Perhaps this was unkind, but he did not mean it to be so.
"Do tell us about it," said the children, all except Mary, she had gone over in the corner of the sofa.
"Well," continued uncle Dick, "when I was in India, it lay all over the ground like the snow here in winter, (only not so thick) in some parts of the country—kind of salt. When tasted it has a cooling, but bitter taste. About an inch of the earth is taken up and put in large tanks something like that you saw at Long Branch last summer (only not near so large) full of water, and soaked there. The water is then taken out, and the saltpetre is found in the bottom of the tanks. The most that we use comes from the East Indies. It is sometimes called nitre. In a great many places it is also found in caves."
"Well, now," said mamma, who had come in during the conversation, "that's something I never knew before."
"Nor I either," said Mary.
"But you know a little more about it than you did awhile ago, don't you?"
This from uncle Dick.
"How queer!" said Freddie and Willie.
[JOSEPH AND RICHARD.]
TWO boys about whom I think you will like to hear. Great friends they were, and schoolmates. If you had lived a few years earlier, and had been sent to London to school, you might have attended the school known as the "Charterhouse," and sat beside Joseph and Richard. I wonder if you would have liked them? They were very unlike each other. Joseph was a quiet, handsome, well-behaved boy, who always had his lessons, always did very nearly what was right, and always took a prize, sometimes two or three of them. But poor Richard was forever getting into trouble. A good-natured, merry boy who did what he happened to think of first, "just for fun," and sometimes spent hours in bitter repentings afterwards.