BY THE BROOKSIDE. 309

water-lilies, peer over the bank into the hole at the

corner under the willow-tree, and watch the monsters of

the deep, the aldermanic chub, gravely oaring themselves

round and round, and perfectly insensible to the attrac-

tions of a magnificent humble-bee, with which they had
| been “ dibbed” for during the last two hours.

It may not have struck you that he ever was a child
like yourselves, but if he is wise, he has not forgotten it ;
indeed, even if he is foolish, which most of us are, it would
be strange if there does not remain enough memory of
his childish days to enable him to sympathize with you,
perhaps to utilize the crook of that ridiculous old umbrella
for the fishing out of water-lilies.

Ah, dear me! it is a good long time since I gathered a
wwater-lily, and then it was in a very different scene from
| that which is represented in our cut, but I hooked it out
sith my umbrella.

The flat, sweltering rice-fields about Ravenna are inter-
sected by long straight ditches, which, in the proper season,
are all a shimmer of water-lilies. We had gone for a walk
before breakfast to the great church of St. Apollinaris in
Classe, with its noble round tower, like a glorified well,
which in a resurrection body had arisen from the earth,
and was aspiring to heaven. Although it was early
spring, and, as I have hinted, not yet breakfast time, we
were glad of our umbrellas to protect us against the sun,
we were glad to dip them into the lily-paved water for
the sake of greater coolness, and at the same time we
fished out some of the blussoms, but they were slippery ;
even, as one might say, somewhat slimy, and we soon got
tired of them, and left them to wither.

should be dragged from their homes, only to be flung
away upon the dusty road ?

Ah, well, children, it will be a good thing if, by the
time that you are grizzled old folks, you have no worse
| wrecks to charge your consciences with than the withering
| of a water-lily.

; For, again, did it ever strike you that, if it pleases God
| to spare your lives, which I hope He will do, you too in
{your turn will be grizzled old men and women. Whether
| it ever struck you, or not, it is true. Now you are
| wading, and paddling, and gathering water-lilies, but you
| svill soon have to get out into deeper water in the great
i mill-stream of life, and there are dangers and difficulties
\+there of which you know nothing, and which are all the
more difficult and the more dangerous because you do not
know about them. There are such things as quicksands,
and undermined banks in even the most innocent-looking
| brooks; there are shelving slopes of sand, which will slide
} you down into that dark hole where the water-lilies have
their roots, almost before you know that you are out of
veach of the friendly bank; there are times when the
| water is muddy, and you cannot tell whether it is deep, or
i whether it is shallow; there are times when the water is
| clear, and then you may always take for granted that it
lis deeper than it seems to the inexperienced eye.
| Any body can prove this statement about clear water
| being deeper than it seems, by dipping a walking-stick
\ into it in a slanting direction, and looking down upon it;
| the part of the stick which is under water will appear as
i if it was bent upwards, the end of it will seem not to be
| so deep in the water as you know it to be in reality.
| The like effect is produced upon every shell and pebble at
the bottom of the water; they appear nearer the surface

|

Poor pale water-lilies, what had they done, that they |

than they are. Always make a fair allowance, therefore,
in guessing at the depth of water; if it looks four feet,
take for granted that really it is, say, five feet deep, 7. e.
that you may find yourself over head and ears in water,
which looks as if it would oniy take you up to your arm-
pits. It is probable that many a life might have been
saved if this principle had been attended to, and if bathers
had kept out of water which was really too deep for them,
although it did not look to be so.

But sometimes you have not the choice, whether or no
you should plunge into the water, be it thick, or be it
clear—a boat oversets, a horse shies, a bridge or a bank
gives way, and there you are struggling for the bare life
in the cold water, which is rushing and roaring in your
ears, like some living monster that is greedy of its prey.
Then, in most cases your only chance is—to swim to
shore, and your only chance of swimming to shore, is, to
have Zearnt the art before hand. You will not be able to
make much use of the directions which you may have
read in books, telling you how you ought to behave your-
self when out of your depth in water. No, you will want
to have availed yourself of the experience and instruction of
others, and to have put in practice, on a small scale, and
under fuvourable circumstances, those lessons of which
you may now perhaps make use to the saving not of your
own life only, but perhaps of the lives of a dozen other
people.

When you are thoroughly grounded in the art of
swimming, you can afford to despise the danger of a
crumbling bank, or a sloping shelf of sand sliding you
imperceptibly down into deep water: and so, one who is
grounded in the principles of the doctrine of Christ, whose
Faith, and Hope, and Love are strong and true, may pass
unharmed through many a difficulty and many a danger,
which would be more perilous, would most likely be
destructive to one who was not so prepared to meet them.
Not that any one should be presumptuously secure, there
are dangers and difficulties from which no one is safe ;
dangers in ourselves, and dangers in ow surroundings ;
cramps, let us say, and quicksands.

The best swimmer is not proof against these. In the
one case the limbs refuse to obey the will, in the other
‘neither beast can walk, nor fish can swim.”

The one may be compared, in a parable, to lawful
things used unlawfully, or inconsiderately, the other to

‘| things about which there can be no question that they are

wrong.

“Using this world,” says the Bible, “as not abusing
it;” that is to say, not using it up; not using it out; not
using it as if there was nothing else to use.

Oh, it is well at times to paddle in the brook, to pluck the
lilies, to crown otirselves with their flowers; but life was
not made for these things, although they were made for
life, especially for its spring-tide. Do not let us think
that God has made us, and made the beautiful world
around us, and then told us that we are to go through,
and never derive any pleasure from it, and that those
who do derive any are mere wouldlings who know nothing
of God.

There is a story of a holy man of old that, arriving at
a friend’s house after a long walk on foot in a part of the
world which was new to him, he was asked what he
thought of the country through which he had passed,
His reply was that really he had not noticed what it was
like; and yet he had been walking for hours through