34 fi 



THE POPULAE EDUOATOE. 



of the former of which a representation is given. The Chirita 

 Sinensis is acaulesceut ; its radical peduncle is blue or yellow, 

 and divided into two or three pedicels, each bearing a flower. 

 The Chirita Moonii is remarkable for its elevation, its beautiful 

 foliage, and its pale violet corolla ornamented internally with a 

 golden spot. 



Mitraria cocdnea, or scarlet mitraria (Fig. 193), is a little 

 Chilian shrub, a beautiful spring-blooming plant for the green- 

 house. Its stem and boughs are weak and slender, its pedun- 

 cles opposed and unifloral. Its corolla is of a bright red. The 

 Achimenes multiftora, or many-flowered achimenes (Fig. 192), is 

 a, Brazilian species, only introduced into Europe in 1843, re- 

 markable, like all its congeners, for its general elegance of aspect 

 and the long duration of its flowers. 



BEADING AND ELOCUTION. XXIV. 



EXEECISES ON EXPRESSIVE TONE (continued.) 

 [To be marked for Inflections by the student.] 



XV. CAUSES OF WAK. 



What are sufficient causes of war let no man say, let no legislator 

 say, until the question of war is directly and inevitably before him. 

 Jurists may be permitted, with comparative safety, to pile tome upon 

 tome of interminable disquisition upon the motives, reasons, and 

 causes of just and unjust war. Metaphysicians may be suffered witli 

 impunity to spin the thread of their speculations until it is attenuated 

 to a cobweb; but for a body created for the government of a great 

 nation, and for the adjustment and protection of its infinitely diversi- 

 fied interests, it is worse than folly to speculate upon the causes of 

 war, until the great question shall be presented for immediate action 

 until they shall hold the united question of cause, motive, and present 

 expediency, in the very palm of their hands. War is a tremendous 

 evil. Come when it will, unless it shall come in the necessary defence 

 of our national security, or of that honour under whose protection 

 national security reposes, it will come too soon too soon for our 

 national prosperity too soon for our individual happiness too soon 

 for the frugal, industrious, and virtuous habits of our citizens too 

 soon, perhaps, for our most precious institutions. The man who, for 

 any cause, save the sacred cause of public security, which makes all 

 wars defensive the man who, for any cause but this, shall promote 

 or compel this final and terrible resort, assumes a responsibility second 

 to none, nay, transceudently deeper and higher than any which man 

 can assume before his fellow-man, or in the presence of God, his 

 Creator. Binney. 



XVI. A CHILD CARRIED AWAY BY AN EAGLE. 



The great golden eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped 

 down, and flew away with something in his talons. One single sudden 

 female shriek, and then shouts and outcries, as if a church spire had 

 tumbled down on a congregation at a sacrament ! " Hannah Lamond's 

 bairn ! Hannah Lamond's bairn ! " was the loud, fast-spreading cry. 

 " The eagle's ta'en off Hannah Lamond's bairn ! " and many hundred 

 feet were in another instant hurrying towards the mountain. Two 

 miles of hill, and dale, and copse, and shingle, and many intersecting 

 brooks, lay between ; but in an incredibly short time the foot of the 

 mountain was alive with people. 



The eyrie was well known, and both old birds were visible on the 

 rock-ledge. But who shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart, 

 the sailor, who had been at the storming of many a fort, attempted in 

 vain ? All kept gazing, weeping, wringing of hands in vain, rooted to 

 the ground, or running backwards and forwards, like so many ants 

 essaying their new wings in discomfiture. " What's the use what's 

 the use o" ony puir human means ? We have no power but in 

 prayer!" and many knelt down fathers and mothers thinking of 

 their own babies as if they would force the deaf heavens to hear ! 



Hannah Lamond had all this while been sitting on a rock, with a 

 race perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person fixed on the 

 eyrie. Nobody had noticed her ; for strong as all sympathies with her 

 had been at the swoop of the eagle, they were now swallowed up in 

 the agony of eyesight. " Only last sabbath was my sweet wee wean 

 baptized, in the name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 

 Ghost ! " and, on uttering these words, she flew off through the 

 brakes, and over the huge stones, up up up, faster than ever hunts- 

 man ran in to the death, fearless as a goat playing among the 

 precipices. 



No one doubted, no one could doubt, that she would soon be dashed 

 to pieces. But have not people who walk in their sleep, obedient to 

 the mysterious guidance of dreams, climbed the walls of old ruins, 

 and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the edge of unguarded 

 battlements, and down dilapidated staircases, deep as draw-wells, or 

 coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed and unseeing eyes, unharmed 

 to their beds, at midnight ? It is all the work of the soul, to whom 

 the body is a slave ; and shall not the agony of a mother's passion, 

 who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast, hurried 



off by a demon to a hideous death, bear her limbs aloft wherevei 

 there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and, fierce! 

 and more furious far, in the passion of love, than any bird of prey 

 that ever bathed its beak in blood, throttle the fiends that with theit 

 heavy wings would fain flap her down the cliffs, and hold up the child, 

 in deliverance, before the eye of the all-seeing God ? 



No stop no stay ; she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath 

 her feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands 

 strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend ? That fear, 

 then, but once crossed her heart as she went up up up, to the little 

 image made of her own flesh and blood. " The God who holds me 

 now from perishing, will not the same God save me when my child 

 is on my bosom ? " Down came the fierce rushing of the eagles' wings 

 each savage bird dashing close to her head, so that she saw the 

 yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once they quailed and were 

 cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an ash jutting out of 

 the cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract ; and the Christian mother 

 falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and blood, clasping her 

 child dead, dead, dead, no doubt but umnangled and untorn, and 

 swaddled up, just as it was when she laid it down asleep among the 

 fresh hay, in a nook of the harvest field. 



Oh ! what a pang of perfect blessedness transfixed her heart from 

 that faint, feeble cry, " It lives it lives it lives ! " and baring her 

 bosom, with loud laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips 

 of tha unconscious innocent once more murmuring at the fount of life 

 and love ! " O Thou great and thou dreadful God ! whither hast thou 

 brought me, one of the most sinful of thy creatures ? Oh ! save my 

 soul, lest it perish, even for thy own name's sake ! O Thou, who 

 diedst to save sinners, have mercy upon me." 



Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old trees far, 

 far down, and dwindled into specks a thousand creatures of her own 

 kind, stationary, or running to and fro ! Was that the sound of the 

 waterfall, or the faint roar of voices ? Is that her native strath ? 

 and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands the 

 cradle of her child ? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot ! Here 

 must she die and, when her breast is exhausted, her baby too ! And 

 those horrid beaks, and eyes, and talons, and wings will return ; and 

 her child will be devoured at last, even within the dead bosom that 

 can protect it no longer. 



Where, all this while,- was Mark Steuart, the sailor ? Half way up 

 the cliffs. But his eye had got dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart 

 sick ; and he who had so often reefed the top-gallant sail, when at 

 midnight the coming of the gale was heard afar, covered his face with 

 his hands, and dared look no longer on the swimming heights. 



" And who will take care of my poor bedridden mother ? " thought 

 Hannah, whose soul, through the exhaustion of so many passions, could 

 no more retain in its grasp that hope which it had clutched in despair. 

 A voice whispered, " God ! " She looked around, expecting to see an 

 angel ; but nothing moved except a rotten branch, that, under its own 

 weight, broke off from the crumbling rock. Her eye, by some secret 

 sympathy of her soul with the inanimate object, watched its fall, 

 and it seemed to stop not far off, on a small platform. 



Her child was bound within her bosom she remembered not how 

 or when but it was safe ; and scarcely daring to open her eyes, she 

 slid down the shelving rocks, and found herself on a small piece of 

 firm root-bound soil, with the tops of bushes appearing below. With 

 fingers suddenly strengthened into the power of iron, she swung 

 herself down by brier, and broom, and heather, and dwarf-birch. 

 There a loosened stone leapt over a ledge ; and no sound was heard, 

 so profound was its fall. There the shingle rattled down the screes, 

 and she hesitated not to follow. Her feet bounded against the huge 

 stone that stopped them, but she felt no pain. Her body was callous 

 as the cliff. 



Steep as the wall of a house was now the side of the precipice. 

 But it was matted with ivy centuries old, long ago dead, and with- 

 out a single green leaf, but with thousands of arm-thick stems, petri- 

 fied into the rock, and covering it as with a trellis. She bound her 

 baby to her neck, and with hands and feet clung to that fearful 

 ladder. Turning round her head and looking down, lo, the whole 

 population of the parish, so great was the multitude, on their knees ! 

 and hush ! the voice of psalms ! a hymn breathing the spirit of one 

 united prayer ! Sad and solemn was the strain, but nothing dirge- 

 likebreathing not of death, but deliverance. Often had she sung 

 that tune perhaps the very words, but them she heard not in hur 

 own hut, she and her mother, or in the kirk, along with all the con- 

 gregation. An unseen hand seemed fastening her fingers to the ribs 

 of ivy; and in sudden inspiration, believing that her life was to be 

 saved, she became almost as fearless as if she had been changed into a 

 winged creature. 



Again her feet touched stones and earth. The psalm was hushed, 

 but a tremulous sobbing voice was close beside her, and lo ! a she- 

 goat, with two little kids at her feet. " Wild heights," thought she, 

 " do these creatures climb; but the dam will lead down her kid by the 

 easiest paths, for oh ! even in the brute creatures, what is the holy 

 power of a mother's love ! " and turning round her head, she kisst.-d 

 her sleeping baby, and for the first time she wept. 



Overhead frowned the front of the precipice, never touched before 



