AMERICAN ACRICNLTtTRI 
THE CHILD IS DEAD! 
It is hard to believe it; that we shall no more 
hear the glad voice, nor meet the merry laugh 
that burst so often from its glad heart. 
Child as it was, it was a pleasant child, and 
to the partial parent there are traits of loveliness 
that no other eye may see. It was a wise or¬ 
dering of Providence that we should love our 
own children as no one else loves them, and as 
we love the children of none besides. And ours 
was a lovely child. 
But the child is dead. You may put away 
its playthings. Put them where they will be safe. 
I would not like to have them broken or lost; 
and you need not lend them to other children 
when they come to see us. It would pain me 
to see them in other hands, much as I love to 
see children happy with their toys. 
. Its clothes you may lay aside; I shall often 
look them over, and each of the colors that he 
wore will remind me of him as he looked when 
he was here. I shall weep often when I think 
of him; but there is a luxury in thinking of 
the one that is gone, which I would not part 
with for the world. I think of my child now, 
a child always, though an angel among angels. 
The child is dead. The eye has lost its lustre. 
The hand is still and cold. Its little heart is 
not beating now. How pale it looks! Yet the 
very form is dear to me. Every lock of its 
hair, every feature of the face is a treasure that 
I shall prize the more, as the months of my 
sorrow come and go. 
Lay the little one in his coffin. He was never 
in so cold and hard a bed, but he will feel it not. 
He would not know it, if he had been laid in 
his cradle, or in his mother’s arms. Throw a 
flower or two by his side; like them he with¬ 
ered. 
Carry him out to the grave. Gently. It is 
a hard road this to the grave. Every jar seems 
to disturb the infant sleeper. Here we are, at 
the brink of the sepulchre. Oh how damp, and 
dark, and cold! But the dead do not feel it. 
ihere is no pain, no fear, no weeping there. 
Sleep on and take your rest! 
Fill it up! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! 
Every clod seems to fall on my heart. Every 
smothered sound from the grave is saying— 
Gone, gone, gone ! It is full now. Lay the 
turf gently over the dear child. Plant a myrtle 
among the sods, and let the little one sleep 
among the trees and flowers. Our child is not 
there. His dust, precious dust, indeed, is there, 
but our child is in heaven. He is not there; 
he is risen. 
I shall think of the form that is mouldering 
here among the dead; and it will be a mournful 
comfort to come at times, and think of the child 
that was once the light of our house, and the 
idol ah! that I must own the secret of this 
sorrow—the idol of my heart. 
And it is beyond the language to express the 
j°y> the midst of tears. I feel that my sin, 
in making an idol of the chiid, has not made 
that infant less dear to Jesus. Nay, thei’e is 
even something that tells me the Saviour called 
the darling from me, that I might love the Sav¬ 
iour more when I had one child less to love. 
He knoweth our frame; he knows the way to 
win and bind us. Dear Saviour, as thou hast 
my lamb, give me too a place in thy bosom. 
Set me as a seal on thy heart. And now let us 
go back into the house. It is strangely changed. 
It is silent and cheerless, gloomy even. When 
did I enter this door without the greeting of 
those lips and eyes, that I shall greet no more ? 
Can the absence of one produce so great a 
change so soon ? When one of the children 
was away on a visit, we did not feel the absence 
as we do now. That was for a time; this is 
forever. He will not return. Hark! I thought 
for a moment it was the child, but it was only 
my heart’s yearning for the lost. He will not 
come again.— Author Unknown. 
Preaching is of much avail, but practice is 
more potent. A godly life is the strongest ar¬ 
gument that you can offer to a skeptic. 
Dimensions op Heaven. —The following cal¬ 
culations, based on a text of Revelations, is con¬ 
tributed to the Charlottesville (N. Y.) Jefferso¬ 
nian : 
A Description of Heaven. —Revelations, xxi. 
16. “And he measured the city with a reed, 
twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the 
breadth, and the height of it are equal.” 
Twelve thousand furlongs—7,920,000 feet— 
which being cubed, is 842,088,000,000.000,000 
cubical feet; the half of which we will res'erve 
for the Throne of God and the Court of Heaven, 
half of the balance for streets, and the remainder 
by 3,096, the cubical feet in a room 16 feet 
square and 16 high, will be 20,844,750,000,000. 
We will now suppose the world always did 
and always will contain 900,000,000 inhabitants, 
and a generation will last thirty-three and a third 
years, 2,700,000,000,000 persons. Then sup¬ 
pose there are 11,240 such worlds, equal to this 
number of inhabitants and duration of years, 
then there would be a room 16 feet long, 16 feet 
wide, and 16 feet high for each person, and yet 
there would be room. 
-O-O-C- 
Respect Due to Wives. —Do not jest with 
your wife upon a subject on which there is dan¬ 
ger of wounding her feelings. Remember she 
treasures every word you utter. Do not speak 
of virtue in another man’s wife, to remind your 
own of a fault. Do not reproach her with per¬ 
sonal defects; for, if she has sensibility, you in¬ 
flict a wound difficult to heal. Do not treat her 
with inattention in company; it touches her 
pride, and she will not respect you more, or 
love you better for it. Do not upbraid your 
wife in the presence of a third party; the sense 
of your disregard for her feelings, will prevent 
her from acknowledging her faults. Do not en¬ 
tertain your wife by praising the beauty and 
accomplishments of other women. If you would 
have a pleasant home and cheerful wife, pass 
your evenings under your own roof. Do not be 
stern and silent in your house, and remarkable 
for sociality elsewhere.— Dollar Newspaper. 
SINGLE WOMEN. 
Many are the jibes and sneers thrown out 
against single women, after they have passed a 
a “ certain age.” These too often result from 
thoughtlessness, or an attempt to be witty at 
another’s expense. In the following article, the 
ever-benevolent and kind-hearted Horace Mann, 
pays a just and beautiful tribute to the value of 
the maiden sister or aunt. 
Not being mothers on their own account, they 
have leisure to be mothers for every body else. 
What a blessing in the circle of the families to 
which she belongs, is an unmarried sister ! She 
watches by the aged father or mother with a 
vestal’s fidelity, while her sisters and brothers 
abandon the old homestead for Cupid, or cupid¬ 
ity. Who so ready as she to solace the be¬ 
reavement of a friend, all of whose earthly 
hopes have been swallowed up in the grave? 
To the widowed brother, her sympathetic voice 
and spontaneity of kindness, seem almost like a 
return from the tomb of the idol he had laid 
there; and to the bereaved sister, whose stay 
and support have been stricken down, she be¬ 
comes, as it were, the strength of another man¬ 
hood. Next to the mother herself, she is the 
last to cease her expostulations with a way¬ 
ward daughter, or her efforts to reclaim an un- 
filial son. To children bereft of parents, she 
becomes both father and mother, and trains un¬ 
conscious orphanage in the way it should go. 
How Protean her capabilities of usefulness, 
transforming herself by turns into friend, nurse, 
physician, or spiritual guide—into the grave 
companion of the old, or the frolicksome play¬ 
mate of the young, as ever-varying occasion 
may demand! Who does not know that when 
any child of all her kindred is deaf, or blind, or 
halt, or whom a step-dame Nature has maltreat¬ 
ed in any other way, a never-failing resource is 
ST. 263 
found in the “ universal Auntyas though 
she kept a full assortment of eyes, and ears, and 
faculties for all kinds of impotent folk! Then, 
for the children’s dresses, does she not always 
know the latest style? for their learning has 
she not seen the sagest books, and for their 
health, has she not the newest cure-alls all by 
heart ? And oh ! for the romping and roister¬ 
ing groups of the nursery, does she not carry 
all the toy-shops of France and China in her 
pockets ? Who, of all the household, can help 
paying homage to such a divinity, even though 
it sometimes does seem as though she would kill 
us with kindness ? 
Outside, and beyond the family relation, this 
personage often becomes a kind of public char¬ 
acter, though without the envy or the odium 
which attaches to the notoriety of public men. 
As a teacher of schools, how she shames the 
wisdom of the lawgiver and the retributions of 
the judge, by savi - where they sacrifice, and 
redeeming where they destroy! To hospitals 
for disease and suffering, to prisons for penal 
retribution, to receptacles for reformation from 
deepest debasement and guilt, how divinely 
does she come, her head encircled with a halo 
of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth 
on which she treads, and the celestial radiance 
of her benignity making vice begin its work of 
repentance through very envy of the beauty of 
virtue! The two Misses Fellows, of Boston, 
within the last ten years have found homes for 
more than a thousand destitute orphan child¬ 
ren, carrying on this warfare against ignorance 
and perdition, as the apostle said, at their own 
charges. What mothers, unless it be such as 
the mother of Washington, deserve so much as 
they the admiration and homage of mankind ? 
For the American Agriculturist. 
YORKSHIRE PUDDING. 
This' is made by baking a batter pudding in a 
dripping-pan, under a piece of roasting beef, and 
is much liked by most persons who have tried it. 
The beef is first partly baked, and is then sup¬ 
ported about two or three inches above the bottom 
of the dripping-pan, by placing it upon little iron 
tripods, or upon iron cross rods. These tripods 
can easily be made by a blacksmith, or little 
three-sided wooden horses may be made, four 
12-penny nails being deprived of their heads 
and driven into one side of the wood for legs, 
and the meat placed upon the upper sharp edges 
of two or three of these, set in different parts of 
the dripping-pan. 
For the pudding, use the following propor¬ 
tions. Four eggs—well beaten—a full pint of 
milk, a little salt, and add flour enough to make 
a moderately thick but running batter. There 
should be enough of this to cover the bottom of 
the dripping-pan one-half to two-thirds of an 
inch deep. 
Before making the batter, let the meat be 
partly baked over the pan with a little water kept 
under it. Then skim off the fat from the gravy, 
pour in the batter, and bake about three-fourths 
of an hour. 
When done, remove the meat to the center of 
a large platter, lift out the legs of the tripods 
carefully from the pudding so as not to break it; 
cut it in small squares and place them around 
the edges of the platter with the brown side up. 
The pudding thus baked has absorbed the 
juices flowing from the meat, and will be found 
very rich and delicious. 
Wise men mingle mirth with their cares, as 
a help to forget or overcome them; but to re¬ 
sort to intoxication for the ease of one’s mind, 
s to cure melancholy by madness. 
