BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE.
Not only because of the kindness of God to this nation in the past should such a reverential insertion be made, but because of the fact that we are going to want Divine interposition still further in our national history. This gold and silver question will never be settled until God settles it. This question of tariff and free trade will never be settled until God settles it. This question between the East and the West, which is getting hotter and hotter, and looks toward a Republic of the Pacific, will not be settled until God settles it. We needed God in the one hundred and twenty years of our past national life, and we will need Him still more in the next one hundred and twenty years. Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates of our glorious Constitution, and let the King of Glory come in! Make one line of that immortal document radiant with Omnipotence! Spell at least one word with Thrones! At the beginning, or at the close, or in the centre, recognize Him from whom as a nation we have received all the blessing of the past and upon whom we are dependent for the future. Print that one word "God," or "Lord," or "Eternal Father," or "Ruler of Nations," somewhere between the first word and the last. The Great Expounder of the Constitution sleeps at Marshfield, Massachusetts, the Atlantic Ocean still humming near his pillow of dust its prolonged lullaby; but is there not some one now living, who, in the white marble palace of the nation on yonder hill, not ten minutes away, will become the Irradiator of the Constitution by causing to be added the most tremendous word of our English vocabulary, the name of that Being before whom all nations must bow or go into defeat and annihilation,—"God?"
THE ENCHANTED SHIRT.
BY JOHN HAY.
The king was sick. His cheek was red,
And his eye was clear and bright;
He ate and drank with a kingly zest,
And peacefully snored at night.
But he said he was sick—and a king should know;
And doctors came by the score;
They did not cure him. He cut off their heads,
And sent to the schools for more.
At last two famous doctors came,
And one was poor as a rat;
He had passed his life in studious toil
And never found time to grow fat.
The other had never looked in a book;
His patients gave him no trouble;
If they recovered, they paid him well,
If they died, their heirs paid double.
Together they looked at the royal tongue,
As the king on his couch reclined;
In succession they thumped his august chest,
But no trace of disease could find.