while two older children tugged at her skirt. In addition she had several nondescript bundles. When the brakeman announced her station she was bewildered and greatly impeded in her efforts to leave the car. She was not quite sure of the place, and she could not easily manage the babies and the bundles.
A tall young fellow, conspicuously well drest, had been sitting near, apparently lost in a book which he was studying. He tossed the book aside, seized the heavy bundles and gave a hand to one little brown-faced child, assisted the whole party out of the car, first ascertaining that they were at the right point of their journey, lifted his hat to the mother as if she had been his own, and resumed his place and book as if he had done nothing uncommon. This incident was chronicled in the memory of one whom it made happier for a whole long day. (Text.)—Herald and Presbyter.
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Burdens for Others—See Hardship Vicariously Borne. Burglar Punished—See Unloading the Useless. BURIAL, A NOVEL PLAN OF Gen. M. C. Meigs, U.S.A., discusses the burial of the dead as follows in Building: I see that the question of disposing of the dead in towers of masonry, or by cementation, is being discust. It is not new. Asiatic conquerors have built the living, after capture of their cities, into towers of masonry, using their bodies as blocks, and generally the adobe mortars of the desert plains for cementing them together. One of them built a pyramid or tower containing thousands of heads. The city of New York inters in its Potter's Field about four thousand bodies annually. Europe rents a grave site for a term of years—a short term—and then disinters the bones and packs them in a catacomb or a vault. Would not New York save money and treat its dead with greater respect if it embedded each body in a mass of Hudson River cement and sand (Beton Coignet)? I find that one-half a cubic yard of Beton Coignet will completely enclose the body of a man of six feet stature, weighing two hundred pounds. The average human being would require even less than thirteen cubic feet. At ruling prices such a sarcophagus would cost only two or three dollars. The name and date, a perpetual record and memorial of the dead, could be inscribed with letter-punches or stamps on the head or foot of the block or sarcophagus. Ranged along-*side each other in contact, and in two rows, i.e., two blocks deep, these would build on any suitable plan a fourteen-foot wall, massive enough and strong enough to be carried to the height of one hundred and fifty feet. Thus would be erected, at the rate of nearly two thousand cubic yards per year, a great temple of silence, a grand and ever-*lasting monument to those who pass away. The designs for such a monument seem worthy of the study of our best architects. It might be a pyramid, a cone, a tower, or a temple, or a long gallery like those of the Italian city of Bologna, the most beautiful cemetery in the world. Many years ago the London Architect published the proposal of an architect to erect by slow degrees and in successive courses a solid pyramid in which, in cells, the dead of London would be enclosed. But this made no provision for memorial inscriptions or visible records. The fourteen-foot wall does this.—Building.
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Burial too Expensive—See Poverty.
Buried Cities—See Earth Increasing.
BUSINESS A TEST OF CHARACTER
Beethoven, when he had completed one of
his grand musical compositions, was accustomed
to test it on an old harpsichord, lest
a more perfect instrument might flatter it or
hide its defects.
The old harpsichord on which to test
our religious life, our new song, is the
market-place. A man, like muddy
water, may be very peaceful when he
is quietly "settled"—not shaken up by
temptation. That proves nothing about
his religious life. But if a man's patience
and peace and principles can
stand the test of business, his religion is
genuine.
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Business Absorption—See Engrossment in Business.
Business Acumen—See Oversight.
Business Brevity—See Success Inspires
Confidence.
