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the world by these impediments, yet Christian love and patience and skill have accomplished this result. The first to achieve success in this difficult work was Dr. S. G. Howe, under whose care the blind deafmute, Laura Bridgman, became an accomplished woman, able to read, write, and receive intelligence from the outer world and convey responses thereto. To her mental

isolation there penetrated the intelligence of the sufferings caused by the famine in Ireland. It aroused her sympathies and with her own hands she knitted a shawl which she sold for seven dollars and purchased therewith a barrel of flour to send to the famishing people of Ireland.

More wonderful still is the story of the mental development of Helen Keller, who also suffered under the treble infirmity of being deaf and dumb and blind. With infinite patience and genius, inspired by Christian philanthropy, she received such instruction as to become one of the most accomplished young women of the times, a college student of rare intelligence, and with better mental equipment than most students possessing all their physical faculties. One of our illustrations shows this marvellous girl in her earlier years, another shows specimens of her clear, legible writing, and still another of her more recent years.

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M. Dessaud has just produced cinematograph for the blind. The apparatus of M. Dessaud is founded on the same principle as the writing invented by Brail. The machine is composed of a circular plate moving on a horizontal axis. On the two edges of this disk there are cut in relief the successive positions of any desired movement, as for example the flight of a bird. As is shown by the figure there is placed at a certain point on the disk a little double opening against which one can place the two index

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fingers in such a way as to touch at the same time the two images in relief, which correspond to the same positions of the object in movement. In turning the plate by means of a pedal and a connection (F) there are experienced, one after the other, sensations which correspond to the different phases of the movement. The blind who have become sensitive, with respect to sensation of touch can, with the aid of this instrument, obtain an exact conception of movement which up to this time they have not been able to do.-Public Opinion.

HARBOUR SUNSET.

Beyond the bar the sun has set And there the wind may chant its runes, All mystical and sad at sea, But here the high sky over me Is one pure dome of violet

Winnowed of cloud above the dunes.

Over the Druid pine and fir That crown the westering hills is seen The young moon's golden barge afloat Like some adventurous fairy boat With one white star to pilot her

Through seas of pearl and lucent green.

Afar, the islets still and dim, That gem the harbour's burnished zone, Hold yet the twilight that must soon Fall over sea and reef and dune, As from some goblet's crystal rim A misty purple wine is blown.

The boats that sailed at break of day Are homeward bound, and on the shore A joyous welcome waits each one For toil is past and work is done When o'er the hushed and placid bay The veil of darkness falls once more. -L. M. Montgomery.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.*

BY THE HONOURABLE JOSEPH H. CHOATE,

United States Ambassador to Great Britain.

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coln was probably the object of more abuse, vilification and ridicule than any other man in the world, but when he fell by the hand of an assassin, at the very moment of his stupendous victory, all the nations of the earth vied with one another in paying homage to his character, and the thirty-seven years that have since elapsed have established his place in history as one of the great benefactors, not of his own country alone, but of the human race.

One of many noble utterances upon the occasion of his death was that in which Punch made its magnanimous recantation of the spirit with which it had pursued him:

Beside this corpse that bears for windingsheet

The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear

anew,

Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?

Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,

To lame my pencil, and confute my penTo make me own this hind-of princes peer, This rail-splitter-a true-born king of

men.

Ninety four years ago, on January 12th, in poverty and obscurity, Abraham Lincoln was born. The same year Gladstone and Tennyson, and the year before Cardinal Manning, saw the light. Yet this humble birth in the wilds of Kentucky was destined more profoundly to affect the history of the world than any other of the century. Our American kinsmen celebrate as one of their memorial days the anniversary of Lincoln's birth. We think it a fitting tribute to this "most American of Americans" to join with them in study and admiration of his heroic character. We are glad to reprint

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Fiction can furnish no match for the romance of his life, and biography will be searched in vain for such startling vicissitudes of fortune, so great power and glory won out of such humble beginnings and adverse circumstances.

Doubtless, you are all familiar with the salient points of his extraordinary career. In the zenith of his fame he was the wise, patient,

the substance of the eloquent address delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh by the Ambassador of the United States to Great Britain. It is but a few weeks ago since the Honourable Mr. Choate delivered another memorial address in John Wesley's Chapel, City Road, London, on the unveiling of a memorial window to another great American, the friend and adviser of Abraham Lincoln, Bishop Simpson, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Thus are the bonds of international brotherhood knit more closely by such Christian courtesies and amenities.-ED.

courageous, successful successful ruler of men, exercising more power than any monarch of his time, not for himself but for the good of the people who had placed it in his hands. Commander-in-chief of a vast military power, which waged with ultimate success the greatest war of the century; the triumphant champion of popular government, the deliverer of 4,000,000 of his fellow-men from bondage; honoured by mankind as statesman, President, and liberator.

Nothing could be more squalid and miserable than the home in which Abraham Lincoln was born -a one-room cabin without floor or window, in what was then the wilderness of Kentucky, in the heart of that frontier life which swiftly moved westward from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, always in advance of schools and churches, of books and money, of railroads and newspapers, of all things which are generally regarded as the comforts and even necessaries of life. His father, ignorant, needy, and thriftless, together for himself and his family, was ever seeking, without success, to better his unhappy condition by moving on from one such scene of dreary desolation to another. The rude society which surrounded them was not much better. The struggle for existence was hard, and absorbed all their energies. They were fighting the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating savage. From the time when he could hardly handle tools until he attained his majority, Lincoln's life was that of a simple farm labourer, poorly clad, housed, and fed, at work either on his father's wretched farm or hired out to the neighbouring farmers.

But in spite, or, perhaps, by means of this rude environment, he grew to be a stalwart giant, reach

ing six feet four at nineteen, and fabulous stories are told of his feats of strength. With the growth of this mighty frame began that strange education which in his ripening years was to qualify him for the great destiny that awaited him, and the development of those mental faculties and moral endowments which, by the time he reached middle life, were to make him the sagacious, patient, and triumphant leader of a great nation in the crisis of its fate.

His whole schooling, obtained during such odd times as could be spared from grinding labour, did not amount in all to as much as one year, and the quality of the teaching was of the lowest possible grade, including only the elements of reading, writing, and ciphering. But out of these simple elements, when rightly used by the right man, education is achieved; and Lincoln knew how to use them. As so often happens, he seemed to take warning from his father's unfortunate example. Untiring industry, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and an ever-growing desire to rise above his surroundings, were early manifestations of his character.

Books were almost unknown in that community, but the Bible was in every house, and somehow or other "The Pilgrim's Progress," "Esop's Fables," a history of the United States, and a life of Washington fell into his hands. He trudged on foot many miles through the wilderness to borrow an English grammar, and is said to have devoured greedily the contents of the statutes of Indiana that fell in his way. These few volumes he read and re-read-and

his power of assimilation was great. This youth's mind, at any rate, was thoroughly saturated with Biblical knowledge and Biblical

language, which, in after life, he used with great readiness and effect. But it was the constant use of the little knowledge which he had, that developed and exercised his mental powers. After the hard day's work was done, while others slept, he toiled on, always reading or writing. From an early age he did his own thinking, and made up his own mind-invaluable traits in the future President. Paper was such a scarce commodity that, by the evening firelight, he would write and cipher on the back of a wooden shovel, and then shave it off to make room for more. By and by, as he approached manhood, he began speaking in the rude gatherings of the neighbourhood, and so laid the foundation of that art of persuading his fellow-men, which was one rich result of his education, and one great secret of his subsequent success.

It is hardly possible to conceive how benighted and isolated was the condition of the community at Pigeon Creek, in Indiana, of which the family of Lincoln's father formed a part, or how eagerly an ambitious and high-spirited boy such as he must have yearned to escape. The first glimpse that he ever got of any world beyond the narrow confines of his home was in 1828, at the age of nineteen, when a neighbour employed him to accompany his son down the river to New Orleans to dispose of a flatboat of produce, a commission which he discharged with great

success.

Shortly after his return from this first excursion into the outer world, his father, tired of failure in Indiana, packed his family and all his worldly goods into a single waggon drawn by two yoke of oxen, and after fourteen days' tramp through the wilderness, pitched his camp once more in Illinois. Here

Abraham, having come of age and being now his own master, rendered the last service of his minority by plowing the fifteen-acre lot and splitting from the tall walnut. trees of the primeval forest enough rails to surround the little clearing with a fence. So Lincoln, at twenty-one, had just begun his preparation for the public life to which he soon began to aspire. For some years he must continue to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no means, no home, no friend to consult. More farm work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a village store, the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a flatboat of his own contriving, a pilot's berth on the river, these were the means by which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he was twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public recognition.

The Black Hawk war broke out, and the Governor of Illinois, calling for volunteers to repel the band of savages whose leader bore that name, Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain of his comrades, among whom he had already established his supremacy by signal feats of strength and more than one successful single combat. During the brief hostilities he was engaged in no battle and won no military glory, but his local leadership was established. The same year he offered himself as a candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the polls. Another unsuccessful attempt at storekeeping was followed by better luck at surveying, until his horse and instruments were levied upon under execution for the debts of his business venture.

At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Legislature of Illinois, and so continued for

eight years, and, in the meantime, qualified himself by reading such law books as he could borrow at random-for he was too poor to buy any-to be called to the bar. For his second quarter of a century during which a single term in Congress introduced him into. the arena of national questionshe gave himself up to law and politics. Year by year his knowledge and power, his experience and reputation extended, and his mental faculties seemed to grow by what they fed on. His power of persuasion, which had always been marked, was developed to an extraordinary degree, now that he became engaged in congenial questions and subjects. Little by little he rose to prominence at the bar, and became the most effective public speaker in the West. It was in political controversy, of course, that Lincoln acquired his wide reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression upon the people of what had now become powerful state of Illinois, and upon the people of the great West, to whom the political power and control of the United States were already surely and swiftly passing from the older Eastern States. It was this reputation and this impression and the familiar knowledge of his character which had come to them from his local leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West to present him as their candidate, and to press him upon the Republican Convention of 1860, as the fit and necessary leader in the struggle for life which was before the nation.

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That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible question of slavery. Negro slavery had been firmly established in the Southern States from an early period of their history. In 1619, the year before the Mayflower landed our Pilgrim

Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, in Virginia. All through the Colonial period their importation had continued. A few had found their way into the Northern States, but in none of them in sufficient numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis for political power. At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution there is no doubt that the principal members of the convention not only condemned slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, but believed that by the suppression of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual extinction in the South, as it certainly was in the North. Washington, in his will, provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and said to Jefferson that it was among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country might be abolished." Jefferson said, referring to the institution: "I tremble for my country when I think that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep for ever "-and Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry were all utterly opposed to it.

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But slavery was made the subject of a fatal compromise in the Federal Constitution, whereby its existence was recognized in the States as a basis of representation; the prohibition of the importation of slaves was postponed for twenty years, and the return of fugitive slaves provided for. Yet no imminent danger was apprehended from it till, by the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture by slave labour became at once the leading industry of the South and gave a new impetus to the importation of slaves; so that in 1808, when the Constitutional prohibition took effect, their numbers had vastly increased. From that time forward

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