home and social life in England. For
these they left mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. There they
were, thinly tented in the rain, and the dew, and the mist, a busy,
boisterous, womanless camp of diggers and grubbers, roughing-and-
tumbling it in the scramble for gold mites, with no quiet Sabbath
breaks, nor Sabbath songs, nor Sabbath bells to measure off and
sweeten a season of rest. Well, the poor widow, who had her cabin
within a few miles of "the diggings," brought with her but few
comforts from the old homeland--a few simple articles of furniture,
the bible and psalm-book of her youth, and an English lark to sing
to her solitude the songs that had cheered her on the other side of
the globe. And the little thing did it with all the fervor of its
first notes in the English sky. In her cottage window it sang to
her hour by hour at her labor, with a voice never heard before on
that wild continent. The strange birds of the land came circling
around in their gorgeous plumage to hear it. Even four-footed
animals, of grim countenance, paused to hear it. Then, one by one,
came other listeners. They came reverently, and their voices
softened into silence as they listened. Hard-visaged men, bare-
breasted and unshaven, came and stood gentle as girls; and tears
came out upon many a tanned and sun-blistered cheek as the little
bird warbled forth the silvery treble of its song about the green
hedges, the meadow streams, the cottage homes, and all the sunny
memories of the fatherland. And they came near unto the lone widow
with pebbles of gold in their hard and horny hands, and asked her to
sell them the bird, that it might sing to them while they were
bending to the pick and the spade. She was poor, and the gold was
heavy; yet she could not sell the warbling joy of her life. But she
told them that they might come whenever they would to hear it sing.
So, on Sabbath days, having no other preacher nor teacher, nor
sanctuary privilege, they came down in large companies from their
gold-pits, and listened to the devotional hymns of the lark, and
became better and happier men for its music.

Seriously, it may be urged that the refined tastes, arts, and genius
of the present day do not develop themselves symmetrically or
simultaneously in this matter. Here are connoisseurs and
enthusiasts in vegetable nature hunting up and down all the earth's
continents for rare trees, plants, shrubs, and flowers. They are
bringi