THE CRUELTY OF SHOOTING SWALLOWS. When I see boys or grown-up men amusing themselves with shooting swallows, I am willing to believe that they do not think of the misery which they are causing. To kill a swallow flying, may be a very difficult thing; and shooting of this kind may be thought very good practice: but the Creator did not make swallows that they might be put to death for amusement or for practice. Some birds do a great deal of harm to our fields and gardens; and to destroy them seems to be a matter of self-defence; but the poor swallow does us no harm at all: there is reason to think that he is sent to do us good. When he is darting through the air, and wheeling round and round so swiftly that the eye can hardly follow him, he is catching flies, which are intended to be his food. Many thousands and millions of flies are destroyed in this way: and if they were all suffered to live, they would in time cover the earth; and we should be as badly off as the Egyptians, when God sent upon them the plague of flies and other insects. We ought to feel much obliged to the swallows for lessening the number of these troublesome guests. We should also remember, that the swallows come to our houses and barns to build their nests. They set about this very soon after their arrival; and when their young ones are strong enough to fly, they all leave the country. It is hardly possible, therefore, to kill a swallow, without robbing some little birds of a father or a mother. The female swallow leaves her nest on a summer's evening, and fills her beak with flies. -But she does not catch them only for herself: she has some young children at home, and she is thinking of them all the time that she is gliding through the air after her prey. When she is returning to her nest with her mouth full of food, she is suddenly struck with a shot, and down she drops to the ground, bleeding and dead. Her little ones go without their supper for that night; ble of becoming her servant This kind they pass all the time in a sad and piteous chirping; and their father does not know how to quiet them, when he finds himself in the nest without his partner. After a sleepless night, he sets out to catch some flies; but he does not know how to feed them as their mother did; and before the evening is over, he too is shot dead by some person who is practising the art of shooting flying. lady was far from rich, yet she devoted herself to the improvement of the condition of her poorer neighbors. She formed the plan of founding a school for female children, and began to save, out of her small income, a sum sufficient for its establishment. Whilst occupied with this intention, the good lady was seized with a dangerous illness-she felt that her end was near, and she lamented to her young attendant that the design she had formed must now fail that she should die-and there would be no school. Her words proved true; she died, and with her, apparently, terminated this fondly cherished plan. The young ones now begin to suffer seriously from hunger: they open their little beaks, but no mother comes to put any thing into them. They see the old birds go backwards and forwards to another nest which is close by, but their own turn never I will not dwell on the grief of the poor comes. At night they get very cold. Their young woman thus suddenly deprived of mother used to cover them with her wings, her early friend. Better thoughts than and with the soft feathers of her breast; but those of lamentation filled her mind, and now they have nothing to warm them. In raised it above the consideration of self. the morning, two or three of them are dead. The chirping becomes fainter and fainter: no little heads are seen stretching out and asking for food: they shake and quiver against each other at the bottom of the nest; and after a few hours they all die of hunger. REAL HEROISM. In an interesting work for youth, a French lady gives a touching example of the gratitude of a young female servant who, after the death of her mistress, devoted herself to the accomplishment of a design which that lady had formed, but which death prevented her carrying into execution. This young person, the daughter of poor parents, had been left an orphan at an early age. Mrs. S. took compassion upon her, received her into her house, and gave her a useful education, so that she was soon capa She left the village, and entered into a new service, and by the continued practice of the most rigid economy, succeeded, at the end of three years, in acquiring the sum necessary to found the school her mistress had been so anxious to establish. The circumstances here narrated took place in France, where less money was requisite for such an undertaking than would be required in many other places. Fifty crowns was the sum amassed by this heroic girl, through the means of industry and the practice of self-denial. She wrote to the clergyman of the village, enclosing her little savings, begging him to carry into execution the wishes of her deceased mistress, with which he had been made acquainted; adding that she should herself have been the bearer of the money, but that she had not sufficient left to defray the expenses of the journey. THE HONEY-BIRD AND THE WOODPECKER. The honey-bird, or bee-cuckoo, a bird somewhat larger than the common sparrow, is well known in Africa for its extraordinary faculty of discovering the hives or nests of the wild bees, which in that country are constructed either in hollow trees, in crevices of the rocks, or in holes in the ground. This bird is extremely fond of honey, and of the bee's eggs, or larvæ; but as it cannot, without assistance, obtain access to the bee-hives, nature has supplied it with the singular instinct of calling to its aid certain other animals, and especially man himself, to enable it to attain its object. This is a fact long ago established on the authority of travellers in Southern Africa. The honey-bird usually sits on a tree by the way-side, and, when any passenger ap proaches, greets him with its peculiar cry of Cherr-a-cherr! cherr-a-cherr ! If the passenger shows any disposition to attend to the call of the little spy, it flies on before him, in short flights, from tree to tree, till it leads him to the spot where it knows a bee-hive to be concealed. It then sits still and silent, till the man has extracted the honeycomb, of which the little bird expects a portion as its share of the spoil; and this share the natives, who profit by its guidance, never fail to leave it. Sometimes, it is said, the honey-bird calls to its aid the woodpecker, who with his long bill is a powerful enemy to the bees. The woodpecker is very fond of the young bees, and his little guide finds a delicious treat in the honey. A MENAGERIE. A little friend asked me the other day what was meant by the word, menagerie. I suspect that he had not been to see the collection of animals, which has lately been exhibited in Boston; or he would have seen the word painted in large letters over the entrance of the building. The word menagerie is derived from the French word ménager, from which is derived our English verb, to manage. So, it used to mean a place for training or managing animals, but it is now applied to any collection of wild beasts. In a menagerie, you will sometimes see a lion, and sometimes a tiger, a leopard and various other beasts, in the different cages ranged about the room. I shall have much to tell you about these animals, from time to time. Sometimes a camel is exhibited. This animal is so tame and gentle that the men do not keep him in a cage. He will let a little boy get on his back, and will not load of from five hundred to a thousand pounds. He is mild, patient, and hardy, needs little food, and is capable of sustaining a march of several miles in a burning sandy desert, without water. In Arabia and other countries where the camel is trained to useful purposes, it is considered as a sacred animal, without which the natives could neither traffic, travel nor subsist: its milk forms a considerable part of their nourishment; they clothe themselves with its hair, which is shed regularly once a year; and, on the approach of enemies, they may, by mounting their camels, flee to the distance of a hundred miles in a single day. The height of the camel is about five and a half feet; his length is about ten feet. On his back he has two bunches. There is another species of camel called the Dromedary, which has but one bunch on his back, and is somewhat smaller. It differs little from the camel in other respects. USEFUL REMARKS. 1. It is a fraud to conceal a fraud. 2. He that contemneth small things shall fall by little and little. 3. He who follows two hares will be sure to catch neither. 4. The man who is most slow in promising is most sure to keep his word. 5. Cail not any thing ill-luck-which is in truth ill-manage. 6. Good thoughts and good books are very good company. 7. The sure way to be deceived is to believe ourselves more cunning than others. 8. Most men are slaves because they cannot pronounce the monosyllable 'No!' 9. Love those who advise you, but not those who praise you. This interesting bird, which visits the north of England and Scotland in summer, and keeps up in the meadows its cry of crake, crake, is well known, but is not easily seen. It runs with great rapidity, and is loth to take wing. When found it has the instinct, in cominon with some other animals, and especially insects, to feign death. A gentleman had one brought to him by his dog. It was dead to all appear. ance. As it lay on the ground, he turned it over with his foot, and was convinced it was dead. Standing by, however, sometime in silence, he saw it open an eye. He then took it up; its head fell; its legs hung loose; it appear ed again totally dead. He then put it in his pocket, and before long he felt it all alive, and struggling to escape. He took it out; it was as lifeless as before. He then laid it upon the ground, and retired to some distance. In a few minutes, the bird warily raised its head; looked round, and then run away at full speed. FIRE IN THE WOODS A fire lately broke out on Berry's mountain, below the village of Millersburg, in Pennsylvania. It continued until it was stopped by the river Susquehannah. It is estimated that about three thousand acres of timber land were overrun by the flames, and laid low. Few sights are more grand and imposing than that of a tall forest on fire. DANGER OF CARRYING FIRE. Recently in Springfield, Massachusetts, a mother stepped into a neighbor's house, leaving three children at home, the oldest of which was a daughter, about seven years old. Contrary to the direction of her mother, the little girl took some coals from the fire-place to make another fire; in doing which she set her clothes on fire, and in this situation ran after her mother, the flames increasing by her exposure to the air. When found, all her clothes were burned off, and she was in a distressing condition. The poor child survived only about six hours. How careful should children be not to disobey their parents! NARROW ESCAPE FROM A BEAR. boots. pulsed, A young man, in passing through the woods himself within a few feet of a ravenous bear. near Bangor, Me., a short time since, found He sprang to the nearest pine and climbed up, the bear clambering after him. Making good use of his feet he dashed his antagonist to the ground. The bear returned and was again reBruin ascended a third time and with carrying with him one of our hero's more caution. The young man, hoping to escape ascended the tree about fifty feet, and as the bear approached him attempted to shake him off, but in vain, as his foot was held by the paws of the infuriated animal, who had lost his hold of the tree and hung suspended by the poor man's leg. The young man's strength becoming exhausted, he let go his hold on the tree, and down they went with a tremendous concussion to the ground. Our hero struck on the bear and rebounded eight or ten feet distant. The affrighted pair sat eyeing each other for some time, when the bear, who was the more severely bruised of the two, showing no signs of fight, the young man rose and fled, leaving his hat and boot behind him,-his friend of the shaggy coat casting at him an expressive look, accompanied by a growl and a shake of the head. |