"YOUR WORD IS SUFFICIENT."



PETRARCH, a famous Italian poet, was held in high esteem for his candor and truth. On one occasion a violent quarrel occurred in the house of a rich nobleman where he was living, and they had recourse to arms. The nobleman, wishing to know who was to blame, assembled all his people, and bound them by a solemn oath to declare the whole truth.

Petrarch, in his turn, presented himself; the nobleman closed the book, and said, 

"As to you, Petrarch, your word is sufficient." ___________




CURIOUS DERIVATIONS.



CAN you imagine how the person sitting at your table happens to be called a boarder? In primitive times, the Anglo-Saxon table was simply a board placed upon trestles at the time of eating; so those that sat around were called boarders.

Before the addition and multiplication tables were invented, to puzzle and assist the brains of children, the early Greek scholars were obliged, in their arithmetical computations, to depend upon the use of pebbles in reckoning numbers. The word for pebble was calculus, and we are reminded of their poverty and expedients every time we use the word calculate.




I OFTEN think that Christian work is like much of our secular work in its laws and methods. If you send a woodman into the forest to fell trees, you do not expect him to strike his ax into one trunk, and then into another, till he has gone through the whole wood, delivering but one stroke upon a tree. That would do if he were "blazing a trail" through the forest; but if his work be to fell trees, it doesn't do at all. He may chop till he is gray, and never produce a log for the mill. He must take his stand by one trunk, and smite away, and make the chips fly, and walk around it, still swinging his ax and working toward the heart, till it comes crashing to the ground. That is the type of successful Christian work.  





Paster A. L. Stone, D. D.