“Yes.” exclaimed she, in a transport
of joy, “I feel that you will give me as
much pleasure as you at first caused me
fright. How could I be so foolish as to
tremble and turn pale at the sight of little
animals, so timid themselves, and who,
though they are so small, do not fear to
approach us. O my dear Charley,” she
added, caressing him for the first time,
“you have cured me forever of the false
idea that I had of your species, and of
other still smaller animals. I see that we
are often blinded by our imagination,
and see dangers where there are none in
reality. Isee that the most hideous in-
sects, and even animals which are venom-
ous, will hardly ever do us any harm,
unless we irritate them.”

Madame Melval, delighted that she had
been the means of curing the ludicrous
fears of her daughter, then told her that
people instructed these pretty little ani-
mals, so that they would obey their com-
mands; so that they would dance on a
swinging: cord, play on a tabour, go
through a number of military evolutions,
and apply the match to a cannon, without
being at all afraid when it was discharged.

“You see how it is, my dear child,”
the mother continued, “There is hardly
anything which cannot be effected by
habit and education, even among animals
that we regard as the weakest and the
least intelligent: and you will allow, that
when a little mouse has the ingenuity to
feign himself dead, and when he has the
courage to stand and listen without flinch-
ing, to the report of a cannon, we are un-
worthy of the superiority which the Crea-
tor has given us over the other animals, and
stripped of that intelligence of which we
are so proud, when, by our foolish fears,
we place ourselves below those same ani-

THE YOUTHS CABINET.

  

 

mals which we ought to have under our
control.”

Laura, convinced of the truth of what
her mother said, provided herself with a
large stock of courage, to be used when
occasions required it. No one, after that,
ever saw her tremble and change color,
when a spider found his way into her
chamber, nor even when he climbed up
her frock, The butterflies who flitted in
the evening around the lamp, did not any
more appear to her to be the messengers
of Satan; and the mice which she met,
although they were not so white as Char-
ley, and had not so good an education, no
longer caused her to scream and call for
help. In a word, she accustomed herself
to see the most hideous-looking insects
without the least fear. She was not long
in making up her mind, that in almost
every case, the fear which one feels does
much more harm than could possibly have
been effected by the object which excited
that fear.

 

Snow in the Aretic Regions.

w latitude seventy-eight degrees and
thirty minutes, my attention was
attracted towards a shower of frozen
particles which fell down like snow,

during this season of inclemency, but

which was not the snow I had been used
to see. Its general appearance was a fall
of scales, or thin eircular pellicles of ice,
but, upon minute investigation, they were
found to be crystalline feathers, of symme-
trical beauty, connected together by their
bases, so as to form a common centre,
from which the vanes or shafts projected
like rays, or, to use @ plainer simile, like