tering the hall my friends and I soon forgot everything but the
speaker. The dim-lit hall, the handful audience, the contrast of both
with the illuminated chapel and ocean multitude assembled overhead,
bespeak painfully the estimation in which the great cause of peace is
held in Christendom. I wish all Christendom could have heard Elihu
Burritt's speech. One unbroken, unabated stream it was of profound and
lofty and original eloquence. I felt riveted to my seat till he finished
it. There was no oratory about it, in the ordinary sense of that word;
no graces of elocution. It was mighty thoughts radiating off from his
heated mind like the sparkles from the glowing steel on his own anvil,
getting on as they come out what clothing of language they might, and
thus having on the most appropriate and expressive imaginable. Not a
waste word, nor a wanting one. And he stood and delivered himself in a
simplicity and earnestness of attitude and gesture belonging to his
manly and now honored and distinguished trade. I admired the touch of
rusticity in his accent, amid his truly splendid diction, which
betokened, as well as the vein of solid sense that ran entirely through
his speech, that he had not been educated at the college. I thought of
ploughman Burns as I listened to blacksmith Burritt. Oh! what a dignity
and beauty labor imparts to learning."

Elihu Burritt spent the last years of his life upon a little farm which
he had contrived to buy in his native town. He was never married, but
lived with his sister and her daughters. He was not so very much richer
in worldly goods than when he had started for Boston with his property
wrapped in a small handkerchief. He died in March, 1879, aged sixty-nine
years.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS,

ENGINE-DRIVER.

Literature in these days throws light into many an out-of-the-way
corner. It is rapidly making us all acquainted with one another. A
locomotive engineer in England has recently written a book upon his art,
in order, as he says, "to communicate that species of knowledge which it
is necessary for an engine-driver to possess who aspires to take high
rank on the footplate!" He magnifies his office, and evidently regards
the position of an engineer as highly enviable.

"It is very _natural_," he remarks, "for those who are unacquainted with
locomotive driving to admire the life of an engine-man, and to imagine
how very pleasant it must be to travel on the engine. But they do not
thi