almost to form themselves, in the deft fingers, into beautiful patterns of mosaics; they make paper boxes, very simple at first, but in time these grow into a wonderful variety of forms and colors. Thus the fingers are trained to rapid and accurate manipulation, and the eye and the taste are unconsciously cultivated in the discernment of order, fitness, and beauty, while, all the time, the materials used are but playthings, and the work only pastime. The little folks are fast becoming artisans, before they know it; and when they go out into active life, the industrial development which they have thus received will tell in all that their hands find to do.

8. In a workshop or factory, in a store or on the farm, we see one lad who, by his expertness in the use of his hands and fingers, is worth twice as much as any one of his fellows, because he can accomplish twice the results. And it is the same with girls that are trained to the early use of the needle, to the forming and arrangement of patterns, and to all the little niceties of fitting and adapting garments for their dolls, and harmonizing colors in the materials used.

9. Such girls grow up with skill and taste in all they do. If compelled to rely upon their own industry for a livelihood, and if not fitted for instruction in the school-room, they are not reduced to the plainest and least remunerative of all labor,-to

"Stitch, stitch, stitch,

With fingers weary and worn,"

but they find places as designers, and pattern-makers, and superintendents, and directors of the labor of others, in the many departments of female industry in which knowledge and skill are always in demand and well paid. Or, if it is their fortune to fill positions in life above the requirements of labor, they will find the ready hand and supple fingers acquired by youthful training useful even there.

10. If all artisans had that training in childhood that secures manual expertness, while at the same time it cultivates the eye and the taste, the results would soon show not only a great addition to the products of industry, but great improvement, also, in their quality, and a like degree. of enhancement in value.

11. The Kindergarten system, when perfected and extended throughout childhood,-whether its principles be carried out in the home or in the school-room,-will be found to be the certain pathway to these great industrial results, because it secures that kind of mental and physical development that is in the order of nature;—and we may be very confident that those who receive this kind of culture in early youth, and make it the foundation for a higher technical education, will be the skilled workmen, the cunning craftsmen, and the inventors of the future.

CHAPTER XXVII.-AROUND THE WORLD.-No. 14.

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO GIBRALTAR.

I.-Malta, Carthage, and Tunis.

1. On the morning of the fourth day after we had left Alexandria, we entered the harbor of Valetta, the capital of the island of Malta, to take in coal, and anchored beneath the frowning guns of St. Elmo. Prof. Howard had already related to us the history of the island, from which we learned that Malta was formerly the seat of the famous knights of that name, who made the island one of the strongest places in the world, and the bulwark of Christendom against the Turks. Since the year 1800 it has been a British possession. He also reminded us that this is the island on which

St. Paul is supposed to have been shipwrecked, on his voyage from Asia to Italy."

2. Sailing from Valetta, we next landed at Tunis, a walled Mohammedan city of one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, on the African coast. Dr. Edson had been telling us wonderful stories of the productiveness of the soil in the vicinity of the city in ancient times,-saying that a single plant of wheat in Tunis had been known to have over three hundred stalks; and that, in modern times, it is not uncommon to find there a single plant of barley with more than eighty stalks!

3. Three miles north-west of Tunis we visited the site of ancient Carthage, so long Rome's proud rival; but although here once stood the capital city of a great commercial nation, whose navy was the largest in the world, and whose merchant ships were seen in every port, it is

a See Acts, chs. xxvii., xxviii.

E

said that the few ruins now found here are those of a more modern city, and that not a trace remains of the great Carthaginian metropolis! The site of Carthage, which was on a peninsula extending into a spacious bay of the Mediterranean, may be seen in the drawing that I send

you.

4. The Professor here read to us, from his ever-ready Hand-book, Tasso's allusion to Carthage, at the time when the Christian knights Carlo and Ubaldo passed the "dead city" on their search for Rinaldo, who had been spirited away to the Happy Gardens of the West by the sorceress Armida :

a

"Great Carthage is laid low. Scarcely can eye

Trace where she stood with all her mighty crowd:
For cities die; kingdoms and nations die;

A little sand and grass is all their shroud.

Tasso.-Canto xv. 20.

5. Sailing from Tunis, a little distance from it we passed within sight of the place where the ancient city of Utica once stood (now a small Arab village), and where, as we were reminded by the Professor, Cato the Younger, fortysix years before the Christian era, put an end to his own life, rather than fall into the power of Cæsar.

6. This allusion to Cato very naturally led the Professor to give us some account of the civil wars between Pompey and Cæsar,-of the tragic death of Pompey, whose cause Cato had espoused, and of the flight of Cato to Utica. Then he related to us the circumstances of Cato's death,― told how he had passed part of the last night of his life in reading from the writings of Plato on the immortality of the soul;-and then the Professor read to us, from Addison, that famous soliloquy which Cato is supposed to have spoken, just before he fell by his own hand.

a See the "Episode," p. 320.

II. Cato's Soliloquy on Immortality.

1. It must be so-Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else, whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us-
"Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.

2. Eternity!-thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being―
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!
The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.
Here will I hold. If there's a Power above us,—
And that there is, all Nature cries aloud

Through all her works,-He must delight in virtue;
And that which He delights in must be happy.

3. But when? or where?-This world was made for Cæsar.

I'm weary of conjectures. This must end them.

(Laying his hand on his dagger.)

Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life,
My bane and antidote are both before me.
This," in a moment, brings me to an end;
But this informs me I shall never die!

4. The soul, secure in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.

a The dagger.

'Plato's Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, which he had been reading.