A FEW summers ago I was recovering from a severe illness, and to gain strength went into a little country place in the hope that the soft breezes would bring back the color to my cheeks, and health to the weak frame. It was in the early part of June, I think, and the weather was sultry, so that it was pleasant to take a wrapper and lie down on the tender grass, beneath the shade of an out-spread umbrella. I found it more than pleasant, while lying thus by the side of the river Thames, watching the glassy stream in its lazy-like wanderings through the flowery-scented meadows and vales in zig-zag course, as though making its journey as long as possible, ere it was lost in the salt sea waves a few miles further on. The “time of singing had come,” and the many-voiced songsters were heard on every hand, calling one’s thoughts away to a time when
The day will never be too long
For cloudless joy and happy song,
The songs that will the Mansion flood
From those made happy through His blood.
Then my thoughts were called back again to the margin of the river by the shouts of little children, who were amusing themselves in various ways. One little boy seemed “happier than a king,” as, with shoes and socks thrown aside, he sat dangling his feet in the river; causing the little fish to wonder — if they ever do such a thing — what large monster was thus disturbing their peaceful element. But what shout of joy was that? Oh, I see; it’s a little girl calling her brother’s attention to the poor prisoners in the bottle, who cannot make out why the stream is so narrow, as they knock their little noses against the glassy banks. I suppose the important person with the rod and line, and the cunning hook, has made the unfortunate little minnows captive. O, sunny time of childhood! how enjoyable is everything to you, how real the pleasure and the pain. But I’m not going to write a long moral, you know; but I could not help thinking how often we are like the little fish in the bottle. A tempting bait — Satan is the angler — how soon we snap at it. Dear little friends, don’t snap at every bait you see: that is what I thought at the river-side.
AN INVALID.