THE CHRISTIAN NEGRO.

SOME years agon to be in this country, NOME years ago, an English gentle

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where the following circumstance occurred to him, which is related in his own words:" In one of my journeys, I was walking by myself over a large plantation. Amused with its husbandry, and comparing it with that of my own country, I came to a middle-aged negro, who was tilling the ground. I felt a strong desire to converse with him, he seemed so happy. After I asked him some questions, he answered very sensibly: My massa teach me to read, and I read good book; that makes me happy,' was one of his replies. I am glad,' replied I, to hear you say so; and pray what is the good book you read?' 'The Bible, massa: God's own book.' Do you understand, friend, as well as read this book; for many who can read the words well cannot get hold of the true and good sense?' 'O massa,' says he, I read the book much before I understand; but at last I feel pain in my heart: I find things in the book that cut me to pieces.' Eh!' said I, what things were they?' 'Why, massa, I found that I had bad heart, a very bad heart indeed. I felt pain that God would destroy me because I was wicked, and done nothing as I should do: God was holy, and I was very vile and naughty; so I could have nothing from him but fire and brimstone in hell.' In short, he entered into a full account of his convictions of sin, which were indeed as piercing and as deep as I ever heard of, and also of what scriptures came to his mind which he had read, that both probed him to the bottom of his sinful heart, and were made the means of light and comfort to his soul. I then inquired of him what ministry or means he made use of, and found that his master was a Quaker, a plain sort of man, who had taught his slaves to read, but who had never conversed with this negro upon the state of his soul. I asked him likewise how he got comfort under all this trial? 'O massa,' says he, it was Christ gave me comfort, by his dear word: he bade me come unto him, and he would give me rest; for I was very weary and heavyladen.' Here he went through a line of the most precious texts in the Bible, showing me, by his simple comment upon them, as he went along, what great things God

had done, in the course of some years, for his soul. I asked him several questions about the merit of works, the justification

of sinners, the power of trade, and the

like. I own I was as much surprised at, as I admired, the sweet spirit and simplicity of his answers, with the heavenly wisdom that God had put into the mind of this negro. His discourse, flowing merely from the richness of grace, with a tenderness and expression far beyond the reach of art, quite charmed me. On the other hand, my entering into all his feelings, and telling him, what he had never heard before, that thus and thus the Lord in his mercy dealt with all his children, and had dealt with me, drew streams of joyful tears down his black face. We looked upon each other, and talked with that unspeakable glow of Christian affection which made me more than ever believe, what I have often too thoughtlessly professed, the communion of saints.

"I shall never forget how he seemed to hang upon my lips, and to eat my very words, when I enlarged upon the love of Christ to poor sinners, the free bounty and tender mercy of God, the frequent and delightful sense he gives of his presence, the faith he bestows in his promises, the victories this faith is enabled to get over trials and temptations, the joy and peace in believing, the hope, in life and death, of a glorious immortality. He had never heard such discourse, nor had the opportunity of hearing it before: he seemed like a man who had been thrown into a new world, and at length had found company.

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Though my conversation lasted at least two or three hours, I scarcely ever enjoyed the happy swiftness of time so sweetly in all my life: we knew not how to part: he would go with me as far as he might; and I felt, for my part, such a delight in the simple, solid, unaffected experience of this dear man, that I wished to have seen him often. But my situation prevented this. I therefore took an affectionate leave, with an ardor equal to the warmest and oldest friendship, telling him that neither the color of his body, nor the condition of his present life, could prevent him from being my dear brother in our Saviour; and that, though we must part now, never to see each other again in this world, I had no doubt of our having another joyful meeting in our Father's home, where

we should live together, and love one another through a long and happy eternity. 'Amen, amen, my dear massa,' said he; God bless you and poor me too, forever and ever.' If I had been an angel from heaven, he could not have received me with more evident delight than he did; nor could I have viewed him with a more brotherly regard, if he had been a long-established Christian of the good old sort, grown up into my affections in the course of many years."

THE WINTER SLEEP OF ANIMALS.

MOST

[OST, perhaps all, animals sleep or repose at given intervals, after certain periods of longer or shorter duration devoted to active exercise. This oblivious rest is necessary for the restoration of the energy of the nervous and muscular systems, when that energy is exhausted by fatigue. There is, moreover, a tendency to sleep, or at least to rest quiet, after repletion; and in hot countries men and animals take their siesta during the fervid heat of mid-day; narcotic drugs produce sleep, by tranquillizing an irritable condition of the nerves, but in overdoses they produce coma, which is not true sleep, and which may end in death.

Distinct alike from true sleep, and its similitude coma, is a species of lethargic insensibility, ordinarily called the torpidity of hibernation. This torpidity is either perfect or imperfect, and it varies in duration. All animals do not fall into this condition, although many do; it occurs at a fixed period of the year, continues for weeks or months, passes off, and leaves the animal to the exercise of its wonted energies, and to its usual alternations of activity and repose.

In

The term hibernation means retirement into winter quarters; but, in the present instance, also supposes a condition of torpidity when in that winter retreat. our northern latitudes, all our reptiles hibernate. Many of our quadrupeds do so also, but none of our birds; for to them is given the instinct and the power of migration.

As examples of hibernation among quadrupeds, we may notice the marmot of the Alps. This animal excavates a deep burrow, in which it makes a bed of dried grass and moss, and to this asylum it retires in autumn, stops up the entrance,

lays itself placidly down, and falls into a state of torpor which lasts till the beginning of spring. The pretty little dormouse also hibernates. It makes a domed nest, generally in a crevice or chink of a tree, sometimes amidst the interlacements of the thickest part of a dense brake or tangled mass of brushwood, and in this snug dome-covered dormitory, made of moss, grass, and leaves, it coils itself up into a ball and waits the approach of sleep. The hedgehog hibernates; forming a warm soft nest of moss and leaves, under the root of some old tree, in the hole of a bank, or under the covert of haystacks, masses of timber or logs, it there rolls itself up like a ball, and sinks into torpidity.

Bats likewise hibernate, some more profoundly than others. They seek the hollows of trees, the recesses of old ruins, church towers, barns, caves, and similar retreats, making no nest, but hanging suspended by the hinder claws. Some hibernating animals, as the marmot, lay up a store of provisions for consumption in early spring, when, although the trance is over, other food is not. attainable.

Instinct impels all hibernating animals to seek at a definite period their winter asylum, and thus instinct-guided, they never fix upon a wrong situation. In every case the aim seems to be the securement of a shelter from extreme cold, so as to preserve the maintenance of a degree of temperature conducing to a peculiar condition of the system, without involving the loss of the vital principle: for extreme cold, as experiments have proved, does not produce torpidity in these animals, but death. If, for example, we expose an animal which naturally becomes torpid at a certain season of the year to excessive cold, and allow it no opportunity of sheltering itself, it will certainly perish. On the other hand, if we subject an animal in a state of hibernation to excessive cold, the shock will revive it; but let it continue in that cold medium for a short time, and it will die. Artificial warmth will revive an animal in its torpid state of hibernation, but not without injury. Bats and dormice thus awakened, seldom or never survive after being so unnaturally roused. "Animals which hibernate at a certain period of the year in obedience to a protective law, will not hibernate if exposed to cold at another

season; and if the cold be intense, they will perish, as was proved by the experiments of Mangili." Moreover, the degree of temperature at the time when animals seek their hibernating retreats is often higher than that of the spring month, when their revival takes place.

A truly hibernating animal in its torpid condition presents us with the semblance of death we can perceive no breathing, no motion of the heart, no vital warmth; wounds inflicted seem to give no pain. We may roll a hedgehog over the floor, or a dormouse over the table, and they exhibit no signs of consciousness; they are under the influence of nature's preservative chloroform.

This is a slight sketch of what we ordinarily term hibernation. Let us reverse the picture, and present to our readers the sketch of a contrary state of things. Hibernation means torpor in a winter retreat. Let us contrast it with estivation, which means a like torpor during the intense heat of the dry season, or summer, in the hotter latitudes.

In inter-tropical climates a continuance of heat and extreme dryness produces the same effects on animals as does the cold of winter in our temperate latitudes. Life appears to stagnate; torpidity assumes the dominance; the forest is still, as if destitute of its native wild tenants, for the birds either seek the densest coverts or migrate to other localities. We quote, with some omissions, the following extracts from Mr. Darwin's interesting Journal, as calculated to give a true picture of this animal torpidity during the season of heat and drought :

"When we first arrived at Bahia Blanca, (South America,) September 7, we thought nature had granted scarcely a living creature to this sandy and dry country. By digging in the ground, however, several insects, large spiders and lizards, were found in a half-torpid state. On the 15th a few animals began to appear, and by the 18th, three days from the equinox, everything announced the commencement of spring. The plains were ornamented by flowers of a pink wood-sorrel, wild peas, anotheræ, and geraniums. The birds began to lay their eggs; numerous insects were crawling about; while the lizard tribe, the constant inhabitants of a sandy soil, darted in every direction." "It is well known that within the tropics the hiber nation, or more properly estivation of animals, is governed by the times of drought. Near Rio Janeiro, I was first surprised to observe that a few days after some little depressions had been changed into pools of water by the rain, they were peopled by numerous full-grown

shells and beetles. Humboldt has related the strange accident of a hovel having been erected ried in the mud; and, he adds, the Indians over the spot where a young crocodile lay buoften find enormous boas, which they call uji, or water-serpents, in the same lethargic state. To reanimate them they must be irritated and wetted with water."

As the rainy season comes on suddenly, so, far more suddenly than in our climate, where the transition from winter to spring is gradual, does animal reviviscence, with a restoration to full activity, take place. To this singular torpidity of animals during heat and drought, Baron Humboldt expressly alludes when speaking of the tanrec, a hedgehog-like animal of Madagascar. From him we learn that in the cold zone the deprivation of heat causes some animals to fall into winter sleep, so in the hot tropical countries an analogous phenomenon occurs, which has not been sufficiently attended to, and to which he applied the name of summer sleep, (estivation.) Drought and continuous high temperature act like the cold of winter in diminishing sensibility. This is a most singular phenomenon, and one to which naturalists might profitably devote their attention.

The same philosopher says:

"When under the vertical rays of the neverclouded sun, the carbonized turfy covering of the plains falls into dust, the indurated soil cracks asunder as if from the shock of an earthquake. At such times two opposing currents of air, whose conflict produces a rotatory motion, come in contact with the soil, and the plain assumes a singular aspect. Like conicalshaped clouds, the points of which descend to the earth, the sand rises through the rarefied air in the electrically-charged centre of the whirling current, resembling the loud waterspout, dreaded by the experienced mariner. The lowering sky sheds a dim, almost strawcolored light. The horizon draws suddenly nearer, the steppe (plain) seems to contract, and with it the heart of the wanderer. The hot dusty particles which fill the air, increase its suffocating heat; and the east wind blowing over the long-heated soil brings with it no refreshment, but rather a still more burning glow.". As in the icy north the animals become torpid with cold, so here, under the influence of the parching drought, the crocodile and the boa become motionless and fall asleep, deeply buried in the dry mud. Everywhere the death-threatening drought prevails, and yet by the play of the refracted rays of light, producing the phenomenon of the mirage, the thirsty traveler is pursued by the illusive image of a cool, rippling, watery mirror."

Of the distress which the herds of horses and cattle suffer at this season,

we must here omit.

"At length," he adds, "after the long drought the welcome season of the rains arrives, and then how suddenly is the scene changed! The deep blue of the hitherto perpetually cloudless sky becomes lighter; at night

the dark space in the constellation of the southern cross is hardly distinguishable, and the soft phosphorescent light of the Magellanic clouds fades away. A single cloud appears in the south, like a distant mountain rising perpendicularly from the horizon. Gradually the increasing vapors spread like mist over the sky, and now the distant thunder ushers in the life-restoring rain. The suffocating heat has passed away as if by magic; the vegetation of the plains springs into luxuriance; the beasts of prey roam abroad; the herds rejoice in water ater and pasturage; and the creatures which slept in torpidity awake and bestir themselves. It is now that the alligator and the huge boa burst from their temporary graves. Sometimes, so the aborigines relate, on the margins of the swamps, the moistened clay is seen to blister and rise slowly in a kind of mound; then, with a violent noise, like the outbreak of a small volcano, the heaped up earth is cast high into the air. The beholder acquainted with the meaning of this spectacle flies, for he knows there will issue forth a gigantic water snake, or a scaly crocodile, awakened from a torpid state by the first fall of rain."

Thus, then, in the hotter regions, during the season of drought, life appears to stagnate as it does in the winter of our northern latitudes; but in each case one great object is aimed at, according to the wisdom of Providence, namely, the preservation of life, although under a semblance of death.

Wonderful and striking, if we consider it, is this preservative law. In our climate so few are the hibernating quadrupeds or reptiles, that persons in general are seldom led to notice the change which spring produces, when the hedgehog, the fieldmouse, and dormouse, issue forth, when the snake leaves its retreat, when the lizard appears on the hedgerow banks in all its liveliness, and the frog, emerging from the mud, throngs every pool and drainage course.

But in the hotter regions, where during the season of intense heat and drought, when all nature seems oppressed, so great a multitude of animals retire and sleep, and then suddenly burst forth, roused by the first showers, grateful to man and beast, the contrast forces itself on the attention. It is one of the natural phenomena with which the wildest aborigines are conversant.

HOW HE BECAME SO.

R. STEELQUILL is a ruined man!

Mwe thought a few days ago that he

was absolutely good for nothing; but it has just struck us that we may put him to one last use, before altogether banishing him from our society and thoughts. In order once more to make him of some slight service to his fellow-men, therefore, we propose to set up Mr. Steelquill, in a brief history of his career, and shocking fall, as a striking example of the evil and misery which may result from apparently trifling, and certainly not universally reprobated, deviation from the path of ordinary life.

Mr. Steelquill was once an articled clerk in the office of Shearem, Fleecy, and Co., the well-known solicitors, and had the bright prospect of being one day himself a prosperous member of the legal profession. Successful as studious, honorable and gentlemanly as well-born and educated, he bid fair soon to master the mysteries of Blackstone & Co., and eventually to rise to eminence in his profession. The Bench was before him; his hopes of attaining that Mont Blanc of the legal Alps were somewhat faint, but still the Bench was before him.

At this period of his history, Mr. Steelquill's personal appearance presented nothing remarkable. A smooth, glossy hat surmounted a fringe of nicely combed hair; his juvenile promises of whiskers, rather than whiskers themselves, were small, but well kept; his countenance wore the open, joyous aspect of one who ceased study when he left his desk, and could walk to and fro without troubling himself with much thought. He dressed in plain, but well-made clothes, always scrupulously brushed; and his boots, in their unsullied brightness, looked as though he had had them cleaned at the nearest corner. In fine, from top to toe Mr. Steelquill presented the appearance of a quiet, steady young gentleman, of good position and better prospects. That is, Mr. Steelquill of old-as he was six years ago. A sad change is apparent. His position now is that of-well, to use his own term, though it is perhaps rather too dignified—an author. In fact, Mr. Steelquill is a periodical scribbler. He does that indescribable sort of work, called "writing for the maga zines." Nobody seems to know what he

were but of the same way of thinking on the moustache question. As it is, he en

It is evident that his circumstances are not very good, though, fortunately for him, he is the recipient of an annuity, to which the income he derives from his pen is merely supplementary. He looks fully twelve years older than when we first introduced him; and his face habitually wears an anxious, care-furrowed expression; ever and anon intensifying into a look of horribly fierce determination. At such moments, it must charitably be concluded that he is laboring under a fit of inspiration. A thought—a great idea-a grand conception-has arisen in his mind; or a startling denouement, or ingenious plot, has suggested itself to his fancy; or, perhaps, something so alarmingly funny has presented itself to his imagination, that it is only by contorting his features into an aspect of extreme gravity that he is able to prevent an unseemly exposition of mirth. He walks along, lost in sublime speculations and glowing aspirations. His search is after originality. He regards commonplace objects, scenes, persons, and occurrences, with a view to an original treatment of them in "Someone's Journal." He affects humor and wit, and is ever on the watch for subjects on which to exercise his gifts; so that, while the fates of nations and continents tremble in the political scale, he thinks of their most momentous questions as scenes for a burlesque, or jokes for an extravaganza; and a war or a revolution provides him with matter for a comic song.

Then, as to his attire, it varies. Occasionally it is incongruous, and also presents that appearance consequent on overlong wear, which has been happily termed "seediness." At other times he is, so far as the texture of his garments goes, welldressed; but still his dress is characterized by a peculiar showiness, almost gaudiness, of color, and singularity of make.

His hair he wears exceedingly long, as the customary and universally recognized sign of genius; and brushes, and combs, and strokes it back from his forehead, until little is left visible from the front save its roots; and it looks as though it had had a very narrow escape of being completely eradicated. He wears, too, what would be a moustache, if nature and he

displays those of more luxuriant growth, and, in short, makes as close an approximation to that hirsute appendage as circumstances admit of. His gait assumes rather a slouching, lounging character, except when he is impelled by one of those fits of inspiration by which he is visited, and then he strides along at a smart pace, until the violence of his emotions has subsided.

A fearful alteration has, indeed, taken place in poor Steelquill. He is but the wreck of his former self; and, from a peaceable, respectable citizen, is reduced to the poor, objectless, aimless, restless creature we see him now. And yet we must not imagine him a miserable man. Providence has kindly rendered him insensible to his misfortunes, and he is even so enamored of his sad state, that he has rejected several overtures of his friends to reinstate him in his former position. Yes, strange to say, he prefers literary poverty to professional affluence, and would rather write what he mistakes for an epigram, than make out a bill of costs. Here then is a case pregnant with warning to the young and ambitious, to avoid the pernicious ways of literature as they would the plague. The love of it entrances, entices, and, at last, irresistibly fascinates; but the pursuit of it makes a Samuel Steelquill of a man in the end. How the transition in Mr. Steelquill's case took place, we design to relate.

Mr. Steelquill, senior, was a respectable retail dealer in West Indian produce-in fact, a grocer. Well-to-do and contented he was; and, intending to qualify his only child for a profession, he gave him an excellent education, and had the satisfaction of seeing him, for some time, advance steadily and rapidly toward an established position. But Mr. S. Steelquill, as we have seen, departed from the path of prosperity and fortune, and eventually wandered very widely astray.

Of course he did not plunge at once into the wilds of literature. He stepped aside, and culled a flower or a leaf, and then sprung hastily back into the beaten track of professional propriety. In all cases of thus forsaking the right course, vagabondizing for a time, and at length marching off in a totally different path, there must