N Christmas Day-wasn't it a real old-fashioned one? but perhaps you are too young to remember such another as I watched the firelight shining on a pile of golden-brown dates in a green dessert-dish, I amused myself by wandering away in imagination from this snow-covered, frost-bound country to the sunny lands where the dates come from. I dare say a good many of you have seen the palms at Kew Gardens -one of the most beautiful sights even in that rich collection of curious beauty -and climbed them by means of the iron staircase. I am going to tell you about another kind of palm-climbing.

All palms are more or less beautiful, and there are several kinds that are useful. There is the palm from which Australian black fellows cut cabbage and Australian bushmen plait hats. There is the palm out of whose pith the New Guinea people make cakes and English people make sago puddings. There is the palm from which you get the shaggyskinned white-fleshed cocoa-nuts-according to the old story, monkeys save men the trouble of climbing for those by flinging them down in spite when men fling up stones at the monkeys.

There is the gommti-palm that gives jaggery sugar, and the fan-palm that is tapped for toddy.

But, both for beauty and for use, the palm that should bear the palm is, I think, the date-palm. Wine is made from its juice-Lagmi, the Arabs call the luscious liquor; and though they are Mohammedans, and, therefore, ought to be teetotallers, they drink it pretty freely. "Lagmi," they say, "is not wine, and the Prophet's prohibition refers to wine."

It is so easy to find an excuse for doing what we like!

But though the date-palm-Phoenix dactylifera is the learned name-yields wine, it is very fond of water. When weary wanderers over the sandy wastes of Africa, who, perhaps, have been fearing that they must kill their camels to obtain the water which those precious ships of the desert carry stowed away in their holds, or peradventure, that the dread desert wind would sweep over them, and bury both camels and masters in its blinding, suffocating sand, see in the distance slim tree-trunks,

half as high as the Monument, crowned with graceful drooping leaves, they recover courage, and, pressing forwards, rejoice in the oasis as the Israelites wandering through the Arabian wilderness rejoiced when they came to Elim, with its threescore and ten palm-trees.

Here, too, there are wells of water, bubbling silverily up from rich green herbage. Flowers gem the grass and wreathe the palm-stems. It

must be hard to strike tents and launch out into the dreary desert again, leaving a place where so much beauty invites to rest.

I was talking about the many uses of datepalms. Its juice, when first drawn, is as white and sweet and unintoxicating as milk. Houses are built of its wood; and baskets, and mats, and string are made out of its leaves; and then just think of the fruit!

You like to eat dates at dessert; but they are food like bread and butter and beef to the people who live where the date-palms grow. The Arabs eat them fresh and eat them dry; and they make flour of them, and live for days on that and water. They get honey as well as milk from the datepalm-the juice of the fresh fruit and sweeten their rice with it; and they crush the stones and feed their camels with them.

This is the way they get the dates :

A man comes out of a house made of palm wood and roofed with palm-leaves, and spreads a mat woven of them under the tree he intends to climb. Then he puts a rope made of palm fibre under his armpits, and ties the two ends on the other side of the trunk in a tight knot, and slips it over one of the notches that old leaves have left all the way up the tree like steps.

When he has climbed up as far as he can get by the help of the rope, he hitches it on to another notch, and shins up once more, and so on he goes until he reaches the fruit, which he either flings down on the palm mat or lowers with another palm rope in a palm basket.

EDWARD HOWE.

A TERRIBLE BOY.

"NOW, if you don't mind, I'll draw you,"

that was Billy Blake's threat to those who displeased him, and thus he held old and young in awe of him.

It was easy enough to smudge out the saucy young fellow's caricatures and to punish the caricaturist, if the aggrieved personage was big enough; but in the meantime all the parish, except the aggrieved person, had been laughing over the original design, and Billy always took his revenge for a beating by drawing a fresh caricature of his beater more atrocious even than the one that had excited his castigator's wrath.

For light surfaces he used charcoal, and for darker chalk; and go where you would in or about the village you saw the works of this young master, clearly cut in the keenness of newly-excited satire.

This naughty Billy had no reverence in his

composition-he didn't mind how high was the game at which he flew. He represented the curate, who had a penchant for short-waisted cassocks, as a lady's tightly-rolled umbrella taking its walks abroad. Even the Great House was not sacred from the attacks of this presumptuous artist. He drew the squire and his wife and sons and daughters as gander, goose, and goslings, dressed up in men's and women's clothes, and walking in single file; and so ludicrously had he hit off the style in which the family stalked into church, that even Billy's father, who, dreading all kinds of terrible consequences to himself, gave Billy an awful chastisement for this piece of audacity, was seen to linger for a moment or two over his son's work with the faintest glimmer of paternal pride in his eye, before he blotted it out with very strong expressions of paternal wrath.

Billy, in his way, was really a bit of a genius. He drew a very funny picture of a drunken undertaker, with the village doctor, also drunk, propping him up.

The village tailor was a very little man, married to a big woman, who was said to beat him; accordingly Master Billy drew the tailor measuring his wife for a pair of breeches.

The parish clerk had a long nose, and sang through it, therefore Master Billy must turn it into a clarionet, sticking out from the old man's face, with his two hands playing on it.

Another man was in the habit of blowing his nose very loud and suddenly in church: it had quite an alarming effect-making people who were nodding start from their slumbers; and his nose was represented as a trumpet.

The schoolmistress, who was somewhat proud of her personal charms and fond of fashionable attire, having induced one of her admirers to box Billy's ears, for depicting her in an exaggeration of the costume and coiffure of the period, Billy -Guy Fawkes Day being close at hand-bided his time and nursed his wrath.

On the Fifth of November the village walls bore sundry representations of the unfortunate lady borne about with a lantern and matches in her hands, whilst derisive spectators exclaim, "My eye! what a Guy!" and also of her standing back to back with her champion-both dressed in the conventional costume of Guido Vaux, and of an utterly indescribable hideousness of feature far surpassing his-whilst a critical scrutinizer of the pair inquires at large,

"Which on 'em's the biggest?"

Billy's father was the village cobbler, and used to mend the schoolmistress's boots. Billy, to relieve his feelings under the indignity of having to carry the boots back to their owner, drew fancy portraits of her on every dead wall he

passed, or, if too pressed for time to be able to do this, executed still more striking miniatures of her on the soles of the said boots, taking care to return them to her soles uppermost.

Lest any one should accuse me of a wish to sap the principles of my young readers, I will conclude with a

MORAL.

Do not behave like Billy Blake.

CHARLES CAMDEN.

vivacity. My dear mother laid a paw on me never. I am inclined to think that poor little Bruina could not have said as much. I had very worthy parents -very, very. It sends a chill even through my bear's skin when I call to mind that I ever behaved to either with impertinence, or have spoken of them with disrespect.

Still, I must say that with all his accomplishments my poor papa did not possess the gift of insight into the future; and, unless one have that, it may be advisable to hold one's tongue about the future-never to prophesy (as one of your own poets hath said) unless you know.

"Well, children," my poor papa went on, "you are aware that we bears take private lodg

WE

LITTLE BEAR.

II.

WE were somewhat confused on awaking. At first we could recollect nothing of the way in which we had spent the day before. Father said to mother, "Do you remember?" And mother answered, "Well, Bruin, I have a vague recollection."

"So have I, very vague,” struck in father, with a laugh; "but can you tell me of what? I only know that I have a splitting headache. I have not had a worse since that rascally hunter's bullet just glanced off my head. I hope we have not been making fools of ourselves before the youngsters. What do you remember, children?".

Bruina and I, though our heads did not ache so badly as my poor papa's, could only call to mind, after long puzzling them, that we had had something sweet.

"Ah, that's it," cried father. "Let's go back and have some more. I recollect where we got it now. It was something like honey, only it made us dance. No doubt we got tired of dancing, and lay down to sleep like sensible people. I am glad that we did not make fools of ourselves before the youngsters after all. Come along, children."

So my papa politely offered his fore leg to my mamma, and Bruina and I trotted after them.

As we were going, I got Bruina, who was father's pet, to ask him to tell us about the rascally hunter whose bullet had once given him a headache.

strictly to ourselves."

Father would have said "like to sport the oak," had he visited your English university towns, as afterwards it was my hard fate to do.

"Indeed, as you are aware, or will be when you are a little older," father went on, "I spend the greater part of my life by myself. Foolish men-(though only once hit, I have been hunted often enough to enable me to acquire a little of their language)-foolish men attribute this love of solitude to moroseness. They have a proverb'As sulky as a bear.' As usual, they are utterly mistaken. We bears-the grown-up ones, I mean -devote our lives to meditation on things in general."

"When we drink sweet-stuff, papa, and dance, and go to sleep?" I put in. (I was always a saucy young whelp.)

"Little bears should be seen and not heard," father replied. "Of course, at times we unbend, and think of nothing in particular. But we are wandering from the subject, and if we go on at this rate, we shall not get back to the sweet-stuff either. I had, as I was saying, or was going to say before I was interrupted by a saucy young bear, who, if he does not mind his ways-mark my words-will live to be muzzled." [Alas! my poor papa, thou wast for once correctly prophetic.] "I had selected for my winter quarters a hollow tree-trunk, which I carefully lined with moss. There was some inside before, but not enough for my purposes. When you are going to sleep for months, you like to lie soft and warm. Well, there I lay until the sunlight grew warm and woke me.

"I rubbed my eyes with my paws, and clambered up to the top of the trunk to look about me. When, however, I was wide awake, I looked at my own trunk, and found, as usual, that it had wasted considerably. I have heard the hunters laugh at their fat comrades, and ask them how long they have been asleep, but superior creatures

My poor dear imperfectly-prophetical papa! The people at the farm had been told that we were near. My papa had scarcely uttered" afterwards" before we saw the farmer and his son with rifles in their hands on the look-out for us.

"That's the fellow who gave me the headache!" exclaimed father; and rushing forward, he seized the farmer with a vice-like grip, and almost squeezed the life out of him.

With a growl of exultation, father dashed him to the ground; but short-lived was his triumph.

Crack, crack! went the sons' rifles, and with a groan, a gasp, and a convulsive kick, my poor papa rolled over, dead.

My mother, Bruina, and myself fled in terror. We had nearly reached our cave, and having, as we thought, secured our personal safety, were proceeding to indulge unrestrainedly in grief, when we found that the murderous young farmers, not satisfied with the slaughter of poor father, were in pursuit of us.

We could see them creeping towards us, rifle in hand, to take us unawares. Bruina took refuge between mother's knees, I sheltered at her side.

Crack, crack! went the rifles again, as soon as the bloodthirsty young ruffians saw that they were discovered. Down tumbled mother on top of me. (To be continued.)

RICHARD ROWE.