spread ruin and desolation around, and yet this terrible power, so tremendous, and against which the cleverest contrivances can provide no defence, is as invisible as the great Maker of Heaven and Earth. How unbelieving many people would look if you told them of a dreadful creature that was coming to the world, which could be heard to roar, be felt to knock down every thing in its path—men, women and children, houses, churches, towers, castles, cities, and trees the most firmly rooted—and yet which you could never catch the faintest glimpse of, for it was always invisible, even when it roared the loudest! As invisible then, as when in its mildest moods, it, as it were, purred softly over the country like a cat. How the good people would laugh, and tell you you were very silly to believe in such a thing. Yet I think this is not at all an incorrect description of the great invisible Power WIND. Now the lesson we may learn from this is to be humble-minded; for since we live in the constant presence of a Power we cannot see, we ought to feel it is equally possible other Powers may exist of which our other senses cannot take cognizance. There is an old proverb—"Seeing is believing"—but you perceive, dear readers, we are forced to believe in the wind though we never see him at all.

To return to Time who is travelling fast on while I am rambling after the wind, he has puzzled the artists a good deal I should say, for with all their skill at representation they have never hit upon any better idea of him than an old Man with wings. An old man with wings! Can you fancy anything so unnatural! One can quite understand beautiful young Angels with wings. Youth and power and swiftness belong to them. Also Fairies with wings are quite comprehensible creatures; for one fancies them so light and airy and transparent, living upon honey dew and ambrosia, that wings wherewith to fly seem their natural appendages. But the decrepitude of old age and the wings of youth and power are a strange mixture:—a bald head, and a Fairy's swiftness!—how ridiculous it seems, and so I think I may well say Time is a very odd sort of thing.

Among those who have to deal with Time, few are more puzzled how to manage him than we story-tellers. In my first chapter, for instance, I gave you a half-hour's conversation among some Fairies, but I think you would be very angry with me were I to give you as exactly every half-hour that passed over the heads of the little girls with Fairy Godmothers, till they grew up. How you would scold, dear little readers, if I were to enter into a particular description of each child's Nurse, and tell whether Miss Aurora, Miss Julia, Miss Hermione, &c. &c. &c. were brought up on baked flour, groat-gruel, rusks, tops and bottoms, or revalenta food! Whether they took more castor-oil, or rhubarb and magnesia; whether they squalled on those occasions or were very good. When they cut their teeth and how, together with all the &c. and ups and downs of Nursery life which large families, such as you and I belong to, go through daily.

Well then, suppose I altogether pass over a period of ten years, and enter into no minute particulars respecting that portion of Time. You must know that the Fairies had agreed that all the children should have the same (and rather a large) amount of intellect, or what you would call cleverness: that is to say, they were all equally capable of learning anything they chose to learn: also they had all fair health, plenty to eat and drink, and all the so called "necessary" comforts of life.

Now then to our story.

At the end of ten years the Fairies agreed to go and have a peep how their charges were going on. They quite knew that nothing decisive could be found out, till the children had come to years of discretion and were their own mistresses. Still they thought it would amuse them just to go and see how the charms were working, as it were; so, away they went.

Now picture to yourselves a nice large nursery, much such a one as your own, in which several children are playing. The eldest, a girl of ten, you may see yonder lounging—gracefully perhaps—but still lounging in a rocking chair which she is swinging backwards and forwards, having set it in motion by the action of her foot on the floor. What a lovely face! I do not think you ever saw one so handsome except in a print in one of Mamma's best picture books. All the features are perfectly good and in proportion, and the dark blue eyes are fringed by the longest eyelashes ever seen. The hair of this little girl too—look at it, as the soft chestnut ringlets wave about on her shoulders as she swings, and show the round richness of the curls.

Now if you ask about the expression on her face, I must tell you it was rather languid and "pensieroso." Pensieroso is an Italian word really meaning thoughtful—but this little girl was not thinking, for then the expression of her face would have been much stronger and firmer and less languid; but the word has got to be used for a sort of awake-dreamy state when one lets thoughts float lazily along without having any energy to dwell upon them, and see whether they are good or bad.

The thought that was passing through this little girl's head at the time I mention and which made her look so languid and pensieroso, was

"I wish it was 6 o'clock."

Now here you are ready to laugh, I know, for there was nothing to look so languid about, in "I wish it was six o'clock!" but the fact was this: at half-past six the little girl's Mamma was expecting a large party to dinner and the little girl was to dress at six and be ready to go down and see the company:—I might add and to be seen by them; for the little girl was, as you will have guessed, the beautiful Aurora herself, and there had been plenty of foolish people, though her good Mamma was not one of them, to tell her how pretty she was and how much people admired her.

It is a very pleasant thing to be admired, both for children and grown up people. "The love of approbation," as it is called, i.e. the wish to be approved of and admired is a feeling which is very strong in most people; not in quite all, perhaps, but in most people certainly. But like all other powers of the mind considered apart from the influence of the heart and conscience, it is capable of being used to a very bad or a very good purpose. Thus you may remember what our Saviour says of the Pharisees who stood praying at the corners of the streets that they might be seen of men: Verily, they had their reward—viz: that men admired them: whereas those who do good deeds and pray privately, i.e. unseen and unadmired by men, should verily have their reward in that day when God who seeth in secret himself shall reward them openly.

Here you see is the same strong feeling,—love of approbation, exercised in a wrong and a right direction. The Pharisees wish for the approbation of men, good people wish for the approbation of God.

Now, love of approbation exists about much smaller matters than I have just been mentioning. But I would warn my young readers, that, to be always thinking, and bothering yourselves as to what other people are thinking about you, is one of the most uncomfortable and injurious habits a person can get into. It makes them so selfish and egotistical. And here was one of Aurora's dangers. Because she knew she was pretty, she was always wondering what other people were thinking about her, a habit which so far from contributing to what the good Fairy had wished, viz. her happiness, was constantly spoiling her comfort from hour to hour. And here, at ten years old, was this little lady swinging languidly and idly on the rocking chair, wishing it was six o'clock, instead of enjoying, as she might so well have done, that small portion of time, time present, which is, as I told you before, the only bit of him we can ever lay hold of, as it were. Of time present, just then, she thought nothing. She would have said, (had she been asked), that the old