A BUBBLE PARTY.
Choose all your players if you can beforehand, so as to have each one select his and her color. As far as possible, wear as much of that color, putting away all other colors, on dress, in button-hole of coat, or scarf around in Highland fashion on the boys' coats, and be sure to tie a bright bow of ribbon of same color on stem of pipe. A player can decorate himself or herself in any way he or she chooses. Variety makes the game all the more brilliant. A cap trimmed with one's color is always pretty for the girls, and toques or soldier caps for the boys.
Dissolve a quarter of an ounce of Castile or oil soap cut up in small pieces, in three quarters of a pint of water, and boil for two or three minutes; then add five ounces of glycerine. When cold, this fluid will produce the best and most lasting bubbles that can be blown.
Now make your soap-bubbles in a big bowl, and choose your sides, an equal number on each, and range them opposite each other, and begin. The side that can make and keep unbroken the largest number of bubbles, is the winner. To keep tally, one of the party must be chosen as judge. You will have plenty of sport. I wish some of you would write me all about your fun.
Margaret Sidney.
THE CHURCH ROBINS.
ONE pleasant April Sabbath, the parish clerk of a church in Wiltshire, England, stood at his reading-desk turning to the morning "lesson" in the great Prayer-Book. The congregation waited to give the responses, but he did not begin as soon as usual. Something curious had caught his eye, partly hidden under the Bible-rack, a small, slanting ledge or platform, slightly raised above the main desk. He looked more closely, and there, directly beneath the great Bible, he saw a robin-redbreast's nest, with two pretty blue eggs in it. Mrs. Redbreast and her mate had found a hole left by a small missing pane in one of the quaint old leaden windows, and entered the sacred house to make their little home where the sparrow and the swallow did that the sons of Korah sing of in the eighty-fourth Psalm. The clerk could not resent so pretty an intrusion, and did not disturb the nest; and when one of the birds flew in before the close of service, neither he nor any one of the congregation thought of doing anything to frighten it. And there the nest remained through the rest of April and nearly the whole of May, the redbreasts becoming so tame that the gathering of the worshippers and the voices and music of the service on Sundays or other days did not alarm them away. The sitting bird would stay, quietly brooding her eggs, while the clerk was reading, almost directly over her head. After the young were hatched, the male robin would fly in with worms in his bill to feed them, and his coming never disturbed the people's litany or the rector's sermon. This pleasant sanctuary partnership lasted till the full-fledged young were able to leave the church and trust to their own wings. Everybody felt that the birds had brought a blessing with them, and were sorry when they went away.—Selected.