boy by words; but she seized him, and, throwing her arms about his neck, half smothered him with kisses, that spoke her gratitude to her son in the most touching and unmistakable of all language.

"Give me your hand, sir," said Josiah to little Benjamin; "let us be better friends than we yet have been, and to-morrow you shall choose a trade for yourself."

"Oh, thank you, father, thank you," exclaimed the delighted lad; and that night he told his joys to his Guinea-pig, and slept as he had never done before.

END OF PART I.

play, and direction to the vast machinery of industry and commerce? So far as the great world of human enterprise is concerned," added the uncle, "the lad is but little better than a pup of eight days old; and, until his mind's eye is fairly opened, it is idle to expect him to have the least insight into the higher uses and duties of life."

As soon as the morning meal of the next day was finished, little Benjamin, to his utter astonishment, was presented by his uncle with a new fishing-rod and tackle, and told to get himself ready to start directly for a day's sport.

"What ever can this have to do with the choice of a trade?" thought the boy to himself.

There was no time, however, for wondering; for the next minute the mother was busy brushing his little triangular hat, while his sister was helping him on with his thick, big-buckled shoes. Then a packet of corned beef and bread was slipped into the pocket of his broad-skirted coat, and without a hint as to what it all meant, the little fellow was dismissed with a kiss and a "God-speed" upon his mysterious journey.

The boy and his uncle were not long in traversing the crooked and narrow streets of Boston. The quaint, old-fashioned State House in front of the large, park-like "common" was soon left behind, and the long wooden bridge crossed in the direction of the neighboring suburb of Dorchester.

Young Benjamin, though pleased enough to be free for a day's pleasure, was so eager to be put to some new occupation, that he kept speculating in his own simple manner, as he trotted along with his rod on his shoulder, as to why his father had broken his promise with him.

The uncle guessed the reason of his little nephew's silence, but said not a word as to the

real object of the excursion; and as they made toward the heights of Dorchester, he recounted to the lad, in order to divert his thoughts, stories of the persecutions of the Franklin family in the old country; till at length, having reached a small streamlet at the foot of the heights themselves, the rod and line were duly mounted, and the day's sport commenced.

Then, as the boy sat on the green bank, with his fishing-rod speared into the ground, and watching the tiny float that kept dancing like a straw in the current, the old man at his side took advantage of the quietude of the spot to impress his little nephew with his first views of life.

It was a lovely autumn day. The blue vault of the sky was like a huge dome of air upspringing from the distant horizon, and flecked with large cumulus clouds that lay almost as motionless, from lack of wind, as if they were mounds of the whitest and softest snow piled one above another. From an opening between two such clouds the sun's rays came pouring down visibly, in distinct broad bands of "fire-mist”—such as are seen streaming through a cathedral window -and fell upon the earth and water in large sheets of dazzling phosphorescence. Out at sea, the broad ocean-expanse constituting the Bay of Massachusetts looked positively solid as crystal in its calmness, while the shadows of the clouds above, dulling in parts the bright surface of the water, swept over it almost as imperceptibly as breath upon a mirror. In the distance, the little smacks that seemed to be reveling in the breeze far away from land had each left behind them a bright trail, which looked like a long shining scar upon the water; and from the scores of islands dappling the great ocean-lake, ferry-boats, freighted with a many-colored load of market-women,

peasants, and soldiers, kept plying to and from the shore.

Looking toward the home they had left, the town of Boston itself was seen crowding the broad peninsular pedestal on which it was set, and the three hills that gave it its ancient name of "Tri-mountain" swelling high above the tide at its base. In front of the city, the masts of the many vessels in the harbor were like a mass of reeds springing out of the water, and from the back and sides of the town there stretched long wooden bridges, which in the distance seemed as though they were so many cables mooring the huge raft of the city to the adjacent continent.

The country round about was dappled with many a white and cosy homestead, and the earth itself variegated as a painter's palette with all the autumn colors of the green meadows and the brown fallow lands-the golden orchards, the crimson patches of clover, and the white flocks and red cattle with which it was studded; while overhead, on the neighboring Dorchester heights, there rose a fine cloud of foliage that was as rich and yet sombre in its many tints as the sky at sunset after a storm.

"Look round about you, lad," said Uncle Benjamin to the youth at his side, "and see what a busy scene surrounds us. There is not a field within compass of the eye that the husbandmen are not at work in. Yonder the plow goes scoring the earth, as the yoke of oxen passes slowly over it, and changing the green soil into a rich umber brown, so that the exhausted ground may drink in fresh life from the air above. Here the farm-cart is in the field, studding it with loads of manure at regular distances, to serve as nutriment for the future grain. The smoke from the uprooted heaps of stubble burning yonder goes drift