of faith in Jesus. Yes, of that great faith, which pierces the clouds of human guilt, and rolls them back from the face of God. "Faith!" echoed that strange man who stood there, erect, with the death-chill on his brow: "Faith! can it give me back my honor? Look ye, priest! there, over the waves, sits George Washington, telling to his comrades the pleasant story of the eight years war: there, in his royal halls, sits George of England, bewailing, in his idiotic voice, the loss of his colonies! And here am I!-I, who was first to raise the flag of freedom, and the first to strike a blow against that king-here am I, dying! oh, dying like a dog!"

7. The awe-stricken preacher started back from the look of the dying man, while throb-throb-throb-beat the deathwatch in the shattered wall. "Hush! silence along the lines there!" he muttered, in that wild, absent tone, as though speaking to the dead; "silence along the lines! not a word, on peril of your lives! Hark you, Montgomery! we will meet in the center of the town :-we will meet there in victory, or die! Hist! silence, my men-not a whisper as we move up those steep rocks! Now on-my boys-now on! Men of the wilderness, we will gain the town! Now up with the banner of stars-up with the flag of freedom, though the night is dark and the snow falls! Now! now one more blow, and Quebec is ours!"

8. And look! his eyes grow glassy. With that word on his lips, he stands there-ah! what a hideous picture of despair : erect, livid, ghastly there for a moment, and then he falls! he is dead! Ah, look at that proud form, thrown cold and stiff upon the damp floor. In that glassy eye there lingers even yet, a horrible energy-a sublimity of despair. Who is this strange man, lying alone in this rude garret: this man, who, in all his crimes, still treasured up that blue uniform, that faded flag? Who is this being of horrible remorse-this man, whose memories seem to link something with heaven, and more with hell?

9. Let us look at that parchment, and flag. The aged min

ister unrolls that faded flag; it is a blue banner, gleaming with thirteen stars. He unrolls that parchment; it is a colonel's commission in the Continental army, addressed to BENEDICT ARNOLD! And there, in that rude hut, while the death-watch throbbed in the shattered wall-there, unknown, unwept, in all the bitterness of desolation, lay the corse of the patriot and the traitor.

10. Oh, that our own true Washington had been there, to sever that good right arm from the corse; and, while the dishonored body rotted into dust, to bring home that noble arm, and embalm it among the holiest memories of the past! For that right arm struck many a gallant blow for freedom. Yonder, at Ticonderoga, at Quebec, Champlain, and Saratoga, that arm yonder, beneath the snow-white mountains, in the deep silence of the river of the dead, first raised into light the ban-` ner of the stars!

Benedict Arnold, an American general, whose memory is stained with treason, on account of his attempt to betray his country into the hands of the English. He was born in Norwich, Conn., January 3, 1740. Soon after the battle of Lexington, he received a commission as Colonel in the Continental Army. He aided Ethan Allen in the capture of Ticonderoga, in May, 1775; also endured great hardships in his long march through pathless forests, as he led his twelve hundred brave followers against Quebec. At the battle of Lake Champlain, October 11, 1776, he fought with great courage, also at the battle of Stillwater, October 7. In 1777 he was raised to the rank of Major-General. He was appointed to the command of West Point, which important post he proposed to betray into the hands of Sir Henry Clinton. The latter employed Major Andre as his agent in the negotiation. The plot was detected, Major Andre captured and hung, and Arnold barely escaped (Sept. 25, 1780) in the British sloop Vulture, stationed below West Point. After receiving pay for his treason, he entered the British army, and fought against his native land, committing several acts of cruelty and outrage. He passed the last days of his life in England, where he was shunned and despised by everybody. He died in London, in June, 1801.

LESSON LXXI.

VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT TYNDALL.

BY CLARENCE KING.

O our surprise, upon sweeping the horizon with my level, there appeared two peaks equal in height with us, and two rising even higher. That which looked highest of all was

a cleanly cut helmet of granite, upon the same ridge with Mount Tyndall, lying about six miles south, and fronting the desert with a bold square bluff which rises to the crest of the peak, where a white fold of snow trims it gracefully.

Mount Whitney, as we afterward called it in honor of our chief, is probably the highest land within the United States. Its summit looks glorious, but inaccessible. The general topography overlooked by us may be thus simply outlined :

2. Two parallel chains, enclosing an intermediate trough, face each other. Across this deep enclosed gulf, from wall to wall, juts the thin, but lofty and craggy ridge, or "divide," before described, which forms an important water-shed, sending those streams which enter the chasm north of it into King's River, those south forming the most important sources of the Kern, whose straight, rapidly deepening valley stretches south, carved profoundly in granite, while the King's, after flowing longitudinally in the opposite course for eight or ten miles, turns abruptly west around the base of Mount Brewer, cuts across the western ridge, opening a gate of its own, and carves a rock channel transversely down the Sierra to the California plain.

3. Fronting us stood the west chain, a great mural ridge watched over by two dominant heights, Kaweah Peak and Mount Brewer, its wonderful profile defining against the western sky a multitude of peaks and spires. Bold buttresses jut out through fields of ice, and reach down stone arms among snow and débris. North and south of us the higher, or eastern, summit stretched on in miles and miles of snow-peaks, the farthest horizon still crowded with their white points.

4. East the whole range fell in sharp, hurrying abruptness to the desert, where, ten thousand feet below, lay a vast expanse of arid plain, intersected by low parallel ranges, traced from north to south. Upon the one side are a thousand sculptures of stone, hard, sharp, shattered by cold into infiniteness of fractures and rift, springing up, mutely severe, into the dark, austere blue of heaven; scarred and marked, except

where snow or ice, spiked down by ragged granite bolts, shields with its pale armor these rough mountain shoulders; storm-tinted at summit, and dark where, swooping down from ragged cliff, the rocks plunge over cañon-walls into blue, silent gulfs.

5. Upon the other hand, reaching out to horizons faint and remote, lay plains clouded with the ashen hues of death; stark, wind-swept floors of white, and hill-ranges rigidly formal, monotonously low, all lying under an unfeeling brilliance of light, which, for all its strange, unclouded clearness, has yet a vague half-darkness, a suggestion of black and shade. more truly pathetic than fading twilight. No greenness soothes, no shadow cools the glare. Owen's Lake, an oval of acrid water, lies dense blue upon the brown sage plain, looking like a plate of hot metal. Traced in ancient beach-lines, here and there upon hill and plain, relics of ancient lakeshore outline the memory of a cooler past-a period of life and verdure when the stony chains were green islands among basins of wide, watery expanse.

6. The two halves of this view, both in sight at once, express the highest, the most acute, aspects of desolation— inanimate forms out of which something living has gone forever. From the desert have been dried up and blown away its seas. Their shores and white, salt-strewn bottoms lie there in the eloquence of death. Sharp white light glances from all the mountain walls, where in marks and polishings has been written the epitaph of glaciers now melted and vanished into air.

7. Vacant cañons lie open to the sun, bare, treeless, half shrouded with snow, cumbered with loads of broken débris, still as graves, except when flights of rocks rush down some chasm's throat, startling the mountains with harsh, dry rattle, their fainter echoes from below followed too quickly by dense silence. The serene sky is grave with nocturnal darkness. The earth blinds you with its light. That fair contrast we love in lower lands between bright heavens and dark cool

earth here reverses itself with terrible energy. You look up into an infinite vault, unveiled by clouds, empty and dark, from which no brightness seems to ray; an expanse with no graded perspective, no tremble, no vapory mobility, only the vast yawning of hollow space.

8. With an aspect of endless remoteness burns the small white sun, yet its light seems to pass invisibly through the sky, blazing out with intensity upon mountain and plain, flooding rock details with painfully bright reflections, and lighting up the burnt sand and stone of the desert with a strange blinding glare. There is no sentiment of beauty in the whole scene; no suggestion, however far remote, of sheltered landscape; not even the air of virgin hospitality that greets us explorers in so many uninhabited spots which, by their fertility and loveliness of grove or meadow, seem to offer man a home, or us nomads a pleasant camp-ground.

9. Silence and desolation are the themes which nature has wrought out under this eternally serious sky. A faint suggestion of life clings about the middle altitudes of the eastern slope, where black companies of pine, stunted from breathing the hot desert air, group themselves just beneath the bottom of perpetual snow, or grow in patches of cloudy darkness over the moraines, those piles of wreck crowded from their pathway by glaciers long dead. Something there is pathetic in the very emptiness of these old glacier valleys, these imperishable tracks of unseen engines.

10. One's eye ranges up their broad, open channel to the shrunken white fields, surrounding hollow amphitheaters which were once crowded with deep burdens of snow,—the birthplace of rivers of ice now wholly melted; the dry, clear heavens overhead, blank of any promise of ever rebuilding them. I have never seen Nature when she seemed so little "Mother Nature" as in this place of rocks and snow, echoes or emptiness. It impresses me as the ruins of some bygone geological period, and no part of the present order, like a specimen of chaos which has defied the finishing hand of Time.