But I could not do that. I must share the danger. Again I clung to his arm, saying, "No, no' I cannot, I cannot! I will not leave you in danger"

But again he drew his arm away, exclaiming, "Your staying does not lessen my danger. Every instant's delay increases it. I shall not stir till you are out of range. Go, Léonie."

There was something in his eye and voice I could not disobey. All this had passed in less than half a moment. I turned, my failing limbs almost refused their office-my head swam-my sight failed, but I comprehended that on my speed depended my friend's only chance of escape, and staggered blindly forwards down the stony path, stumbling with every step.

Again rang out the sharp bang of a gun. My mind took it in with vivid, terrible distinctness; but I still tottered on, every sense absorbed in the one fearful perception of imminent danger; not to myself I never thought of that-but to my friend. At last I reached a low stone wall that stretched across the hill just above the plantation. Now I knew how far I had come-that I might stop. I leant against it, turned, and with a desperate effort looked up the hill towards the spot where I had left Conrad.

At first I could see nothing,-lights danced before my eyes, bells rang in my ears, a deadly sick

ness gathered round my heart. But then-oh! with what unutterable gratitude and joy I saw a tall dark figure moving steadily through the mist that had spread over my eyes. That sight dispelled it. I looked again, and saw it now walking rapidly; in another moment it was by my side. "Thank God-thank God! you are safe," I murmured, as he took my outstretched hands in a close firm grasp. I could say no more, the revulsion of feeling was too strong-the deadly faintness returned, and but for Conrad's strong arm thrown round me, I should have fallen. But I did not faint. Conrad seated me on the low wall, still supporting me with his arm, and speaking low gentle words of soothing and

NE of the companions of my childhood was a little brook that ran near the homestead. It was my playmate. Sometimes so transparent that I could see every pebble on its bed-sometimes so shallow that it scarce covered my foot; when it got rains from heaven it ran full, but "what time it waxed warm it vanished away." That little shallow short-lived brook is to me a picture of humanity. Just in view of our house was a deep pure lake, double the size of the Sea of Galilee. In its glassy surface the clouds were mirrored; over it our skiffs floated, but no man ever saw its bottom. That deep placid lake, unchangeable in summer and in winter, inexhaustible, and hiding everything in its silent bosom -that lake was to me an emblem of "the deep things of God." Man is easily fathomed and soon drieth up. God is the unexhausted sea. His ways are past finding

out.

And one of the deep things of God is his Word. No fathoming-line has ever touched its bottom. No consumption of its pure refreshing waters has ever lowered it an inch. Within it play the leviathans. Its sublime utterances are as the sound of many waters. "Deep calleth unto deep." And in its profound bosom lie all manner of pearls and precious stones; any one of them is worth all the pebbles of earthly streams. That single pearl, "God is love," outweighs the globe in value.

Just compare, too, all the human books ever written with this one Book as the subject of pulpit and private study.

Upon this one Book the most cultured and devout minds have been engaged for eighteen centuries. Millions of spiritual and soul-saving discourses have been drawn out of it. And the Bible is as fresh and faithful as when Augustine explored it twelve hundred years ago. Men run dry; but the Bible, never.

What human production could have survived such a

constant process of search and "sounding"? Plato was the wisest of the ancients, but Plato's brook is easily forded. Shakespeare is the acutest of modern intellects; but Shakespeare does not contain religious truth enough to fill a pint measure; the little that he has, he dipped out of God's Word. Just imagine all the ministers in Christendom trying to preach for a lifetime out of Shakespeare-substituting "Hamlet" for St. John, or "Macbeth for the Psalms of David! God only loaned to Shakespeare a narrow rivulet of thought, and that too was often riled and mudded with impurity. But "the sea is HIS, and he made it!" he "giveth his people to drink as out of the great depths." Ah! there is precious fishery in the Bible. We are all the time commanded to "launch out into the deep, and to let down our nets for a draught." When we have this done, we have not been able to draw the net to land for the multitude of the fishes. The most needful truths are easy of reach; they lie near to the surface. A child can apprehend them. Nothing can be simpler than--"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul," or "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." But there are other truths of profound inystery--such as Creation, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Divine Decrees, the Resurrection, &c.-that go down many leagues below our longest lines. These are the deep things of God.

Our congregations sometimes tell us ministers that our preaching is tantalizing; it stops just at the point where they wish to know more, and to go deeper. Our answer must be that there is a limit to all human fishing-lines and fathoming-lines. For example, the doctrine of Election is too deep for my fishing-tackle. And if any unconverted sinner is wasting his precious time in trying to find out whether he is "elected to be saved," or even what God's secret decrees may be, he is more likely to be caught in the devil's net than he is to catch much truth in his own net. There are a great many things which no father tells to his own children. The "secret things belong unto God; but the things which

are revealed belong unto ourselves and to our children," and these vital truths let us spend our short lives in studying and obeying. It will be time enough to understand the Trinity and Predestination when we each the high-school of heaven.

There are deep things of God that belong also to his daily providence. I have stood lately by two coffins that were to me "past finding out." Why a loving God permitted those premature deaths, was to our eyes the darkest of mysteries. Verily he is a God that hideth himself; his way is in the sea, and his footsteps are not known. I cannot pretend to fathom the mystery of a thousand seeming failures of great and holy undertakings; no, nor the mystery of tens of thousands of sick chambers, or early graves, or shattered hopes and broken hearts. We puzzle and torment ourselves over these enigmas until brain and heart ache. How often we call our loving Father cruel! How often we have been tempted to murmur, "O, I could have borne this trial a little later, or a little sooner, but just now it is so hard. If God had taken my property and left to me my wife or if that particular child had not died -or just this blow had been spared me,-I could have submitted better." So we foolish children talk. But a wiser spirit replies in sharp rebuke, “Thou fool; be still and know that he is God." Our blind, selfish ignorance is sure to err, and scan his work in vain. We shall read these hard and trying chapters of our lives with very different eyes when the light of eternity illuminates the tear-blotted page. It will be one of the joys of heaven to find out some of these deep things of God.

For, after all, the deepest of God's deep things will be his unfathomable LOVE. Into this infinite ocean our lines sink without reaching bottom. It is deeper than human depravity or human wretchedness. When man fell he sank fearfully low, but not beneath the reach of redeeming love. O the breadth and the depth of that passion, which dredges the uttermost deeps of human depravity to bring up lost pearls for Immanuel's crown!

to have almost as great an objection to associate with the white. The feeling is as intense and as wide-spread in the Southern States as ever it was; indeed, it would even seem to have deepened since the war. The negroes must have their own schools, and hotels, and railway-cars. No negro will venture to enter a railway-car or other public conveyance with a white man, except in the capacity of a servant. As society is constituted at present in the old Slave States, it would be vain to attempt to introduce coloured students to any of the colleges. Even in the North-in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, with all their boasted freedom, I did not see one. There may be some. I am not aware that there are any rules to exclude them; but among the crowds of students I did not notice a single coloured face. This is a sad state of matters. It is one of the bitter fruits of a pernicious system long fostered in the heart of a noble nation. It cannot easily or soon be eradicated; and yet the most thoughtful of American statesman see in it grave elements of disturbance, and even danger to the country. Five millions of people educated apart, living apart, to some extent labouring apart, and all the while cherishing, as we know they do, a deep sense of past wrong and present social degradation, must be a source of weakness and danger to the constitution. The two races, I fear, will never amalgamate; but education and Christianity may draw them closer together, and prevent a collision which conscious weakness on the part of the negro has alone averted hitherto.

Under such circumstances, it is clear that if the coloured people are to get collegiate training, they must have colleges of their own. Men of influence and wealth know this, and they have determined to supply the want. The first-fruits of their labours are now seen at Washington, in

HOWARD UNIVERSITY.

Having been invited to visit this remarkable institution and address the students, I gladly consented. At an early hour on Monday morning, a friend called for me in his carriage at the Arlington. For half an hour or so the road was tolerable, but matters soon changed. The road —that is, what is designed at some indefinite period in the future to be a road-is wide, and

marked out plainly enough by deep trenches cut in the soft soil. There was nothing, however, to distinguish the space between the trenches from the fields and wilderness outside, except a little more unevenness of surface, caused by ruts and holes here and there, which it required careful piloting to avoid. Two or three times we encountered a ravine running at right-angles to our route, and filled with mud of unknown depth. We halted to survey, and I gave it up as hopeless. Not so my enterprising friend. His quick, experienced eye caught sight of a break in the boundary dyke; he went at it, and with a cheery "Gee up" cleared it. I fully anticipated an upset and general smash: but nothing of the kind; the high wheels and light body of the "buggy seemed specially adapted for such work; and the only inconvenience I experienced was rising a foot or so into the air, a momentary sensation as of flying, and then a descent upon the seat again with a "thud." It is a little exciting. There is a spice of romance in it unknown in prosy old England. Fortunately the country is wide; trespass never thought of; and if one have only enough of time and pioneering skill, he usually reaches his destination in safety. We did; and after the last stiff climb up a natural bank, not particularly smooth, I felt amply repaid.

The site of Howard University is splendid. It stands on the crown of a graceful hill, project-. ing from a wooded ridge, and some three hundred feet high, commanding the whole plain on which the city of Washington lies in outline, with long reaches of the broad Potomac beyond, backed by the verdant heights of Arlington, and the picturesque uplands of Virginia, which extend far away along the whole southern horizon. It struck me as if there were something symbolic in that site of the first college ever erected in America for the coloured races-looking down on the capital of the great and now free Republic ; looking beyond, across the Potomac, to Mount Vernon, where Washington lived, and where his; ashes sleep; and looking to Virginia, where they and their fathers felt the galling chain. As they look and study there, will the freedmen not have constantly impressed upon their minds the thought of what they were, what they are, and what they may attain to?

The college consists of a main building, four stories high, plain, but substantial, containing library, chapel, class and lecture rooms for the preparatory and collegiate departments. Behind it, at right-angles, on the one side are chambers for a full staff of professors and three hundred resident pupils: on the other side is the new medical school; and surrounding the whole lies a park of seventy acres, now being laid out with taste and care.

"The originators of this institution," we are told, were a small band of men, earnestly enlisted in the work of elevating the coloured races. They were all Northern men, and nearly all of them connected with the new Congregational Church and Society of Washington. The credit of originating the scheme belongs to the Rev. B. F. Morris of Cincinnati, who was at that time in the government employment in the district of Columbia. He was son of Thomas Morris, a native of Virginia, who, while a Senator in Congress from Ohio, was one of the foremost champions of freedom. The original idea of the Rev. Mr. Morris was to train coloured men for teachers and preachers.

"On the 20th November 1866, the first meeting was held which initiated this great educational enterprise. Some twenty were present. The views of Mr. Morris were adopted. In the course of the meeting, General Howard offered to build a seminary structure from the educational funds of the Freedmen's Bureau, if the association would furnish a site; and Mr. Brewster thereupon gave his verbal guarantee that the site should be secured."

On fuller consideration, the plan of the proposed institution was enlarged so as to include a preparatory and collegiate department in arts for both males and females; also departments of law, medicine, and theology; and it finally received its charter under the name of the Howard University. The original idea was to reserve it for the coloured races exclusively to train teachers, preachers, and missionaries, both for America and Africa. In this respect, too, the plan was ultimately extended, and it was resolved to open the doors of the university to all, without distinction of race or colour. Hitherto, however, this latter liberal enactment has been a

:

dead letter, and it is, I fear, likely long to continue so. No child of white parents has ever entered it, though the professors and teachers, with one exception, are whites. That exception is a remarkable one. There is something of romance in it, something, too, which shows in a very striking manner the strong prejudices still felt against the coloured people; and, on the other hand, the determination occasionally exhibited by them to triumph over all opposition, and to assert their full manhood. I give it as find it in the Report :

I

"The medical department was organized by the election of three members of its faculty in the early part of May 1868; and in the month of September a fourth professorship was filled. In September, also, Dr. Alexander T. Augusta, a distinguished coloured physician of Washington, was elected as Demonstrator of Anatomy. Dr. Augusta is a gentleman of decided abilities, and is thoroughly educated in his profession. He is a native of Norfolk, Virginia; free-born, and served his apprenticeship as a barber in that city, subsequently working as a journeyman at his trade. In his boyhood he learned by stealth to read a little, and subsequently acquired, while working at his trade, some additional knowledge. At a later period he read medicine for a time in the office of a respectable physician in Philade phia; but he could get no access to the medical college of that city, by reason of his colour. He went to California to get money to prosecute bis purpose, and was highly successful. On his return he made another effort to find entrance to a medical college, and was repulsed both in Philadelphia and Chicago. He finally went to the University of Toronto, and was cordially welcomed to the medical college of that very distinguished institution, second to no university in British America; and after some half-a-dozen years of laborious academic-classical as well as professional-study, he received the degree of Bachelor of Medicine, with the full honours of the college. During the war he was a surgeon in the army; and while stationed at Savannahı, Georgia, in charge of a hospital, he was repeatedly associated in professional relations with medical gentlemen of the first eminence in that city, who treated him with uniform courtesy.

They often came into his hospital to observe cases interesting to the profession, and to join with him in uncommon surgical operationsfacts honourable alike to both parties. (!) Dr. Augusta is the only coloured gentleman connected with the medical faculty so far as it has yet been organized; and for this reason, as well as for the essential interest which marks his career, reference is here made to him. It is a suggestive fact that, after such struggles to gain access to a medical school for his own culture, he should thus be called as a teacher in the first school of medical science founded for his race in America."

I may just add that it is a hopeful fact to find such a narrative as this embodied in a special Report drawn up by the Commissioner of Education, and submitted to the Senate of the United States in the year of 1870. grace As arranged, I fortunately reached the university in time to join in morning prayers. The whole establishment-principal, professors, pupils, and servants—assemble in the chapel every morning at eight o'clock. It is reckoned a necessary part of the daily exercises, and is attended, as I learned, there and elsewhere, with the happiest results. All are taught, at the commencement of each day's labour, to acknowledge the existence and presence of an almighty though unseen Being the Author and Sustainer of life-the Source of blessings temporal and spiritual. Some are deeply impressed; all are solemnized by it.

About four hundred were present, and among them not a single white face except the teachers. The females sat on one side; the males on the other. I watched them closely. From my position on the platform I could command the entire congregation; and I was struck with the aspect of intelligent, devout attention which characterized every one. I soon recognized the peculiar features of three Japanese youths, and one from China, who, like the others, bowed their knees to the Christian's God. A hymn was sung with much taste-one of the coloured pupils playing an accompaniment on the harmonium. lesson from the New Testament was read, and prayer offered. At the close, I was requested to address the audience; and I shall not soon forget with what deep interest they listened while I

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contrasted heathen and Christian lands-the East, whence they sprang, with the West, where they were being trained and then attempted to press home their duties and their responsibilities. I left with the conviction that there, in Howard University, the first decided step is being taken to solve one of the grand problems which now lie before the United States,-How to elevate and utilize the coloured population. This will be effected, not merely by providing elementary instruction for the masses, but, above and along with this, by raising up among themselves men who, from their talents, and intellectual and moral culture, will be capable of taking and holding their places in the nation.

DEAF-MUTE COLLEGE.

Another steeple-chase drive lay before us-worse even than the former, for our route lay along the slope of a low ridge, furrowed by ravines having lively torrents and miry torrent-beds, but no bridges. It was passed, and we entered the grounds of "the Silent College"-one of the most remarkable educational establishments in the world.

America is at this moment setting an example to mankind in her plan of educating deaf-mutes. The history of her efforts is instructive. Some sixty years ago, Dr. Gallaudet visited Europe, to glean information as to the mode there pursued of imparting knowledge to the deaf and dumb. He tried in vain to get access to English schools. They were private establishments, and their work was a monopoly. Going over to Paris, every facility was afforded him of accomplishing his purpose. Returning to the United States, he opened a school at Hartford, which was for a time supported by private subscription. Its success was such as to attract public attention. Enlightened statesmen soon saw that the establishment of similar schools throughout the country would tend to elevate a class of persons hitherto a burden upon the community into a position of independence and permanent benefit; and they therefore concluded that it was the duty of the State to undertake their support and management. This was done,-done so thoroughly, that official returns for 1871 show thirty-three fully equipped institutions and five day-schools for deaf-mutes,