And cold and damp and drear;
The turkeys say
Thanksgiving Day
They dread through all the year.
—Selected.
GAS.
AFTER a time wood became scarce. In some parts of the country it could hardly be had for love or money. Then what? Ah! the Lord always provides, as he did the lamb in place of the lad Isaac, you remember. Some men were looking about one day among the hills of Pennsylvania, and they found a piece of a—wood house, sticking out of the ground with a bit of wood in it, though it looked no more like wood than a stone painted black does. But it shone so brightly that somehow they took it home and somehow, I can’t just say how, they got it to burn. Then they went back to the “wood house” and began to dig, and the more they dug the larger the wood house grew, until they could find no limits to it. Then many of the neighbors went at it with pickaxes and spades; then nearly all the people of the country—and now how many think you are getting wood there? A hundred? Ten thousand? Guess again. And can you guess what sort of wood it is; do you know of any one that knows how many cords of wood are in this house, and who piled it away there, and when?
It does seem as though an army of children would have starved or frozen to death but for that fuel; found just at the right time, you see.