proffered at once the full use for weeks, months or years of that vast and royal collection which the British government has been gathering at such heavy cost for the last hundred years. Here were over 40,000 manuscripts and 750,000 volumes, any one or any number of which were open to the use of any foreign or English scholar without expense, trouble or needless restriction.

Among the great number of other ancient and time worn Scriptures examined there, papyri enclosed in glass plates to stay the progress of decay; palimpsests, the early writing of which afforded only such faint traces as could be discerned through a magnifying glass; royal gospels on purple vellum inscribed with letters of gold; pages of the black, cramped, heavy script of the dark ages; exquisite volumes with curious arabesque borders and glowing full page illustrations scarcely dimmed by the lapse of centuries; manuscripts of all classes and ages from Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Hungary, India, Ireland, Iceland, all quarters of the globe,-the crown of all was the old Alexandrian Bible.

We sometimes say of a precious book that it is worth its weight in gold. But their weight in gold would sustain no appreciable proportion to the real value of the four volumes which contain this old Scripture. They are entirely unpurchasable and can be balanced in preciousness by the few other Bibles which have also escaped the ravages of time, and offer for the use of Christian learning Scriptures as ancient, rare and important.

The Alexandrian Bible is contained in four quarto volumes of 773 leaves. It was written upon thin, fine vellum, which has decayed in many places, leaving holes in the sheet. The red ink in which the opening lines of the different books are inscribed, holds its color well; but the black ink in which the main portion of the book was written, has long since faded into a yellowish-brown, and scales off from the page unless the leaf is handled very tenderly. The close of each book is marked with curious arabesque drawings of a border partly enclosing the title, which is placed at the end

of the books, not at the beginning. The writing is in two columns to the page, the letters being the ancient square uncials, not quite so simple as those found in the Vatican and Sinai Bibles, larger than the former but a little smaller than the latter. A few of them have been pared from the edge of the page by some ignorant and careless book-binder.

This Bible contains the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, (only ten leaves of which are lost,) with the New Testament, (from which, unfortunately, several fragments are gone.) the Apocrypha, the Epistles of Clement, and one of Athanasius. Each of the three oldest Bibles extant contains other books and epistles than those now included in our canon of Holy Scripture, showing that they were written before the time when the limits of the Scriptures were closely and exactly defined. The Epistles of Clement and Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and some other Scriptures were long read in the churches, and inserted, although it is thought not upon equal terms, among the other books of the Bible.

The Alexandrian is the most ancient Scripture we have in which capital letters are used. They are written here at the opening of each section and book. We also find on these pages the primitive punctuation mark, a simple dot followed by a break in the writing. The appearance of the Eusebian canons denotes that the copy was not made earlier than the last quarter of the fourth century; while a number of considerations indicate that it had come into existence before the middle of the fifth. Dr. Scrivener says, "The Alexandrian has been judged to be carelessly written, but that is the case to some degree with nearly all the old copies, with the Sinai Bible most of all. Besides other corrections by later hands, there are not a few instances in which the original scribe altered what he had at first written, and these changes are to the full as weighty as the primitive readings which they amend. The Alexandrian is at perpetual variance with the Sinai and the Vatican Bibles in their characteristic and more conspicuous various readings, and being thus

shown to have had an origin perfectly independent to these cognate copies, its agree ment with either or both of them supplies great strength of probability to any reading thus favored." This Bible, the third in antiquity, was the first to receive thorough scholarly examination and contribute to the correction of the errors in the common Scripture text.

Its external history is brief. It was presented to Charles I. through Sir Thomas Roe, the English Ambassador to Turkey in 1628. The giver was Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople, whose European education incited him to'attempt reforms which ended in his being strangled on the charge of high treason in 1638. He had previously been patriarch of Alexandria and had brought the book from that city. The earliest inscription in the book is a MoorishArabic scrawl found at the foot of the first

page in Genesis, denouncing a curse upon any one who should take it away from the patriarchate of Alexandria. There is also a Latin note upon one of the fly leaves declaring that the book was presented to the patriarch, A. D., 1098. Cyril wrote a note in it, indicating the tradition that the book was copied by Thecla, a noble Egyptian lady, a little later than A. D., 325. But Dr. Tregelles acutely conjectures that this tradition arose from the fact that the first of the remaining leaves of the Gospels forms part of the Scripture for St. Thecla's festival day and was therefore marked with her name. The Bible was presented by the King of England to the British Museum in 1753, and it has since remained there the most valuable manuscript in that vast collection, or indeed, within the possession of Protestant Christendom.

Frank P. Woodbury.

"O, acrobats; Dancing darkey!" No. But I don't believe you'll ever guess. I'll give you a hint or two, and then perhaps you will think.

The thing that was in Tom's stocking that morning was put in by Tom himself. It isn't very common, I know, for boys to fill their own stockings, and Tom had not always done it in exactly this way; but there was a good reason why nobody but him should do it this time, and I presume if you had been in his place, you would done just as he did.

The thing that was in Tom's stocking was worth a great deal.

"Worth a dollar?"
More than that.
"Ten dollars?"
More than that.

"Hundred dollars!"

O yes, much more than that: if you had been in Tom's place you would not have sold it, I'm sure for many hundreds of dollars.

"Wasn't he a lucky boy, though?"

Yes, he was not however in just the way you think. But you haven't guessed yet

It was his foot. jumped out of bed.

what it was that Tom had in his stocking. Give it up? Well then I'll tell you. He put it in when he Now you know why it was like a jumping-jack, and why Tom put it into his stocking himself, and why he wouldn't have sold it for a good deal of money.

But you thought it was a present. Yes, but Tom didn't expect any present in his stocking that morning. I suppose he would have been as glad of one as you or I, but there was no one to make him a present on this Christmas day. He thought it all over before he went to sleep on Christmas eve. The year before there were presents enough. They were living then in the old home in the city-Father and Mother and little Sue and baby Dick; and they had a Christmas tree in the parlor, and on it was a new dressing-gown for father, and a new chain and locket with father's picture in it for mother, and a doll's house for little Sue, and a jack in the box for Dick, and many other things too numerous to mention; not the least among which was a splendid new sled, latest tooth-pick pattern, painted blue, with its name "Streak" in gilt letters on the top; a genuine blue streak it proved, too, Tom said, "Give it a good day and a good track."

Tom remembered that day very well. He thought it all over-how bright his father's eyes were, and what an eager look there was on his face as he watched the children at their play, and how hard he seemed to be trying to make the day a merry one for all, and still how it sometimes seemed as though he would cry, even while he was laughing. Tom did not know, then, what this all meant, nor why his mother was so sad; but when, two months after, his father died, he understood that they were full of sorrow because they knew that it would be the last Christmas they ever would spend on earth together.

Tom loved his father dearly; and when one day they called him in, and he sat down by the bedside, and took the thin cold hand in his, and heard the slowly whispered words: "I'm going away, my boy. Be good to your mother. Take care of little

Sue and Dick. I leave them with you! Always tell the truth. Don't do a mean thing. Father trusts you. Jesus will help you"when Tom heard these words, slowly and painfully spoken, and went out of the room knowing that he never again should see his father alive, it seemed to him that his heart would break. He thought he should never be happy again like other boys. But young hearts are not often crushed by sorrow, and Tom soon saw that there was need that he should be braver and more cheerful than he had ever been before.

In the spring their house in the city was sold, and Tom's mother, with the children, moved into the farm house where his father had lived when he was a boy. It was an old-fashioned house with a sloping roof in the rear that reached almost to the ground, and there were five large elms in the yard with a swing hanging from the branches of one of them, and there was a nice garden with currant bushes and asparagus beds and pie-plant in great abundance, and there was an orchard with twenty or thirty old apple trees, and a pasture with woods in the rear and a brook running through it with a good many dace and minnows in it, and now and then a trout. There could not have been a better home for a twelve-year-old boy, and Tom had enjoyed it, though he had been obliged to work pretty hard, for his mother was not rich. The care of the garden and of old Betsey the cow, and of the pigs and the hens fell pretty much on Tom, and in looking after these things his mornings and evenings and holidays and vacations had been fully occupied. I suppose he had sometimes been idle when he ought to have been at work, and sometimes careless and roguish; but I am bound to say that Tom had tried hard to act like a man. All the neighbors said, at any rate, that that widow Noble's boy Tom was just the manliest little chap that ever was.

"Handles a hoe," said farmer Brown, "as if he had been born with a hoe in his hand.”

"Ye oughter see his inyun beds,” said farmer Green. "There aint a weed in 'em anywhere big enough for a grasshopper to roost on. Pusley don't stand no show at all in his garden.”

"And that aint the best on't," said farmer White. "Blamed if he aint the most fatherliest little fellow to them younger children that I ever see. And he's jest as tender and good to his mother as a boy could be. 'Taint often you see a woman treated by anything of mankind as he treats her. Seems jest like as if he was a courtin' on her; he's so kind and thoughtful like.

It did the neighbors good to praise Tom, I am sure. And if they did not say these things to his face, he knew that they thought well of him, and their good opinion helped him mightily to be a better boy.

I have told you all these things about Tom, that you may understand a little how he felt that Christmas eve, as he lay there thinking about the last Christmas day, and of all that had happened since. He felt sure there would be no presents; for his mother was going to Brookville, the week before, but she had been taken suddenly ill and had neither been able to purchase nor prepare anything for Christ

mas.

Now she was better; grandmother had come to take care of her, and all was going on well. But though Tom was very thankful for this, he couldn't help thinking how different things were the year before; and because he was a real boy and not one of Mr. Hiram Hydraulic's boys, I guess (though I don't know, because I was not there to see,) that he cried about it a little before he went to sleep.

The next morning all this sorrow was bravely put away. Tom was up betimes, and it was plain to begin with that if the day failed to be a merry one it would not be for the want of Tom's wishing it to be merry early and often.

children, and that her first name was Mary. "Where's Mawy Quismas?" he demanded. "O you're a knowing youngster," laughed Tom, as he rolled up the cherub in the blanket and tossed him over his shoulder; "Christmas isn't a woman, Dick, it's a day. "Tisn't Mary Christmas, it's Merry Christmas." Dick still looked dubious.

"Well," said Susie, "there was a Mary that had something to do with it; perhaps he's thinking about the story in the Testament. But say, Tom, is this Christmas day, truly?"

"You're right, it is," said Tom, the rale ginooine Christmas day. But look here, ducky, we're not going to have any presents to-day; because, you know, mamma has been sick, and she hasn't been able to get anything ready for Christmas, or even to think about it. Now don't you say a single word about presents: that would make her feel badly, you know. Let's see if we can't have a jolly old Christmas all on our own hook. That'll do her lot's of good. Come on, let's go down and wish her Merry Christmas! Softly! we won't wake her if she is asleep." They knocked gently at mother's door. "Come in," said mother.

Sne

Mother was sitting up in bed with her breakfast shawl round her shoulders. was much better, but her face wore a troubled look, that quickly passed away when the happy little group stood by the side of her bed.

"Where's Mawy Quismas?" persisted Dick. The irrepressible youngster was determined to spoil Tom's plans.

"O mother!" he laughed, "this baby thinks Christmas is a girl, and her name is Mary."

"Well, children dear," Mrs. Noble began, "I'm sorry"

66

Now, mother, dear," said Tom, gently putting his arm round her neck and stopping her mouth with a kiss, "don't you say another word. I'm not sorry a bit. I was, a little, but I've got all over it. Are you, Sue?"

"No," said Sue, bravely. "Are you, Dick?"

"No, I isn't sawy," crowed the little cherub, flapping the wings of his night gown, "but I's hungwy vough. I wants my bextuf."

Holmes's Hill, and the meadows beneath, white with snow that rain and frost had enameled with a glittering crust, shone like a crystal sea. Tom thought there was glory

"Now just let me fix this thing," cried Tom. After breakfast I'm going up to the woods to cut a nice little Christmas tree and get it ready for evening. Christmas evening is just as good a time for a Christmas tree as Christmas eve. Then we 'll all go out and have some jolly fun sliding down the little hill behind the house. After dinner, I'll pop a good lot of corn, and Sue and Dick can string that while I go up to Holmes's Hill, if Mother says I may, and have an hour or two of royal coasting. All the fellows are to be there this afternoon. Then after supper, I'll build a roaring fire in the big sitting-room fire-place, and we'll bring in our Christmas tree, and festoon it with pop-corn, and hang some of those bright balls on it that we had last year, you know, mother, with some apples and things, and I know we can make it look as pretty as a picture. Then we'll crack a lot of walnuts and butternuts, and make some molasses taffy; and we'll play some games, and sing "We Three Kings of Orient," and I shouldn't wonder if we would all feel as happy as kings."

"Very good, Tom," said Mrs. Noble; "your programme is a capital one. My children have been so good, all summer, and especially my dear boy, that I felt very sorry because I was not able to prepare for their Christmas; but I know that if each one tries to make the rest happy, we shall all have a merry Christmas. I'll ask the doctor when he comes, and perhaps he'll let you and grandma help me into the big rocking-chair, and draw me out into the sitting-room for a little while this evening." "Do it mother!" shouted Tom. "Good for you! Won't that be staving to have you round again."

With his heart full of his plan to make the most of his Christmas, Tom put on his cap and mittens and sallied forth into the frosty air to do his chores before breakfast. The sun was just looking over the top of

most as bright as the angels saw in the sky. No doubt it was partly because his heart was so full of good will that the world looked so glorious.

"Merry Christmas, old Betsey!" he shouted, as he mixed an extra allowance of meal for her breakfast.

"M-m-m-m!" replied the cow.

I don't know exactly what she meant by that; but I know that the dumb creatures would be very thankful on Christmas day if they knew enough; for it is the Lord Christ who had a manger for his cradle, and on whom the large eyed cattle looked wonderingly before ever the shepherds worshiped Him, who has taught his disciples to be merciful and kind to "man, and bird, and beast."

แ

Merry Christmas, Grunter and Greaser!" shouted Tom again,as he looked over the side of the pig-pen, with a basket of corn in his hand. Greaser and Grunter were of Dick's mind; they wanted their breakfast, and no nonsense; and they put their forefeet up on the side of the pen, and said so in the plainest Hog Latin. Tom gave it to them, and by this time the Prince or Pasha, or Highcockolorum, or whatever you call him, of the hen-house, was on hand with his numerous family.

Merry Christmas to you, old Rooster!" said Tom; whereupon that worthy stood a moment on one leg, cocked his head first on one side and then on the other, and then flew up to the top of the pig-pen, flapped his wings and answered

But you know what he said much better than I can tell you. It sounded to Tom a little like: "Ditto to you!" At any rate the funny way the old rooster said it made Tom laugh heartily, and he went into break

fast in the best of humor.

After breakfast, the day's programme was carried out just as Tom had arranged it. Taking his hatchet and a rope, he loaded the little children on his sled and went to the woods for the Christmas tree. The one