FACTS, HINTS, GEMS, AND POETRY. Facts, Hints, Gems, and Poetry. Facts. THERE are four hundred rivers and rivulets in England and Wales, all distinguished by particular names. There are three rivers called Derwent, three Dee's, two Wye's, three Rother's, four Ouse's, five Esk's, and nine Avon's! The longest river in England is the Thames (including the Medway). It is nearly two hundred and forty miles in length. The largest river is the Humber (including the Trent and the Ouse). The area of basin is 9,550 square miles, that is, very nearly equal to one-sixth of the total area of England and Wales. The longest river in Europe is the Danube. The longest river in India is the Ganges; in China, the Yan-tse-Kiang; in North America, the Mississippi; and in the whole world, the Amazons, in South America. Most rivers of any size are divided into three parts, the upper, middle, and lower course. The country which is enclosed by the arms of a river is called the delta, from the Greek letter A. The spring out of which the river flows is called its source; the channel in which the river flows, its bed; the solid land which bounds this bed, its banks; and the little rivers which feed it, its tributaries. A brook is a small river, two or more brooks a rivulet, and several rivulets a river. Hints. The first folly is to hold one's self wise, the second to profess it, and the third to despise counsel. The resolved mind hath no cares. He that's long a giving knows not how to give. All feet tread not in one shoe. Bear with evil, and expect good. If the wise erred not, it would go hard with fools. The filth under the white snow the sun discovers. He that tells a secret is another's servant. One flower makes no garland. Bought unwanted is dear bought. surer. Gems. Death will not be prorogued. A thousand worlds will not purchase a day or an hour. To be commended by wicked men is dangerous; to be connived at by them, suspicious; to be hated by them, safe. It is better to suffer in God's way than in man's way. God never took it unkindly when any one leaned too much upon him in the plain way of duty. We come very much short in what we know, and we know but little of what is to be known. Faith is the evidence of a hell not He is rich enough that wants seen, and the substance of a heaven nothing. He that measures not himself is measured. To gain teacheth how to spend. hoped for. What a sweet rest is the pardon of sin, and the love of Christ: a sanctuary, a harbour, a shadowy rock in a weary land. Without faith, without Christ. THE CHILDREN'S CORNER. Poetic Selections. SPEAKING FOR JESUS. WE all must speak for Jesus, Who hath redemption wrought, Who gave us peace and pardon, Which by His blood He bought. We all must speak for Jesus, To show how much we owe We all must speak for Jesus, The rich and poor, on land and wave; We all must speak for Jesus, The world in darkness lies; We all must speak for Jesus; The Children's Corner. "I DON'T CARE." INDEED, Mr. Upstart, "Don't care." So says the strutting fop, the idler and the lounger. So says the vain, giddy, flirting novel readerthe impudent miss to her mother, "I dont care.' "I'll do as I please, read what I please, dress as I please." So says the unruly, disobedient urchin. So says the iron-hearted gin-seller. The cruel oppressor, 'Let me alone, I'll do as I please, kill or no kill-'I don't care.'" 'I don't care," says the tippler and smoker. "I don't care," says the profane "Who's a better right?" How does swearer and Sabbath-breaker. this sound young friends? Little readers, do you ever say to your parents, teachers, or any one, "I don't care?" O shame! shame! Care? yes, you should always care, care to do good, to do what is right, honest, pure, lovely, and of good report. Care to be affable, courteous, industrious, neat, obedient -temperate in all thing. You should care to keep good company, read good books, and shun the evil. You should care to fear God and keep his commandments, to acknowledge him in all your ways—to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, glorify God in all things. These are the things you should care for daily and hourly. There is no surer mark of a lazy, trifling, impudent, insignificant good for nothing lad, than this same don't-care-ism, to hear him drawl out, when he does something wrong, "I don't care." Is it not a forerunner of every evil? of everything base, mean, low-lived, corrupt, shameful? Whenever we hear a boy, girl, or any one, making use of the expression, "I don't care," it forcibly reminds us of the proverb of Solomon, "A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back." A FUNERAL PROCESSION IN ROME. In the maze of narrow streets which hem in the Post office, we got mixed up with a funeral. It was a delightfully fine and warm afternoon, and anything more grotesquely ghastly than this funeral I never saw under a bright sun and a blue sky anywhere. It was a walking funeral. The coffin was a great painted ark, bedizened with rosettes of tinsel and foil paper, and hung with festoons of paper flowers and shreds of coloured calico. It looked as though Jack-in-the-Green had gone the way of all flesh which is grass, and was to be buried in professional costume, with my Lord and my Lady as chief mourners; and I am sure that the 20th of December in Rome was very like the 1st of May in less favoured climates. This ark was borne on painted poles, apparently distrained from barbers' shops, on the shoulders of half a dozen lads in long red gowns, beneath which their dirty boots "stole in and out" in anything but the mouse-like manner of the little feet of the bride in Sir John Suckling's ballad; and they swayed to and fro with their burden, and staggered along, now and then halting to trim their bark and adjust their balance, in a fashion which was, to say the least, unseemly. In a surplice, which had evidently not been washed since last Easter, and which was disgracefully ragged, came along a thurifer, with a great crucifix on the top of a pole. There was an old priest in spectacles, and a young priest with many pimples on his face, walking leisurely along, and crooning forth in that dull, listless, heartless chant, which to heretics is the most distasteful and irritating of all things in the Romish rite, the office for the dead. The old priest had something the matter with his knee-shorts, which compelled him every two minutes or so to stop and hitch them up; and the young priest, at the imminent risk of getting a crick in his neck, was staring at the occupants of the very tall houses on either side the street, droning out his chant meanwhile, and yawning occasionally, as though he found the office for the dead rather a bore than otherwise, which I dare say he did. There was a sprinkling of choristers carrying candles, and choristers swinging censers; but the most extraordinary part of the cortége was that which brought up its rear. A mob-for I can give them no other name-of hulking fellows came clumping along, their features and all but the dim outline of their limbs 66 A FUNERAL PROCESSION IN ROME. concealed under most hideous robes and hoods of bright green baize, with white calico crosses sewn on to the breast. Their cowls, drawn over their faces, with two holes for their eyes to peer through, looked inexpressibly horrible. I have met more than one Trappist monk, and in Spain I have seen the Confraternity of the Passion, who carry images about and wear disguises of fine white flannel; but this rabble rout of green baize maskers in Rome staggered me. If anything could add to the incongruity of their aspect, it was this: that the robes of many were too short for them, and that beneath the green baize vestments I noticed one pair of shepherd's plaid pantaloons and one of corduroy. They were howling, in a most drearily demented manner, some litany or penitential psalm of their own, which completely failed to harmonize with the office for the dead going on ahead. I asked the driver who these people were, and he informed me that they belonged to one of the innumerable Confraternities of the Dead," who in Rome appear to be a kind of amateur undertakers. According to the driver, they were great rogues; and he even hinted that so soon as they got possession of a corpse their principal endeavour was to get as many pauls as they could out of the bereaved relations: but this, I hope, is not the case. It is certain that they attend condemned criminals to the scaffold quite gratuitously; and the intense horror of death and puerile terror even of the sick room, which prompt so many Italians to abandon the sick and dying to the priest and the hired attendants, render the intervention of these confraternities necessary. Somebody finds a shroud; a coffin is easily hired for the occasion; and the priests and hooded people do all the rest. Funerals must be very cheaply conducted in this country; and, abstractedly, there is nothing purer and nobler than the voluntary penance to which these green baize persons devote themselves in the performance of offices generally found so revolting. Practically, perhaps, it would be better to employ regular undertakers than these howling amateurs. Foreigners are always told that many of the proudest Roman nobles are members of these confraternities, and that the eyes you see blearing through the slits in a hood may belong to a Colonna, an Orsini, or a PamfiliDoria; but I scarcely imagine that the green baize guild numbers many patricians in its ranks. I had a taste of their quality ere long. I have said that we were mixed up with this funeral. The painted coffin and its carriers, the priests, the cross-bearer, A FUNERAL PROCESSION IN ROME. and the choristers, all became inextricably entangled with my hack cab and its horse, with a string of peasants bearing sacks of charcoal, with a dray piled with pumpkins and drawn by two of the savage buffalo-looking oxen of the Campagna, with a knot of Dutch Zouaves rather the worse-or the better-for their visit to the adjacent wine-shop, and with a countryman on horseback, who, cloaked up to the eyes, and with his shaggy overalls of goatskin, his high-peaked saddle, and huge rowelled spurs, wanted only a coach-wheel hat and a lasso wound round the cantle of his saddle to make him the twin brother of a Mexican skirmisher. You may add to these, several priests off duty, and with shovel hats quite broad enough of themselves to block up a street of ordinary width; a select party of young gentlemen returning from some theological day school, and clad for the occasion in salmon-coloured bed-gowns, also with shovel hatsnothing religious can be done in Rome without a shovel hat, and even the Pope wears one, of a bright crimson, like a cardinal's turned up, during the performance of certain rites-a sprinkling of monks, some barefooted and some clumsily shod, who, in infinitely varied stages of dirt and imperfect shaving, are always hopping about Rome, like pigeons, taking what they can pick up; and innumerable monks without hoods and shaven crowns, but with brass badges on their breasts licensing them "a domandare in Roma," (to beg in Rome) who were professional beggars. These, with the children wriggling about under and between the legs of the adults, like eels, and a poor mule, seemingly belonging to nobody, and who had gotten his eye knocked out, and was wandering about in a dumbly distraught manner, the blood trickling from his orbless socket, very pitiable to view-these, with a tribe of furious dogs, and a number of old women, clawing each other's heads on the doorsteps, and, more furious than the dogs, the Confraternity of Death howling their banshee serenade, made up a picture of modern Roman life for which I was quite unprepared. For all its frequentation by foreigners, the grass grows between the stones on the Piazza Condotti and the Piazza di Spagna; but here there was life and animation and bustle of quite a turbulent order. It was life and animation, however, quite two centuries and a half old, and struck me, as I sat in a hack cab on the 22nd of December, 1866, as being life and animation not precisely real and vital, but of a spasmodic and galvanized description. |