abroad far and wide, rather than that their apostolical care, and solemnity, and truth, and love, should be no otherwise known than even thus.

But all I can ask your leave to tell of in this place is the marvellous doing of Jenny Russell's pen, with such small evidence as remains of her chief joy being to seek, and to lead others to seek after, "the mind that was in Christ Jesus." Well might the good Syrian, who was lately in this country, Assaad Yacoub Kayat, when I shewed these papers to him, beg a page to take home with him that his poor countrywomen' might see what women could do in England without hands!'

And is it not fitting that we should look thoughtfully at such an example as this for our own edification, and to the glory of divine grace! Of Jenny Russell it may truly be said, "She hath done what she could." Oh! the awful import of those few words-to rich and poor! What, all around us, and in such times as our lot is cast in, might not both do with hands! May they well think, when they read of her, if by your favour read they may !

Jenny Russell did not, with her maimed and pained body,' sit down in idleness. Neither did she wander about begging. She did not set herself to conquer the difficulties of writing-and very slowly and very painfully her task must needs have been accomplished-for the sake of a wonderment, nor for vanity, nor for gain, although doubtless she might have practised her acquirement, when she had so learned, for all three. What we possess of her writing is two sermons full of the blessed truths of the gospel, and some observations of her own upon them, proving that she so wrote them out for very love of

them, and in hope of good through them to others; and a letter also of her own, very affectingly expressive of her thankful, and humble, and holy frame, which would seem to have been in reply to some kind friend, whose benefaction she thus gratefully and religiously acknowledged. She had evidently a sound and clear understanding, and a tender spirit; and though poor as to the things of this world, "being dead, yet speaketh" in so touching a manner of her blessed experience of "the unsearchable riches of Christ," that I dare not any longer keep so much to myself all account of her. For I cannot but humbly hope that it may please God by his Holy Spirit, so to accompany it to the hearts of some, that it may be good for them, both "for the life that now is, and that which is to come," to have condescended, as peradventure it might have at first seemed, to contemplate the example and character, and that divinest gift, that "faith which worketh by love," which in such circumstances was so abundantly, so joyfully Vouchsafed to Jenny Russell!

With truest respect and good wishes,

I am, Madam,

Your obliged friend and servant,

PHILOPREPOS.

LUCUBRATIONS ABROAD.

No. I.

I HAD spent some days at Bruges, during which I

had visited most of the beautiful city is adorned. my dinner was eaten, my paid, and I had yet a full time fixed on for my departure. That hour's leisure I resolved to occupy in another visit to the church of St. Nicolas; and a few minutes after the resolution was taken found me in front of that ancient Gothic structure. I entered at the western door, and was proceeding towards the high altar, which had previously excited my admiration, when my attention was arrested by as piteous a spectacle of suffering humanity as ever awakened compassion.

churches with which that My trunks were packed, bill at the inn was duly hour to spare before the

An aged woman, scantily clad in the foulest rags, was seated on the low step of one of the confessionals in the side aisle, and there with extended hand, she silently but powerfully asked an alms.' Disease and want and some seventy years had left their usual traces, yet spite of their ravages and the livid pallor of her countenance, I fancied I perceived vestiges of great beauty:—the dark restless eye might tell of former fire, and around the small mouth and lips, now thin with age, the smile of allurement or of

scorn might well be believed to have once sparkled. The little Belgian straw bonnet that covered the head left the face exposed, and a gleam of light that found its way from a lofty window, fell on her features and person, giving them in parts an unnatural brilliancy, and making more striking the squalor of the one, the abject poverty of the other. The altar, or rather confessional, in front of which she was seated, was ornamented with a rich carving of wood, representing the fall of man; and immediately above her head was conspicuous the serpent coiled among the branches of the forbidden tree laden with its fatal apples.

I doubt if she had traced the origin of the evils that afflicted her when she chose her position, but nothing could be more strikingly appropriate; their connection was too obvious to be overlooked, and full of the humbling considerations the sight was calculated to awaken. I approached the poor supplicant, and placed in her attenuated hand a small gratuity. Apparently it exceeded what she was accustomed to receive, for an expression of deep gratitude passed over her features as she uttered her thanks. The Flemish word that caught my ear sounded so like my native tongue, that for an instant I fancied she was English; and in the compassion or rather fellowship of the moment, I bent down to add a few inquiries to my donation. I soon found that the bond of compatriotism was imaginary; but her ability to speak French, and the manner in which she did so, confirmed my suspicions that her story might record a fall besides that of our first parents, and most probably in the pursuit of some forbidden fruit. The human heart is seldom found irresponsive to the voice

of sympathy, and I gathered from her replies the outlines of a life of sin and misery.

Born of poor but respectable parents, she had early married the owner of a small estaminet in Bruges; but the fatal gift of beauty did not suffer her to remain long unnoticed in such a situation, and when the republican arms of France gained possession of Belgium, she was tempted by a soldier belonging to the forces under Dumourier, to quit her husband and her child to follow his glittering fortunes. With him she led, for some years, a life of varied misery ; and when, at the battle of Fleurus, death deprived her of his unholy protection, she contrived to obtain a precarious subsistence by the various exertions of bumble life, till strength and spirits failing, maternal affection (that feeling so deeply implanted by nature, as to be hardly uprooted even by a continued course of guilt) renewed in her desolate heart the yearning desire to see again the child she had deserted, and brought the wanderer back to her native city. From her husband, could she have appealed to him, she had little to hope; but he too had found a bloody grave; her only child was dead; her early kindred were all dispersed or dead too; and she fell through all the gradations of penury and wretchedness, till she had become the forlorn outcast that was before me.

The voice of conscience so long unheeded or silenced, now sometimes warns her of a judgment after death, and she seeks to appease its forebodings by the superstitions of her youth. She almost daily visits the shrine where I saw her, and believes that the saint whose church she has chosen as her place of supplication, gratified by her preference, touches