BUY THE TRUTH AND SELL IT NOT. Prov. 23:23.
II.
THE BUTTERFLY.
A party of boys had been playing in the fields on a sunny afternoon in the bright month of June. They had been chasing a gay butterfly, which, in its uncertain flight, had led them over hedge and ditch, till at last the beautiful prize was won, and the brilliant insect remained a helpless prisoner in the hands of its pursuers. Alas, for the butterfly! A few moments before so gay and so free, sometimes resting on a blossom, then fluttering up towards the sky, its lovely wings were rudely torn away, and it lay quivering in the agonies of death. At this moment Ella Claremont, a young lady of the village, approached the party; she had seen the chase and its close, and looked with regret on the poor mangled butterfly. “Why did you not let it live?” said she; “it had never harmed you, and it was so happy. You easily took away its little life,” she added; “but could any of you, could any power on earth, give that life back again?”
A HELPLESS PRISONER.