.DR. KITTO'S BOYHOOD.

We have nine volumes of Dr. Kitto's works on the Scriptures in our library, and he must have written as many more. He is the Albert Barnes of England. All his writings aim to expound the Word of God. Few authors have so many readers, and few are so far and so favorably known as Kitto. What he was as a boy, and how he came to be a great author, is pleasingly shown in the following article, taken from the Congregationalist. EDITOR.

"If a man would succeed," said Sir Joshua Reynolds of painting, "he must go to his work, willing or unwilling, and he will find it no play, but very hard labor." It is work, hard persevering work that wins success.

"Destiny is not Without thee, but within.

Thyself must make thyself."

Said the brother of Edmund Burke, after the latter had made a display of his marvelous attainments in the House of Commons: "I have been wondering how Ned has contrived to monopolize all the talent of the family, but then again I remember, when we were at play he was always at work." Edmund Burke made himself an orator in days of youthful toil. His brow was baptized with the sweat of solitary study, long, long before it was graced with bay leaves. He waited his opportunity. It came. He rose in the political sky like a sudden light. Men called him a genius. He was nothing but a patient worker, a pains-taking, self-taught boy.

The boy who sows will reap, and reap what he sows, and success comes of the sowing. The boy who works will succeed, and succeed in the measure that he works, and success comes of the working.

But says some young reader: "I am poor and unfortunate. I would be successful, but I am hemmed in on every side."

Then God loves you. Trust in Him. God is strength, He is comfort, He is hope. Trust, work, wait.

Give me your hand, dear reader, and let us visit in fancy the home of one poor boy.

The place, Plymouth, England, with its smoky streets and foamy harbor. The time, the first part of the present century. The house, a hovel; the family tattered, distressed with hungry faces, hopeless, woe-begone.

The boy John Kitto. He is tender at heart, but he has no friends; he is a lover of books, but he finds no regular teacher.

He makes the best use of the few books that he has; he reads them, and spells them and learns them with the quenchless zeal of one whose life is so sunless, so dreary. He spends his days in carrying brick and mortar to his father, who is a working mason. He is slender for such hard work, and young-only ten or twelve. There are no daisied walks for his bare feet, no fields sprinkled with flowers and gladdened with birds. He sees little but the windy harbor, and hears little save the complaints of the wretched at home, and far off the moaning of the waves on the bar.

Poor little boy! He is thirteen now, and he works at carrying slate up the ladder to the roof, not an easy nor a quiet employment for a poor little boy. One day he becomes weary. In stepping from the ladder to the roof his foot slips, he loses his balance, he falls. Thirty feet fell that poor little boy with his burden of slate.

He struck on a paved court. They took him up and carried him home. They thought him dying and said he would die. We should not wonder if they hoped he would die, for the family could hardly find bread for those who toiled from sun to sun; much more for a helpless invalid. Poor little boy!

Would you like to hear his own story of this accident?

"Of what followed," he said, "I know nothing. For one moment, indeed, I awoke from a death-like state, and found that my father, attended by a crowd of people, was bearing me homeward in his arms, but I had no recollection of what had happened, and at once relapsed into a state of unconsciousness.

"In this state I remained for a fortnight. Those days were a blank in my life; when I awoke one morning to consciousness, it was as from a night of sleep.

"My hearing was entirely gone. I saw the people around me talking to one another, but thought that, out of regard to my feeble condition, they spoke in whispers because I heard them not. I asked for a book I had been reading on the day of my fall. I was answered by signs.

"Why do you not speak ?" I asked. "Pray let me have the book.'

"A member of the family wrote upon a slate that the book had been taken away by its owner.

"But why do you write?' I asked; why do you not speak?' "Those around me exchanged looks of concern. Then the slate was handed me with the awful words, YOU ARE DEAF.'" Poor, deaf, and little cared for!

He could not help his father now. But he resolved to work, even on the bed of pain. He borrowed books and began to store

his mind. This he continued to do until his strength in a measure returned again. His hearing never returned. The world was all silent to him like a dumb show.

But he lived; why, no one could tell. We think not because he was wanted in the world, for he was a burden. His parents were unable to support him any longer, and they made known their situation to the overseer of the poor, who took the deaf little lad away from his home and what little charms it had-it must have had some-and put him in the poor-house or work-house. Here he was taught to make shoes. He worked hard, and he trusted in God, and he knew not why-he spent every leisure moment in improving his mind. He was next apprenticed to a shoemaker, a bad man, who had no feeling for the sad-hearted deaf boy, and who used him like a dog. He treated him so ill that the magistrates interfered and took him away. He used to work sixteen hours a day, but in the remaining eight he still took an hour for the improvement of his mind.

At last he began to write for a Plymouth journal, and his ability so excited public attention that the people began to feel kindly toward him and to assist him. They lent him Greek books and he learned Greek; books on modern tongues and the sciences, and he mastered them. He became a teacher, a traveler, a theologian, an oriental scholar and the author of books to be found in every library.

Reviewing the past, he says: "It does somewhat move me to look back upon that poor deaf boy, in his utter loneliness, devoting himself to objects in which none around him could sympathize, and to pursuits which none could understand. When I was a shoemaker's apprentice, I worked sixteen hours out of twenty-four, and my heart gave way. Now that I look back upon this time, the amount of study which I did contrive to get through, under these circumstances, amazes and confounds me.

The world is full of disappointed men. The poor deaf boy of Plymouth work-house is not among them. He sowed in the darkness; he is reaping in the light. We doubt that any young reader of this journal ever had a lot like his. Work, trust, wait.

"Commit thy way unto the Lord! trust also in him, and he will bring it to pass."

EARLY RISING.-Suppose two persons go to bed at the same time every night, and one of them rises at six o'clock every morning, and the other not till eight; in forty years, the difference would exceed twenty-nine thousand hours. How many things might be done or learned in such a number of hours!

The Sunday-School Drawer.

WORKING FOR THE SABBATH-SCHOOL.

A little boy had been all round his new home, to see if the children went to the Sabbath-school. He found eleven that did not go. He invited them to call at his father's house, and to go with him to the Sabbath-school. They gladly accepted his invitation, and came, Sabbath after Sabbath, in the morning and afternoon, to go with him to the Sabbath-school. There was also in the Sabbath-school, an infant class, consisting of twelve little boys. If any of these were late or tardy in attending the school, he would run and bring them in. One Sabbath morning, he found that one of them had no cap, and as he himself was always so neatly dressed, he did not like to take him to school bareheaded, so he whispered in his mother's ear and asked her if he could not get his week-day cap and lend it to him. His mother told him that he might do so. He did so; and then away they ran to the Sabbath-school. On another Sabbath, there was one of the boys that had no shoes, and again he goes and whispers in his mother's ear and asks her if he cannot lend him his week-day shoes. He said, "I think they will fit him." His mother gave her consent, and immediately he ran and brought the shoes for the little boy, and they were soon in the ranks of the Sundayschool army, singing sweet songs of praise.

Now, if all the children would do as did this good little boy, every seat in the Sabbath-school would be filled, and many more children would learn to love Jesus.-Mothers' Magazine.

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD.

Willie, why were you gone so long for the

water?" asked the teacher of a little boy.

"We spilled it, and had to go back and fill the bucket again," was the prompt reply; but the bright, noble face was a shade less bright, less noble, than usual, and the eyes dropped beneath the teacher's gaze.

The teacher crossed the room and stood by another, who had been Willie's companion.

Freddy, were you not gone for the water longer than was necessary?" For an instant Freddy's eyes were fixed on the floor, and his face wore a troubled look. But it was only for an instant-he looked frankly up to his teacher's face.

"Yes, ma'am," he bravely answered; "we met little Harry Braden and stopped to play with him, and then we spilled the water and had to go back."

Little friends, what was the difference in the answers of the two boys? Neither of them told anything that was not strictly true. Which one of them do you think the teacher trusted more fully after that? And which was the happier of the two ?-Selected.

THE NEARNESS OF GOD.

A missionary visited a poor old woman, living alone in a city attic, and whose scanty pittance of half a crown a week was scarcely sufficient for her bare subsistence. He observed, in a broken teapot that stood at the window, a strawberry plant growing. He remarked from time to time how it continued to grow, and with what care it was watched and tended. One day he said, "Your plant flourishes nicely; you will soon have strawberries upon it." "O sir," replied the woman, "it is not for the sake of the fruit that I prize it; but I am too poor to keep any living creature, and it is a great comfort to me to have that living plant, for I know it can only live by the power of God; and as I see it live and grow from day to day, it tells me that God is near."

SUNDAY-SCHOOL.

WE should honor most not the showy and brilliant, but rather the faithful plodders who make laborious yet grand uses of the one talent committed to them. The teachers who most deserve our sympathy and encouragement are those who, with limited acquirements and scanty resources, either of time or material, from which to make preparation, yet do brave, and patient, and successful work. Let us strive better to appreciate, and stimulate, and aid those who zealously cultivate inferior powers, and who industriously avail themselves of the few opportunities within their reach. Of such an one, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, once said: "I would stand to that man hat in hand."-Sunday-School Times.

"MOTHER, mother," cried a young rook, returning hurriedly from its first flight, "I'm so frightened! I've seen such a sight!" "What sight, my son?" asked the rook. "Oh! white creatures, screaming and running, straining their necks, and holding their heads ever so high. See, mother, there they go!" Geese, my son; merely geese," calmly replied the sapient parent bird. "Through life, child, observe, that when you meet any one who makes a great fuss about himself, and tries to lift his head higher than the rest of the world, you may set him down at once to be a goose."Selected.

FINDING TIME. One of my little Sunday-school boys earned a new suit of clothes, shoes and all, by digging dandelions, and selling them for greens. "When did you find time, Jemmy?" I asked; for, besides being a punctual scholar at the day school, he did errands for Mrs. Davis. "When did you find time?"

"There is most always time for what we are bent on," said Jemmy. "You see I pick up the minutes, and they are excellent pickings, sir."

ESPECIALLY should we not act on the idea that the children of the Church should be permitted, first to go astray in active sin, and then be able to point to a remarkable, instantaneous conversion, before they are admitted to the Lord's table. We should rather proceed on the principle that they are already in the Church of Christ, and that they should be kept there, without being permitted to wander into the commission of transgressions that will necessitate cutting compunction of heart.-Presbyterian.