returned to Jerusalem of the visit of the wise
men, and the presentation of the gifts they brought to the Divine
Infant, when He was acknowledged by them to be the king of the Jews,
He was lost sight of for a time, when he appeared as a carpenter who
was employed in making the cross on which the Saviour was to be lifted
up into the eyes of all men. As Christ walked up the way to Calvary,
He had to pass the workshop of this man, and when He reached its
door, the soldiers, touched by the sufferings of the Man of Sorrows,
besought the carpenter to allow Him to rest there for a little, but
he refused, adding insult to a want of charity. Then it is said that
Christ pronounced his doom, which was to wander over the earth until
the second coming. Since that sentence was uttered, he has wandered,
courting death, but finding it not, and his punishment, becoming more
unbearable as the generations come and go. He is said to have appeared
in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even as recently as the eighteenth
century, under the names of Cartaphilus, and Ahasuerus, by which the
Wandering Jew has been known. One of the legends described him as a
shoemaker of Jerusalem, at whose door Christ desired to rest on the
road to Calvary, but the man refused, and the sentence to wander was
pronounced.

SOME MEMORABLE DARK DAYS.--During the last hundred years there have
been an unusually large number of dark days recorded. As has been
suggested by several writers, this may have been the result of the
careful scientific observations of modern times, as well as of the
frequency of these phenomena. The dark day in the beginning of this
century about which so much has been said and written occurred Oct.
21, 1816. The first day of the same month and year is also represented
as "a close dark day." Mr. Thomas Robie, who took observations at
Cambridge, Mass., has this to offer in regard to the phenomenon. "On
Oct. 21 the day was so dark that people were forced to light candles
to eat their dinners by; which could not he from an eclipse, the solar
eclipse being the fourth of that month." The day is referred to by
another writer as "a remarkable dark day in New England and New York,"
and it is noted, quaintly by a third, that "in October, 1816, a dark
day occurred after a severe winter in New England." Nov. 26, 1816,
was a dark day in London, and is described "in the neighborhood of
Walworth and Camberwell so completely dark that some of the coachmen
d