberated slaves permit a memorial of their benefactor to be erected without their help. They sent more than £500, which had been collected chiefly in coppers. At length £1500 was subscribed, and a beautiful fulllength marble statue was erected in Westminster Abbey. There it stands, near the monument of Wilberforce, and surrounded by the memorials of the greatest, the noblest, and the worthiest of England's dead.

HELP IN THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE.
PART SECOND-MUTUAL HELP.

CHAPTER II.-SYMPATHY.

HE first positive form of mutual help I will name is Sympathy. The helpfulness of sympathy is very great; far greater, I believe, than many see. Its tendency is to inspirit and energise its object. Illustrations of this truth crowd upon us. We see it manifested in the wee baby trying to take its first step in life. How it is cheered and encouraged by the sympathising eye and voice of the bystander. If it do not at first succeed that sympathy will lead it to try and try again until success crowns its efforts. So with the youth at school in his acquisition of knowledge, or the youth in the office or workshop learning the mystery of his trade or calling. And so in the great struggle of life; many have endured what would have been unendurable, and achieved what would have been beyond_the range of their attainment, by the force they have had imparted to them by sympathy; and for want of strength-inspiring sympathy many have painfully and ignominiously failed in life's struggle.

There may be some true heroic souls brave enough to do and brave enough to suffer all that it may fall to their lot to do and suffer, without any regard to this sympathy of which we speak, but they are exceptions to the rule of human experience. Most have natures greatly responsive to it, and on occasions of trial are inspired with confidence, or moved to despondency, as it is manifested or withheld. Crises come in our personal history, times of defeat and disappointment, when we are sternly taught that the race is not wholly to the swift nor the battle wholly to the strong, for notwithstanding our industry, forethought, and thrift, disaster has befallen us, and we stand face to face with penury and want, and these perhaps in their severest forms. Having laboured, but laboured in vain, having expended our strength, but spent it for nought, our heart sinks within

us like lead; all energy and all hope forsake us, and we are on the point of abandoning ourselves to helplessness and despair. "No one cares for me," is the wail of the soul in this condition; "I may lay down and starve, and there is no eye to which I can look for pity, and no hand that I can grasp for help. I am alike disowned by God and cast off by man." Unexpectedly something occurs to disprove this. A word is spoken, a look is given, or an act is done, which gives the assurance that by some of our kind we are regarded with brotherly sympathy, and this assurance is our salvation. It repels from our bosom the demon of despair; we take heart again in our struggle; we grapple manfully with our difficulties; we overcome them, and go on our way rejoicing our joy probably calmer for this passage in our history, but withal more substantial and satisfying.

CHAPTER III.-PRACTICAL ASSISTANCE.

Sentimental sympathy should be embodied in material aid when there is a necessity for such aid being given. All admit this when the necessity is on a large scale, or comes in a terribly severe form. On these occasions our sympathy is often displayed in a manner truly magnificent, and lavishes its gifts on the objects whose suffering or weakness has called it forth. The Indian Mutiny and the Cotton Famine may be mentioned as instances of this character; also the loss of the Captain, and more recently the disastrous conflagration of Chicago. While I am writing, the terrible inundations in France are not only awakening our compassion for the unhappy victims of them, but the hand of help is being held out to them by thousands of our countrymen. Who condemns such conduct? Who does not feel that it is right and proper that such help should be given ?

The mode in which our sympathies shall act, or the organisation by which they shall give aid to their object, is worthy of some consideration. Shall our sympathies work by any organisation at all, or shall they be altogether personal and spontaneous? I think I may say that the general sense of mankind is that they should combine both methods.

Our acts of mutual help must not be done altogether mechanically. The conduct of our Saviour in touching those on whom He exerted His healing power has often been remarked upon, and from it a moral lesson deduced for the guidance of our treatment of each other. The giving of help is not in itself everything; the way of giving the spirit breathed into the act by the giver-is of primary importance too. The true symbol of society is not the machine moved by material unconscious force, but the human body with its warm sympathetic impulses. We are living flesh and blood, and should ever act towards each other in harmony with our nature.

CHAPTER IV.-MODES OF HELP.

Almsgiving is one mode by which we may help each other in the struggle of life. It is doubtless the most primitive mode of doing

this, and it is also the easiest. I am not going to decry it as altogether wrong, or as the least efficient method of doing good. In many instances it is the best way of giving help, as it is the only way in which the necessity of the person to whom help is given can be met. But indiscriminate impulsive almsgiving is not a blessing to society at large, though some worthy members of it may receive aid by its exercise. Indeed, such almsgiving is a serious injury to society, for it fosters the very evil which it is supposed to relieve. There are thousands in our country leading a lazy, licentious, and vagabond life, who are provided with the means of doing so from the thoughtless benevolence of the kind-hearted. I have often been struck with the number of beggars exposing their sores and crippled limbs which surround a factory on pay day, and have been sorry that these impostors, as most of them are, should be able so readily to obtain money from those who honestly earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. This very morning's newspaper supplies me with a fact to sustain my statement. It contains what is called an extraordinary letter written by a man sixty-five years of age, who was educated at Sherborne Charity School, and who has made a livelihood by mendicancy the greater part of his life. We are told he writes a good hand, and is a man of considerable attainments. In the Poor Law Report on vagrancy a list of fourteen convictions in sixteen years is registered against him, and he confesses to having been in gaol more than one hundred times. In his letter he describes some forms of "lurk " (a slang expression among thieves and begging-letter impostors, derived from the Welsh llerc, a fit of loitering), in which he had been an actor. We will give one of the instances he furnishes :

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"I have found," he writes, "that the bereavement lurk' is a lucrative ɔne—i.e., the pretended loss of a wife, leaving me with a young and helpless family to support. I practised the following scheme for the first time in Manchester :-I obtained three children -two girls and a boy-between the ages of five and ten years, of their parents for three shillings to stand pad' with me from seven o'clock until twelve p.m. on a Saturday. I agreed to give the children plenty to eat before starting, and some pence for themselves when we returned; so that after the children had been well washed and clean pinafores put on them, and had been plentifully regaled with bread and butter and tea, and I had taught them their lesson, and I had provided a placard to place on each of their breasts, with the word Motherless" written in large characters upon it, we sallied forth on our expedition, and took up our position at one of the entrances to Shudehill Market, and there stood pad '- i.e., stood with the children by me, and did not speak unless I was spoken to. I had frequently to answer questions as to how long the wife had been dead, &c., but was not otherwise interfered with. In five hours I had more than thirty shillings given me in silver and copper. I should think I drank at least a shilling's worth of rum during the time. Besides

buying some cakes for the children, and giving them fourpence each for themselves, I had £1 8s. odd for myself."

The man who has made these "confessions" is the sample of a very large class, a class which ought to be suppressed as far as possible by the arm of the law, and against which the benevolent and kind-hearted should steel their sympathies. I am not thus writing to induce my readers to abstain in all instances from direct gifts of money or food, but if they will suffer the word of exhortation I would say-When you do your alms let them be bestowed on the really needy and deserving, on those who are sober and industrious, who themselves do their best in the struggle of life, and to whom your benefactions will come to supplement and not supersede personal effort. Those who are needy from bereavement, or from personal feebleness, or affliction, or inability to obtain work, or the decay of age, are the proper objects of our charity. From these we should never shut up the bowels of our compassion, and such poor we have always with us in sufficient numbers to receive our bounty without bestowing it on the idle and profligate.

THE FAITHFUL DOG.

UR readers, even the younger of them, will have heard many curious stories about dogs. Some of these stories will no doubt have been coloured a little by the narrator. Our imagination influences our apprehension of actions more than we are generally aware, and we put into them the intelligence they would embody if we performed them ourselves. Still we must admit that dogs are very knowing animals, and some of them have other good qualities besides intelligence. They are faithful and trustworthy, and often devotedly attached to those who own them. Sometimes thieves quiet them in a very mysterious manner when they break into a house, but I knew a little dog which on such an occasion ran to his master's bedroom, and not only barked but nearly pulled the clothes off the bed in its endeavour to awake him.

Our picture shows us a dog entrusted with taking his master's dinner, and in a very perilous condition he is, not from human thieves, but from thieves of his own kind. Here are four hungry curs and a big mastiff around him intent on making their dinner out of the contents of the basket, and here are two more in the distance coming to join them in the fray. Poor fellow! I feel very sorry for him, and wonder how he will come off in the contest. Well, I think he will

master his assailants, for he is evidently a dog with some pluck in him, and the mastiff does not seem disposed to carry his depredation too far; as for the little curs which appear so bold and eager, his growl and a snap or two will send them scampering away. But should it be otherwise, we will sooner believe that some human being

will providentially pass by and interpose for the deliverance of the faithful dog from his evil-disposed kindred.

Looking at the picture we have seen in it more than meets the bodily eye. It has suggested to us what sometimes happens to boys, and may we not say girls too? Dogs, I daresay, have a language of