"Are you waking, flowers that slumber
In the deep and frosty ground?
Do you hear what we are breathing
To the listening world around?
For we bear the sweetest story
That the glad year ever tells:
How He loved the little children,--
He who brought the Christmas bells!
Ding, dong! ding, dong, Christmas bells!

GEORGE COOPER.




JACK THE MAGPIE.


One day last summer, a man in Colorado found a magpie by the roadside.
Its wings had been clipped, so that it could not fly. The man gave it to
a little boy named Ernest Hart.

He lived with his parents in a neat cottage near by a mountain stream.
He ran home, and showed the bird to his sister Edith. They named it
Jack.

Jack was quite a large bird. His body was black as coal; his breast was
white; and his wings and tail shaded off into a dark green. His bill was
long and very strong. He had a shrewd, knowing look. As he was quite
tame, he must have been some one's pet.