d every day, and thoroughly washed with orange flower water. All
this requires great attention, and the paucity and cost of service in
Europe will ever prevent any one but a man of large fortune from smoking
in the Oriental fashion with perfect satisfaction to himself.--_New
Monthly Magazine._

* * * * *

NOTES OF A READER.

* * * * *

BUILDING A SCHOOL IN THE HIGH ALPS.

[We find the following "labour of love" recorded by the Rev. W.S. Gilly,
in his Life of Felix Neff, Pastor of the French Protestants in these
cheerless regions. Its philanthropy has few parallels in the proud folio
of history, and will not be lessened in comparison with any record of
human excellence within our memory.]

It was among the grandest and sternest features of mountain scenery,
that Neff not only found food for his own religious contemplations, and
felt that his whole soul was filled with the majesty of the ever present
God, but here also he discovered, that religious impressions were more
readily received and retained more deeply than elsewhere by others. In
this rugged field of rock and ice, the Alpine summit, and its glittering
pinnacles, the eternal snows and glaciers, the appalling clefts and
abysses, the mighty cataract, the rushing waters, the frequent perils
of avalanches and of tumbling rocks, the total absence of every soft
feature of nature, were always reading an impressive lesson, and
illustrating the littleness of man, and the greatness of the Almighty.

The happy result of his experiments, made the pastor feel anxious to
have a more convenient place for his scholastic exertions than a dark
and dirty stable; and here again the characteristic and never-failing
energies of his mind were fully displayed. The same hand which had
been employed in regulating the interior arrangements of a church, in
constructing aqueducts and canals of irrigation, and in the husbandman's
work of sowing and planting, was now turned to the labour of building a
school-room. He persuaded each family in Dormilleuse to furnish a man,
who should consent to work under his directions, and having first marked
out the spot with line and plummet, and levelled the ground, he marched
at the head of his company to the torrent, and selected stones fit
for the building. The pastor placed one of the heaviest upon his own
shoulders--the others did the same, and away they went with their
bur