As a scholar he was persevering and thorough. After he had gained some knowledge of English, he conceived the idea of reducing his native language to writing. As it was merely a spoken language, everything was to be done. He had succeeded in translating the Book of Genesis and made some progress in the work of making a grammar and dictionary. But the work he had planned was not to be finished by his own hand. Within a year from the time he entered the school at Cornwall he was called home. As recorded upon the marble slab, his last thoughts were for his native island; his last earthly longing was, that the Gospel might be preached to his own countrymen. One of our popular cyclopædias gives a brief mention of this remarkable young man and makes this statement: "He was the cause of the establishment of American Missions in the Sandwich Islands."
To have so lived, and by his earnestness and zeal so inspired others that upon his death they were ready to take up and carry forward the work he had planned, was to have accomplished even more than he could had he been permitted to enter upon the work for which he was preparing.
Faye Huntington.
DISASTER.
A HOLE in the pocket's a very bad thing,
And brings a boy trouble faster
Than anything under the sun, I think.
My mother, she calls it disaster.
For all in one day,
I lost, I may say,
Through a hole not as big as a dollar,
A number of things,
Including some rings
From a chain Fido wore as a collar,
My knife, a steel pen, a nice little note
That my dear cousin Annie had sent me.
The boy who found that, pinned it on to his hat,
And tries all the time to torment me.
I'd lost a new dime
That very same time,
But it lodged in the heel of my stocking;
And one thing beside,
Which to you I confide,
Though I fear you may think it quite shocking:
The doctor had made some nice little pills
For me to take home to the baby;
But, when I reached there, I was quite in despair,
They had slipped through my pocket, it may be.
Aunt Sallie, she,
As cool as can be,
Said, a hole in a boy's reputation,
Is harder to cure,
And worse to endure,
Than all pockets unsound in the nation.
Still a hole in the pocket's a very bad thing,
And I am sure a real cause of disaster.
But baby is well; so you must never tell;
Perhaps he got well all the faster.
—Gwinnet Howard, in Independent.
AND now we must begin to confess, very reluctantly it is true, that the long evenings we have had the past few months around the Family Lamp are slowly growing shorter and shorter. Before we can have time to realize it very deeply somebody will say, "Oh! don't light the lamp just yet, it is so much pleasanter to sit in the twilight," and then it won't seem but about ten minutes, and the children and young folks will be whisked off to bed, and the games will be crowded entirely off the programme, and the Family will feel as if it had no good-night frolic at all. So we must get all the fun we can, and to-night we propose as a grand bit of sport—