NOBODY'S CHILD.

Only a newsboy, under the light

Of the lamp post plying his trade in vain ; Men are too busy to stop to-night,

Hurrying home through the sleet and rain. Never since dark a paper sold;

Where shall he sleep, or how be fed ? He thinks, as he shivers there in the cold, While happy children are safe in bed.

Is it strange if he turns about

With angry words, then comes to blows, When his little neighbor, just sold out,

66

Tossing his pennies, past him goes? Stop!".

-some one looks at him, sweet and mild, And the voice that speaks is a tender one:

"You should not strike such a little child, And you should not use such words, my son!"

Is it his anger or his fears

That have hushed his voice and stopped his arm? "Don't tremble," these are the words he hears; "Do you think that I would do you harm?" "It isn't that," and the hand drops down; "I wouldn't care for kicks and blows; But nobody ever called me son,

Because I'm nobody's child, I s'pose."

O men! as ye careless pass along,

Remember the love that has cared for you; And blush for the awful shame and wrong

Of a world where such a thing could be true! Think what the child at your knee had been If thus on life's lonely billows tossed ; And who shall bear the weight of the sin, If one of these "little ones" be lost!

PHOEBE CARY.

A LILY'S WORD.

"My delicate lily,

Blossom of fragrant snow,

Breathing on me from the garden,

How does your beauty grow?

Tell me what blessing the kind heavens give? How do you find it so sweet to live?"

"One loving smile of the sun Charms me out of the mold:

One tender tear of the rain

Makes my full heart unfold.

Welcome whatever the kind heavens give,

And you shall find it as sweet to live."

LUCY LARCOM.

Bébée was a hard-working Brabant peasant girl; up while the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sun sank beyond the far blue line of the plains.

She hoed, and dug, and watered, and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean as a freshblossomed primrose; she milked her goat, and swept her floor.

She sat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in the winter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sight over lacemaking in the city to get the small bit of food that stood between her and that hunger which to the poor means death.

Now when she woke to the full sense of her wonderful sixteen years - Bébée, standing barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sight as was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine.

This wondrous morning, with the bright burden of her sixteen years upon her, she dressed herself quickly and fed her fowls, and, as happy as a bird, went to sit on her little wooden stool in the doorway.

There had been fresh rain in the night; the garden was radiant; the smell of the wet earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in palaces. The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair as she went out; the starling called to her

Bébée-good-day, good-day!"

"Bébée,

These were all the words it knew. It said the same thing a thousand times a week. But to Bébée it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she was sixteen years old that day.

Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in the dawn and thought, without knowing that she thought it, "How good it is to live when one is young!"

Mother Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the wall:

"What a fine thing to be sixteen! - a merry year, Bébée!"

Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out from her gate, broom in hand :

"The Holy Saints keep you, Bébée; why, you are quite a woman now!"

The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal burner, who were as poor as any mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up the lane, bringing a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tied round. with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week, all in honor of Bébée.