not without that work, heaven is to be entered and hell avoided. Yours, in Christian affection,

A. B.

CONTAGIOUS AND EPIDEMIC DISEASES.

By an act of last session (9 and 10 Victoria, chap. 96), provision was made for the more speedy removal of certain nuisances, as well as to enable the Privy Council to make regulations for the prevention of contagion and epidemic diseases. According to the preamble of this statute, it was considered expedient, for the purpose of preserving the health of divers of her Majesty's subjects, that better provision should be made for the removal of certain nuisances likely to promote or increase disease. On the receipt of the certificate of two medical men, certain public officers, specified in the act, can complain to justices of the existence of nuisances. The justices have power to summon the parties, and to make an order for the removal of the same, and in default the parties complaining may enter the premises and remove the nuisance. The costs and expenses incurred can be recovered from the owner or occupier of the premises. By the fifth section the Privy Council are empowered to issue orders at any time for measures to prevent the spreading of contagious and epidemic diseases. The act contains 22 sections, and three schedules of forms to be used.

FROZEN PROVISIONS.

THE winter markets at Quebec are very curious; everything is frozen. Large pigs, with the peculiarly bare appearance which that animal presents when singed, stand in their natural position on their rigid limbs, or upright in corners, killed perhaps months before. Frozen masses of beef, sheep, deer, fowls, cod, haddock, and eels long and stiff like walking-sticks, abound in the stalls. The farmers have a great advantage in this country, in being able to fatten their stock during the abundance of the summer, and by killing them at the first cold weather, they keep frozen, to be disposed of at their pleasure

during the winter. Milk is kept in the same manner, and sold by the pound, looking like lumps of white ice. -England in the New World.

MERCANTILE HONOUR.

MR. George Stephens, ironmonger, in Dundee, by a series of losses sustained through the perilous years from 1826 to 1833, was in the last of these compelled to take refuge in the Gazette; but such opinion had his creditors generally of his integrity, that at the shortest period allowed by the statute he was unanimously discharged, on his agreeing to pay a composition of 8s. in the pound. Some friends at this critical time advanced Mr. Stephens a small capital, to enable him to carry on the more advantageously his business; and this, joined to his own thorough knowledge of it, his persevering industry, and resolute determination to right those whom his misfortune, not his faults, had wronged, enabled him to commence, five years ago, gradually, and as he could spare the means, to pay up his creditors the remaining 12s. in the pound, which they had written off their books and agreed to cancel. These payments are now completed— not completed by any windfall coming in his way to enable him to do it easily-nor by a man who had only his own wants and comforts to provide for, but by one who had a wife and rising family depending upon him; and this circumstance ought to be in view in estimating Mr. Stephens' conduct.-Northern Counties' Herald.

GOOD LAWS OF SWEDEN AGAINST DRUNKENNESS.

THE laws of intoxication are enforced with great rigour in Sweden. Whoever is seen drunk is fined, for the first offence, three dollars; for the second, six; for the third and fourth, a still larger sum; and is also deprived of the right of elections, and of being appointed a representative. He is, besides, publicly exposed in the parish church on the following Sunday. For repetitions of the same offence, the punishment is imprisonment with hard labour.

TOMBS CUT IN THE ROCKS.

As the Jews did not make use of coffins, they placed their dead separately in niches, or little cells, cut into the sides of the caves; or rooms, which they had hewed out of the rock. The higher such sepulchres were cut in the rock, among perpendicular cliffs, so as to be almost inaccessible, or the more conspicuously they were situated, the greater was supposed to be the honour of reposing there. "Hezekiah was buried in the chiefest," says our translator, rather, "in the highest part of the sepulchres of the sons of David," to do him the more honour. The vanity of Shebna, which so much displeased the Lord, (see Is. xxii. 16,) was discovered in preparing himself a sepulchre in the face of some lofty rock. Several modern travellers mention some monuments still remaining in Persia, of great antiquity, which gave them a clear idea of Shebna's pompous design for his sépulchre. They consist of several tombs, each of them hewn in a high rock near the top; the front of the rock to the valley below, being the outside of the sepulchre, is adorned with carved work in relief. Some of these sepulchres are about thirty feet in the perpendicular from the valley. A small square opening, scarcely large enough to pass through, admits a stranger to the interior of these tombs; where is found a square chamber, with one or more receptacles for dead bodies, shaped like baths, upon the sides of the apartments, and neatly chiselled in the body of the rock. The mouths of these sepulchres were originally closed by slabs of stone, exactly fitted to grooves cut for their reception, and so nicely adjusted, that when the work was finished, the place of entrance might not be observed. Of this construction, doubtless, was the tomb in which our Lord was buried.

The celebrated traveller, Dr. Clarke, visited a range of tombs on the borders of the lake of Tiberias, hewn by the earliest inhabitants of Galilee, in the rocks which face the waters. They were described in the time of our Saviour, and had become the resort of wretched men

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afflicted by diseases, and made outcasts of society; for these tombs are particularly alluded to in the account of a cure performed upon a maniac in the country of the Gadarenes. The tombs at Naplous, the ancient Sichem, where Joseph, Joshua, and others were buried, are also hewn out of the solid rock, and are durable as the hills in which they are excavated. The sepulchres of the Jews are made so large, that persons may walk into them. The rule for making them is this; he that sells ground to his neighbours, to make a burying-place, must make a court at the mouth of the cave, six feet by six.

It was into this kind of court that the women who visited the sepulchre of our Lord, entered. Here they could look into the sepulchre, and the several graves in it, and see every thing within. The words of the sacred historian are, "And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment, and they were affrighted."

These different sorts of tombs and sepulchres, with the very walls likewise of the inclosures, are constantly kept clean, white-washed and beautified, and by conse quence continue to this day to be an excellent comment upon the words of our Saviour, "Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Sent by M. P.

MOTHERS! DON'T VEX YOUR CHILDREN.

As I was riding, a few days ago, into the town near which I live, I saw a woman with a very little child in her arms. It seemed that this woman was taking care of the child for the mother, who lived on the opposite side of the road. The child was crying; the mother, who heard it, rushed across the road, and, without asking why the child was crying, seized it in her arms, crying, "You naughty boy." She then carried the child home, beating it all the way, whilst the poor child screamed and cried most violently. The little creature could not, of course, understand why it was beaten. It was, in truth, nothing but the passion of the mother, who