BY MARY D. BRINE.
Ring, bells, ring! for the King is here;
Ring, bells, ring! for the glad New Year.
He mounts his throne with a smiling face,
His sceptre lifts with majestic grace.
Ring for the joy his advent brings;
Ring for the happy songs he sings;
Ring for the promises sweet and true
With which we gladden our hearts anew.
The new-born Year is a happy fellow,
His voice is sweet, and low, and mellow;
With the Christmas holly his head is crowned,
With the Christmas blessings we'll wrap him round.
Then ring, bells, ring! for the joyous day—
The Past lies silent, the Present is gay;
Ring out your merriest, cheer after cheer,
To welcome the birth of the Happy New Year!
[BEE-HUNTING.]
BY JIMMY BROWN.
The more I see of this world the hollower I find everybody. I don't mean that people haven't got their insides in them, but they are so dreadfully ungrateful. No matter how kind and thoughtful any one may be, they never give him any credit for it. They will pretend to love you and call you "dear Jimmy what a fine manly boy come here and kiss me" and then half an hour afterward they'll say "where's that little wretch let me just get hold of him O! I'll let him know." Deceit and ingratitude are the monster vices of the age and they are rolling over our beloved land like the flood. (I got part of that elegant language from the temperance lecturer last week, but I improved it a good deal.)
There is Aunt Sarah. The uncle that belonged to her died two years ago and she's awfully rich. She comes to see us sometimes with Tommy—that's her boy, a little fellow ten years old—and you ought to see how mother and Sue wait on her and how pleasant father is when she's in the room. Now she always said that she loved me like her own son. She'd say to father "How I envy you that noble boy what a comfort he must be to you," and father would say "Yes he has some charming qualities" and look as if he hadn't laid onto me with his cane that very morning and told me that my conduct was such. You'll hardly believe that just because I did the very best I could and saved her precious Tommy from an apple grave, Aunt Sarah says I'm a young Cain and knows I'll come to the gallows.
She came to see us last Friday, and on Saturday I was going bee-hunting. I read all about it in a book. You take an axe and go out-doors and follow a bee, and after a while the bee takes you to a hollow tree full of honey and you cut the tree down and carry the honey home in thirty pails and sell it for ever so much. I and Sam McGinnis were going and Aunt Sarah says "O take Tommy with you the dear child would enjoy it so much." Of course no fellow that's twelve years old wants a little chap like that tagging after him but mother spoke up and said that I'd be delighted to take Tommy and so I couldn't help myself.
We stopped in the wood-shed and borrowed father's axe and then we found a bee. The bee wouldn't fly on before us in a straight line but kept lighting on everything, and once he lit on Sam's hand and stung him good. However we chased the bee lively and by-and-by he started for his tree and we ran after him. We had just got to the old dead apple-tree in the pasture when we lost the bee and we all agreed that his nest must be in the tree. It's an awfully big old tree, and it's all rotted away on one side so that it stands as if it was ready to fall over any minute.
Nothing would satisfy Tommy but to climb that tree. We told him he'd better let a bigger fellow do it but he wouldn't listen to reason. So we gave him a boost and he climbed up to where the tree forked and then he stood up and began to say something when he disappeared. We thought he had fallen out of the tree and we ran round to the other side to pick him up but he wasn't there. Sam said it was witches but I knew he must be somewhere so I climbed up the tree and looked.