happy. Shall we not be glad, then, with the birds, because their lost one is found? You may still hear it sing from the trees, and see its bright plumage as it skips about the garden, and know that it is happier there than it would be in confinement, where its song would seem to be—

Still, if you want something which will fly in the air, and yet return when you wish it, be a good boy, and when I come home again I will bring it for you." Henry no longer shed tears for the bird when he thought of its being so happy in freedom.

All the afternoon he studied and worked and played as usual, often wondering what it was that his father would bring him. At length sunset came, and his father returned, bringing him a handsome kite, adorned with painted pictures. "O, father," cried Henry, after he had joyfully examined it, "may I go and play with it now?" "Not now," replied his father, "but in the morning when the wind is fresh I will show you how to raise it, and you may see it fly." Early the next morning Henry rose while a faint star was still shining in at his window, and kneeling down with a confiding heart, he repeated softly and slowly, his morning prayer. He then took his kite and went down into the garden, where the sun was just lighting up the dew-drops, making them shine like diamonds, and the breeze was fresh and strong. In a few minutes his father appeared, smiling at his promptness, and went with him into the field to assist in raising his kite.

Proudly it soared away until the yellow star upon it looked smaller than the morning star that had peeped in at Henry's window, and as they watched it moving through the air like a bird, his father told him that Benjamin Franklin, a philosopher, once tried an experiment with a kite, by which he discovered the nature of lightning. Henry said he thought Benjamin Franklin was a little boy that paid all his money away for a whistle. "So he was," said his father, "but he learnt wisdom by his mistakes, and that made him a philosopher." Henry wanted to hear all about the experiment. So his father told him how Franklin made his kite with an iron point at the top, and the string of hemp with the lower part of silk, and a key fastened where the two were tied together, and how he raised it in a thunder-storm, and the iron drew the lightning which passed down the hemp-string to the key, but no further, because it could not pass down a silken string; that he then drew it down so as to touch the key, when he received a spark like that from an electrical machine, which showed that electrical sparks are of the same nature as lightning, which no one knew before, and which was a great and useful discovery. Henry was pleased with the story, but when his father told him that another man trying the same experiment afterwards, was killed by the lightning, the little boy said that he should not care about trying it himself.

Thus the time passed pleasantly until they returned to breakfast, and when they heard the birds singing sweetly among the trees, Henry was glad that