to persevere for three days more.
Three critical days in the history of the world.

AN APPROPRIATE HOUR.

JOHN FOSTER, a noted English essayist and moralist. Born at
Halifax, September 17, 1770; died at Stapleton, October, 1843.

The _hour_ just now begun may be exactly the period for finishing _some
great plan_, or concluding _some great dispensation_, which thousands of
years or ages have been advancing to its accomplishment. _This_ may be
the _very hour_ in which a new world shall originate or an ancient one
sink in ruins.

RANGE OF ENTERPRISE.

EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN, a celebrated English historian. Born at
Harborne, Staffordshire, 1823; died at Alicante, Spain, March 16,
1892. From an article on "The Intellectual Development of the
English People," in the _Chautauquan Magazine_, May, 1891.

The discovery of a new world was something so startling as to help very
powerfully in the general enlargement of men's minds. And the phrase of
a new world is fully justified. The discovery of a western continent,
which followed on the voyage of Columbus, was an event differing in kind
from any discovery that had ever been made before. And this though there
is little reason to doubt that the western continent itself had been
discovered before. The Northmen had certainly found their way to the
real continent of North America ages before Columbus found his way to
the West India Islands. But the same results did not come of it, and the
discovery itself was not of the same kind. The Old World had grown a
good deal before the discovery of the New. The range of men's thoughts
and enterprise had gradually spread from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic, the Baltic, and the northern seas. To advance from Norway to
the islands north of Britain, thence to Iceland, Greenland, and the
American continent, was a gradual process. The great feature in the
lasting discovery of America, which began at the end of the fifteenth
century, was its suddenness. Nothing led to it; it was made by an
accident; men were seeking one thing and then found another. Nothing
like it has happened before or since.

FRIDAY.

Of evil omen for the ancients. For America the day of glad tidings
and glorious deeds.

Friday, the sixth day of the week, has for ages borne the obloquy of
odium and ill-luck. Friday, October 5th, B. C. 105, was marked
_nefastus_ in the Roman calendar because on that day Marcus Mallius and