countries were performed for the purpose of acquiring such information as would be of great benefit to Russia.

Dolgoruki is pronounced dŏl'gỏ rựʻkï; Ivan Romanoff, ï vän’ ro må' nof.

A mon' as tĕr'y is the residence of a body of men who have bound themselves by vows to the performance of certain religious practices.

Name's-day means the feast of the Saint whose name one

bears.

Virgin of the Ships was a title given the Virgin Mary, as if invoking her protection over the new Russian navy.

Language. Instead of wished in the sentence-"He wished to go," use in turn, each of the following words: desired, requested, longed.

Explain the exact meaning of each of the words used.

Words which are nearly alike in signification and can be used to express the same general meaning are called sýn'o nýms.

63.—MY FIRST DAY IN THE QUARRY.

wrought (rawt), worked.

in ef fl'cient (fish'ent), useless;

inadequate.

fis' sūreş (fish'urş), clefts. ver mil' ion (yŭn), bright red sen ti měnt'al, romantic. fôr mi da ble, dreadful.

trăns mu ta'tion, change. plum'met, a piece of lead at

tached to a line used in sounding the depth of water. ĕx'qui şîte (ěks’kwi zit), keen; perfect.

strā'tum (plural, stra'tà), layer.

It was twenty years last February since I set out, a little before sunrise, to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint; and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at that time, fond of the fanciful visions of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has referred to in his "Twa Dogs "N as one of the most disagreeable of all employments, -to work in a quarry.

Excepting the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy forebodings, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods, a reader of curious books when I could get them, a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements, for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil.

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the old red sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost.

A heap of loose fragments, which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away. The use of the shovel soon blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe, and I wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed.

Picks, and wedges, and levers were applied by my brother workmen; and, simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however, and the

workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder.

The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one; it had the merit, too, of being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital blasts; the fragments flew in every direction; and an immense mass of earth came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter.

I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish yellow.

I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching downwards toward the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had

yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual.

It was

no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "h ink of rest" which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own.

I was as light at heart next morning as any of my brother workmen. There had been a hard frost during the night, and it lay white on the grass as we passed onward through the fields, but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed, as it advanced, into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year.

All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been stretched on canvas.

From a wooded promontory that extended half way across the bay, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree.

Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwashed snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiseled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple.

They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is described as taxing the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him as a subject for his pencil a flower-piece composed of only white flowers, of which the one half were to bear their proper color, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and how the young man solved the riddle and gained his wife, by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it so as to strike upon the flowers that were drooping over the edge.

I returned to the quarry convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employment may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

HUGH MILler.

Biography. - Hugh Miller was born in Scotland in 1802, and died in 1856.

When he was five years old, his father was lost at sea. From that time, his education was superintended by two uncles, one of whom taught him natural history, and the other, literature. At the age of seventeen years, he became a stone-mason, which vocation he followed until he was thirty-four. In 1829, he published a volume, entitled "Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason," and some years later, "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland." His industry as a student of natural history and his remarkable ability as a writer were publicly acknowledged by the British Association in 1840, the same year that he became editor of the Edinburgh "Witness." Owing to overwork, his mind gave way and he died in 1856. Miller's principal works are: "Old Red Sandstone," "My Schools and School-masters," and "Testimony of the Rocks."

Notes. "Twa Dogs"-twa meaning two-is a poem by Robert Burns, one of the best known poets of Scotland.

"Blink of rest," a very short period of rest-blink meaning a glance.

Ben Wy'vis is a mountain in Scotland. The word Ben means

either mountain or summit.