TEE LITTLE UULPRIT. 1‘„ , A From the school-house old andkray, Under branches pink with Mg, Vatter, patter, all together, - - Little feet have hurried one, ; ' Echoing with their. noise and ront,, • Tbieugh the brooding sprOptime weather Wised uncertainly between April cloud and Bummer sheen, Ballenamored of delay. Wily one poor little drone, Silent, sullen, stays alone, With his book unheeded lying Near the useless, broken slate In - a storm oblige and hate Flung at random on the floor. Froncl, rebellious, obstinate, For a weary while before Beim waited, vainly trying, To repress the tears, that rise e : the angry baby eyes. Well enough it le to play All the golden hours away; Well enough, tolicky scorner Of the Echool-room!s common law, idle curve and line, to draw, While the classes read and s pell; But when work hr fairly done, To be left the only'one, In a dark and dusty corner, Surely'is not 4ntte as well! Vaught for note Of time hos he , Save a neighboring apple-tree, • That a lengthened shadow swinging Nearer; clearer, through the hour, Tracery of leaf and , dower Marks upon the wall so plain, Almost seems it he can see °wile beugh'the eager bee • To the shaken blosiom clinging, the'breezy petel-rain. --:0 you naughty little elf Punishing your silly self While the sun la well n igh" setting ! Delon fancy Bob will wait AU the evening by the gate With bit boat upon the shelf ? I Let the ready tears baVe witYl , Seek forgiveness while you may, lest yon find yourself regretting A repentance code too late. • (From ET4317 BlitUrdiFy.) :ast should we do without clocks and watches? Is there anything comparable to the misery of being benighted on a polmtry read with a watch that has stopped in one's waistcoat pocket, and not a clock with in view to tell one the time? The sun has set, every minute's tramping on the dusty murky road seems as an . hour. We have a - ain - to - tatchi - allinner to-le.in-Xime for,- or-a district meeting to attend, at which it won't do to be late. On ordinary occasions, when cool and collet ted, we might be able to com pute the time, hut in straits like these our xeckoning-deserts-us.---11-may-be•Bve,or_six, or seven, for all We know; 'we should not be ;surprised to hear it was eight. .Our notions ' get muddled, and on we trudge, breathless, nervous' and irritable; pretty certain, too, to find in theond that we have - been fretting ourselves for nothing. - Mut - itis - of - no - ussr - asking-how me:lihould get on without clocks and watches. The jimepiece_mayalmosthe_said to be_the_rnain, spring of eivilikation. It is so intimately con nected with all our wants, it is so completely the regulator of ail our occupations, that we have become, as it were, its slaves; . and we _can no more imagine a state of social exist- .. ence,without it, than we can imagine , birds fly:Mg without wings, or any other thing that in totally impossible. . - The first people who appear to have allotted - the day into portions were the Assyrians, who invented -the water-clock at a period too re mote for - precise calculation. All we know for certain is, that the apparatus existed before. the overthrow* of the first Assyrian empire by Albsces and Belesis, in the year 759 B; C. for we find by the tradition of early Persian au thors that the use of it , was general in Nineveh under the reign of . Phul, better known as Bardanapalus the second; the first monarch of the second Assyrian empire. This water clock was nothing more than a brass vessel of cylindrical shape, holding several gallons of water. A very-small -- hole - was bored in one of.its sides, through which the liquid was allowed to trickle; and it was calculated that the vessel could empty itself about five or six times ha'a day. Under the reign of Phul, the ro'al palace of Nineveh, and each of the principal distriets of the city, possessed a water c- clock of the same shape and capacity. They were - filled together, or as nearly as possible together„at the signal of a watch man stationed aloft on a tower to proclaim the rising:of the sun, and.they remained all day . in the keeping of officials whose busmen it was to fill them as soon as they became empty. There was a regular staff of criers employed in connection with each of the time offices, and as-often as the water clacks were replenished they spread through the streets shouting out the fact for the benefit of the townspj ple. In this way a sort of rough computed of 'the flight of fci time was held. The in ervals between the filling and'emptying of the vessels were called "watches," and were, probably, two hours or two hours and a half in duration. But it is bard to suppose that the water-clocks kept very steady pace with each other; the diffi culty of making by hand vessels of the same ' size, of drilling them with holes of precisely the same diameter, and of supplying them with -water of just the same density, must have given rise to even more irregularity in the working of these machines than exists at present in the movements of our eity,,,,clocks„, those clocks of which Charles LaMb said that they allowed him to walk from the Strand , o Temple Bar in no time and gain five minutes! The water- clock, or clepsydra, continued to remain in its primitive condition for many centuries; and it was not until the invention of the sun-dial at Alexandria, five hundred and fifty-eight years before Christ, that it un derwent any improvement. About that time„ however, an Egyptian of Memphis added a dial with a hand to the clepsydra. The hand _ revolved on a pivot, and communicated with a string which - was fastened to a float. As the water leaked out, the float fell with it, and the tension of the string caused the hand to move round with slight spasmodic jerks, something like those of the second-hand on a watch of inferior make. . This reform, meritorious enough m theory, proved somewhat deficient in practice;for the d'q:ffeulty about getting the clocks to keep step was doubled or trebled when the system became complicated with dial, needle, string and float. To insure simultaneous acting,the. String-or wire of the different clocks ought to have been of the same length and force; the needles also ought to have been of a size and Let on pivots exactly similar in point of height and circumference. And when all this Mid been obtained, there was still the question as to how to make float and suing, string and needle, act in perfect unison. Often,through rast, or some other cause, the needle must have proved obdurate to the faint tug of the string, and the float, in consequence, have • remained suspended in mid air; whereupon, of course, the dial became mute, and t•gyptians, who disliked innovations, must have shrugged their . ehottiders. But, notwithstanonig i ts drawbaCk% Um rrnprovement was a very valuable out:, if ter, bp Oh( r reason than that it pr9ared the way 'for further changeo, and led to-the per kctthg of the elepydra by the sutistitution of si , kystpxt ,of debited u heels for that already in thte,.., The wheels were set at wort ou the water-mill principle, and the addition of a second het,dle to the dial allo wed the clock tolie' ark the one of the different= 'Washes;". This was the ne