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Our Boys
THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE.
By Fanny J. Crosby.
God spake in Genesis and said:
l^et there be light, and darkness fled;
In ExoduB, at His command,
All Israel fled from Egypt's land;
Their laws, and what their tribes befell,
Leviticus and Numbers tell;
God's holy will again we see
Contained in Deuteronomy.
Then follow Joshua, Judges, Ruth,
Two books of Samuel from his vouth:
And two of Kings, the record plain
Of many a good and evil reign;
Two books of Chronicles tell o'er
Each monarch's history heard before?
Their noble deeds of valor done.
Their many battles fought and won.
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Historic words our hearts inspire
From Ezra and from Nehemiah;
And Esther shows the ways of God,
While Job receives the chastening rod;
The Psalms lift up the soul with praise,
And Proverbs teach in homely phrase;
Ecclesiastes next comes on,
And then the Song of Sdlomon.
Isaiah now, with vision clear,
Beholds a promised Savior near,
While Jeremiah lifts on high, .
For Israel's race, his humble cry;
And Lamentations paints his grief
That Zion weeps nor finds relief;
Ezekiel, Daniel, each record
The wondrous dealings of the Lord.
Hosea, Joel, Amos too, f
And Obadiab, prophets true,
O'er Israel's faithless nation yearn, !
And warn from evil to return;
rnen jonan, Micah, Nahum show
God's tender love and threatened woe;
Habakkuk prays in words sublime,
That ring through all succeeding time;
Next Zephaniah, Haggai,
Then Zechariah, Malachl,
Arid we have passed In close review '
From ancient Scripture to the new.
And now a Savior's birth behold,
In Matthew's Gospel sweetly told;
Mark, Luke and John, His works disclose.
His sufferings, death, and how He niacin
Acts the Holy Ghost descends,
And Christ His kingdom wide extends;
In Romans, lo! the apostle Paul
Commends the gift of God to all;
Corinthians and Galatians show
The grace that every soul may know.
Rphesians and Philippians tell
The zeal His life portrayed so well;
Colossians, Thessalonians, speak
Of hope and comfort to the weak;
In Timothy, Paul's charge we And,
In Titus, friendship warm and kind;
Philemon shows how love constrains,
While Hebrews all the types explains; <
With James and Peter, John and Juds,
And Revelation, we conclude
The books that in God's Word divine
Like stars of endless glory shine.?Ex.
THE BOYS OF OLDEN DAYS.
Great were the boys of olden days, who, grown
to manhood, opened new regions of the earth
to settlement and work.
Few now are the spots of the earth that have
I not been explored. Take the North and South
Poles, a few sections of South America, a little
of Africa, and a little of Central Asia, and you
have all the world with which man is not yet
wholly familiar.
It seems quite probable that within another
century the days of opening new countries will
have ended?there will be no untraveled spots
on the face of the globe.
Exploration is now conducted on scientific
lines. Men go on great expeditions equipped
with every comfort. But it was not so in the
days when Mackenzie found the Arctic Ocean
and then made his undaunted way to the Pacific.
The story of what was doing in those last
days of the 18th century is worth twenty tales
of bloody battles; a score of fairy nothings. He
urns mnlrinc for all hnmanitv?whirVi is roal
work?and some day it is to be hoped that Canada
will set up a great monument to his name.
PRESBYTERIAN OF THE SO
and Girls
He found out and proved a lot of things that
the geographers and stay-at-homes of his time
did not know and could not have known if he
had not taken a stout heart and a clever mind
into the wilds of the North and worked for the
honor of true knowledge and his natiye land.
When you are discouraged with a bit of work,
road this story of Mackenzie and take a new
hold on your undertakings. Learn from his
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Far to the north, so far 1. h that the thermometer
plays hide-and-go-seek much of the
time around forty degrees below, there is a jumble
of lakes and rivers bearing names like Athabasca,
Wholdachuck, Yellow Knive, Great Slave,
Tache, St. Therese, Good Hope, Great Bear,
Peace, Tatlah, Smoky, Fraser, and so on. They
lie in the provinces of Canada known as McKenzie,
Yukon and British Columbia. They are
so far out of the world of railways, telegraph,
printing presses and school houses that they
are lonesome even in these days when they are
being opened to active settlement.
But what must they have been in 1789, a hundred
and twenty-two years ago? The Athabasca
is a wonderful savage river, more mighty and
beautiful than our Hudson. It empties into
Athabasca Lake, and on this lake in 1789 Alexander
Mackenzie, chief fur trader for the North.
west Company, had his home. He was a trader
with Crees, Slaves, Chipewyans". So, too, he was
a dreamer, a thinker of doing things that other
men might call impossible. He loved the "sniff"
of the wilds, and he was neither afraid of himself
nor of natnre.
In those days the English government had a
standing reward of $100,000 for any man who
would discover a northwest passage between the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The reward had
been standing for years. Many men had tried
to win it, and failed. Mackenzie said to himself:
"The rivers run north from Athabasca, and
run west from Athabasca. If I follow the rivers
I must land somewhere?perhaps I will master
the secret and win the great reward."
One morning in June he put a canoe into
the waters of Athabasca. He started north to
where the present Mackenzie River flows out to
the lake, making its way to the Polar waters.
He had two or three men with him and some
provisions. He entered the Mackenzie at a point
a mile wide, and its banks rise three and four
hundred feet high, banks of rock.
Nine days his canoe drifted in a heavy fog,
and then cold and driving nains came upon the
party. Forty days after Mackenzie had left
Athabasca his canoe entered the Arctic Ocean
at what is now called Mackenzie Bay. It required
eight weeks for the party to make the
rem in journey, uiten they were without food,
the weather was deadly cold, the canoe frequently
upset in icy waters. Mackenzie never complained.
The chronicles of the time which survive
speak of his enduring good temper, his immense
strength, his fearlessness and his patience.
He did not discover on this voyage the Northwest
passage, because none existed, but he
proved that it did not exist. A. C. Lunt writes:
'' He discovered the Mississippi of the North?
Mackenzie River."
The following spring Mackenzie hastened to
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me iienuqunrivrN 01 nis company at lirand fortage,
on Lake Superior, where he reported his
finding of the Mackenzie, and asked permission
of the directors to explore the Peace River, which
rolled and tumbled westward from Athabasca
to some then unknown region. His journey
UTH [August 30, 1911
southward and back to his trading post occupied
a year, but he returned home with the permission
of the directors to explore the westward
stream.
He built a birch canoe thirty feet long, and
stored it with powder and pemmican. He took
nine persons with him, and in May, 1793, while
all France was torn with revolution, when
poleon's star was just on the ascendant, while
we were yet a bankrupt and disorganized government,
he set himself afloat in the wilderness
to find a new way to the sea.
The journeying was frightful. Mr. Lunt de- f .
scribes one incident of this:
"In less than a week snow-capped peaks had
crowned the canoe in a narrow canon below a
tumbling cascade where the river was one wild
sheet of tossing foam. The difficulty was to land.
Fastening an eighty-foot tow line to the bow,
Mackenzie leaped to a declivity, axe in hand,
cut foothold along the face of the steep cliff
to a place where he could jump on level rock
then, turning, signalled for his men. The voyagers
were paralyzed with fear. They stripped
themselves to swim, then one by one vaulted
from foothold to foothold where Mackenzie had
cut steps, till they came to the final jump across
water. Here Mackenzie caught each on his
shoulders. The tow line was then passed round
trees, and the canoe tracked up the raging cascade
"
Mackenzie's men revolted from the perils before
them. They swore they would go no further.
Mackenzie gave them a good meal and
ordered them to go ahead. They came to windfalls
of trees with the thickness of twice the
height of a man. Up this Mackenzie climbed,
"clothes torn to tatters, boots hacked to pieces,
feet gashed with cuts." The going was so bad
in one day he only made three miles. His men
fell asleep on bare ground from sheer exhaustion.
Finally a majority of the men deserted the
explorer. They left him without food and with
but little powder. Barefooted and in a terrific
storm he followed them. They were overtaken
that night and compelled to go on with the
journey. Finally the source of the Peace River
was reached. Beyond were neaks of elaeiers
The streams were worse than the one they had
left. The canoe was upest and all the provisions
and powder dumped into the water. The men
wept. Mackenzie quietly remarked that this
would teach them how to run rapids. Men of
the North?to turn back? Such a thing had
never been known in the history of the Northwest
Pur Company. It would disgrace them
forever. Then he vowed that he would go ahead
whether the men accompanied him or not. They
went with him and so he crossed the Great
Divide of the Upper Rocky Mountains and started
down the western slones that wow
him to the Pacific.
The Indians he met told him "the river he
was following ran for many moons through the
shining mountains before it reached the midday
sun." It was barred by rapids and dangerous.
Mackenzie kept on. He had only one month's
provisions left and his powder was nearly all
gone, but he kept moving ahead. On July 4,
1793, he abandoned the canoe. His men were
loaded down each with a musket, two pistols,
and ninety pounds of food. They walked west,
barely making twelve miles a day. Their feet
bled, and they suffered terribly.
But on July 20, 1793, far ahead they saw the
thin, blue line of the Pacific Ocean. Sea lions
played on the rocks of the coast. Sea gulls
whirled over their heads. Here was the sea that
for three hundred years men had been trying
to reach by overland and failed, until Mackenzie
came to it. He was three months from home, and
almost starving, but he had found his goal.