Page 15

4

The Power of a Word.

Reader, did you ever think how much
power is vested in a word? It may have
caused but little exertion on your part to
utter it. Only a single breath may have
been required to waft it from your lips to
the ears of your listener, but when once
spoken it was past recall. It revealed the
secret motives and brought to light the
hidden thoughts of your heart. Ah! the
word may have been a thoughtless one,
spoken in an unguarded moment; but it
left its impress, and may be remembered
long after your voice is hushed, and you
are sleeping the sleep that knows no waking.

Perhaps the word was an unkind one,
harshly spoken, and accompanied by a
cold, chilling look which cast a gloomy
shadow o'er some loving, sensitive heart.
Perhaps it was one of malice, envy, or deceit,
and enkindled a bitter feeling of resentment
which will live on and on while
memory lasts; or it may have been a cheerful,
pleasant, loving word, proceeding
from a heart brimful of the purest kindness,
which fell like the sweetest music on the
listening ear, touching a hidden chord in
the soul, which will ever respond in strains
of love and harmony. Perchance it may
have been a word of sympathy or encouragement,
spoken in the tenderest accents, so
that every word may have scattered the
clouds, dispelled the gloom, and diffused
sunshine into the heart well nigh crushed
beneath its burden of woe.

Words may seem but little things to us,
but they possess a power beyond calculation.
They swiftly fly from us to others,
and, though we scarcely give them a passing
thought, their spirit lives. Though
they are fleeting as the breath that bore
them, their influence is as enduring as the
heart they reach. Ah! well may we guard
our lips so that none grieve in silence o'er
words that we have carelessly dropped.
Well may we strive to scatter loving,
cheering, encouraging words to soothe the
weary, and encourage the nobler, finer
feeling of those with whom we daily come
in contact. Well may we endeavor to use
right words, for they are indeed precious.
How they endear each to the other.
Though they cost the speaker nothing,
they are more valuable than diamonds,
and shed a brighter luster on all around.

Three Kisses.

His first kiss fell upon my hair, and
resting for a moment there, it glided down
unto my brow, and lay there like a flake
of snow; "I reverence thee," it seemed to
say -- "I honor thee, and shall always."
The next time that we chanced to meet,
his lips so pure and wondrous cheek -- and to
my soul it seemed to speak, in music
tones: "let come what may, this friendship
ne'er shall pass away." The third
upon my lips was pressed, and oh! what
comfort, peace and rest, it brought unto
my wearied heart, could contain a better
part -- for me, than what was breathed
in this -- last clinging, sweet and rapturous
kiss? A year rolled onward, and again
-- I met this noblest, best of men -- and as
his lips touched brow and cheek -- and
quivering mouth, they seemed to
speak--these words: "For all eternity--I'll honor
love and cherish thee--my darling wife,
that is to be."

Happiness between man
and wife can only be secured by
that constant tenderness and care
of the parties for each other which
are based upon warm and demonstrative
love.

THOSE CARPETS.

A Horror of the Springtide.

The Utica Herald remarks that the annual
ceremony of taking up, and whipping, and
putting down carpets is almost upon us. It is
one of the ills which flesh is heir to, and can
not be avoided. You go home some pleasant
spring day at peace with the world, and find
the baby with a clean face and your favorite
pudding for dinner. Then your wife tells
you how much younger you are looking, and
says she really hopes she can turn that walking-dress
she wore last fall, and save the expense
of a new suit, and then she asks you if
you cant just help her about taking up the
carpet. If you are a fool, and you generally
are by that time, you tell her of course you
can, just as well as not. Then she gets a saucer
for the tacks and stands and holds it, and
you get the claw, and get down on your knees
and begin to help her. You feel quite economical
about the first three tacks, and take
them out carefully and put them in the saucer.
Your wife is good about holding the
saucer, and beguiles you with an interesting
story about how your neighbor's little boy is
not expected to live till morning.

Then you come to the tack with a crooked
head, and you get the claw under it and the
head comes off, and the leather comes off, and
the carpet comes off, and as it won't do to leave
the tack in the floor, because. it will tear the
carpet when it is put down again, you go to
work and skin your knuckle, and get a sliver
under your thumbnail, and tell your wife to
shut up about that everlasting boy, and make
up your mind that it does not make any difference
about that tack, and so you begin on the
corner where the carpet is doubled two or three
times, and has been nailed down with a shingle
nail. You don't care a continental about saving
the nail, because you find that it is not a good
time for the practice of economy; but you do
feel a little hurt when both clauses break off
from the claw, and the nail does not budge a
peg. Then your manhood asserts itself, and
you rise in your might and throw the carpet
claw at the dog, and get hold of the carpet with
both hands, and the air is full of dust and
flying tacks, and there is a fringe of carpet
yarn all along by the mopboard, and the baby
cries, and the cat goes anywhere, anywhere out
of the world, and your wife says you ought to
be ashamed of yourself to talk so--. but that
carpet comes up.

Then you lift one side of the stove, and your
wife tries to get the carpet from under it, but
can't, because you are standing on it. So you
try a new hold, and just after your back breaks
the carpet is clear. You are not through yet.
Your wife don't tell you any more little stories
but she gets you old coat and hangs it on you,
and smothers you with the carpet, and opens
the back door and shoves you out and intimates
that the carpets need whipping. When
you hang the tormenting things across the
clothes-line the wrong way, and get it righted,
and have it slide off into the mud, and hang it
up again, and get half a pint of dust and three
broken tacks snapped out of the northwest
corner into your mouth by the wind, you make
some observation which you neglected to mention
while in the house. Then you hunt up a
stick and go for that carpet. The first blow
hides the sun and all the fair face of Nature
behind a cloud of dust, and right in the center
of that cloud, with the wind square in your
face, no matter how you stand, you wield that
cudgel until both hands are blistered and the
milk of human kindness curdles in your
bosom.

You can whip the carpet a longer or shorter
period, according to the size of your mad; it
don't make any difference to the carpet, it is
just as dusty and fuzzy, and generally disagreeable
after you have whipped it two hours,
as it was when you commenced. Then you
bundle it up, with one corner dragging, and
stumble into the house, and have more trouble
with the stove, and fail to find any way of
using the carpet-stretcher while you stand on
the carpet, and fail to find any place to stand off
from the carpet, and you get on your knees
again, while your wife holds the saucer, and
with blind confidence hands you broken tacks,
crooked tacks, tacks with no points, tacks
with no heads, tacks with no leathers, tacks
with the biggest end at the point.

Finally the carpet is down, and the baby
comes back, and the cat comes back, and the
dog comes back, and your wife smiles sweetly,
and says she is glad the job is off her mind. As
it is too late to do anything else, you sit by the
fire and smoke, with the inner consciousness
that you are the meanest man in America.
The next day you hear her wife tell a friend
that she is so tired; she took up and put down
that great heavy carpet yesterday.

GRAPES OF THORNS.

We must not hope to be mowers,
And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Until we have first been sowers,
And watered the furrows with tears,
It is not just as we take it
This mystical world of ours:
Life's field will yield, as we make it,
A harvest of thorns or flowers!

ALICE CARY.

Study of Nature.

When Smeaton was in search of that
form best fitted to resist the combined
action of wind and waves, he found it in
the trunk of the oak. When Watt was
employed to conduct the supply of water
across the Clyde to the city of Glasgow,
he borrowed his admirable contrivance of
a flexible water-main, from considering
the flexibility of a lobster's tail; and so,
when Mr. Brunell was engaged in superintending
the construction of a tunnel
under the Thames, it was from observing
the head of an apparently insignificant
insect that he derived his first conception
of the ingenious shield, which he introduced
in advance of the workmen, to
protect them from being crushed by the
falling in of the earth. It becomes us,
then, while we trace the operations of human
ingenuity in adapting means to its
proposed ends, to raise our thoughts to
that Divine Architect, who has imprinted
traces of his widow and power on all
his works, causing the heavens to declare
his glory, and the earth, throughout all
its domains of land, sea and air, to show
forth his handiwork.

Inspirations.

By inspirations are meant all those interior
attractions, motions, reproaches and
remorse, lights, and conceptions, which
God excites in us, pervading our hearts
with His blessings, through His fatherly
care and love, in order to awaken, stimulate,
urge and attract us to the practice of
every virtue, to heavenly love, to good
resolutions; in a word, to everything that
may help us on our way to eternal happiness.
Now, though the inspiration should
continue during our whole life, yet we
could not render ourselves pleasing to God
if we took no pleasure in it, and gave not
consent to it. Resolve, then, to accept
with cordiality all the inspirations it
should please God to send you, and, when
they come, receive them as ambassadors
sent by the King of Heaven.

Old Letters.

Never burn kindly letters; it is pleasant
to read them when the ink is brown,
the paper yellow with age, and the hand
that traced the friendly words is folded
over the heart that prompted them under
the green sod. Above all never burn love
letters. To read them in after years is
like a resurrection to one's youth. The
elderly spinster finds, in the impassioned
offer she foolishly rejected twenty years
ago, a fountain of rejuvenescence. Glancing
over it, she realizes that she was a
belle and a beauty, and beholds her
former self in a mirror much more
congenial to her tastes than the one that
confronts her in the dressing-room. The
"widow indeed" derives a sweet and
solemn consolation from the letters of the
beloved one who has journeyed before her
to the far-off land from which there comes
no message, and where she hopes one day
to join him. No photographs can so vividly
recall to the memory of the mother
the tenderness and devotion of the children
who have left at the call of heaven,
as the epistolary outpourings of their love.
The letter of a true son or daughter to a t
true mother is something better than an
image of the features--it is a reflex of the
writer's soul.

A RHYME OF LIFE.

Our life is but a winter's day;
Some only breakfast and away;
Others to dinner stay, and are full fed;
The oldest man but sups and goes to bed!
Large is his debt who lingers all the day,
Who goes the soonest has the least to pay.