The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-05-19
NOTHING USELESS.
Youths Companion.

A visitor to western Pennsylvania, while admiring the glowing fires in a house warmed by the natural gas, stopped to discover what the substance was which filled the grates and sent forth such intense and radiant heat. He found it to be broken cinders from the glass works in the neighborhood.
 "Why, this is the refuse which have always seen carted into the river 1" he said.
 "Yes," replied the mill owner; "but there is always use for refuse some- where. The great secret of this worlds economy is to find the right place for the waste"
 Our French and Chinese kinsfolk know this secret better than we do. They find 8 place and use for the scraps and the dust. The debris of every tradesman's work goes to help another with his task. Even the offal is turned to sweet and wholesome uses.
 "Gather up the fragments that re- main," said He who created world by a word, "that nothing be lost"
 A few years ago a good woman in one of our cities was vexed to see how many magazines were thrown into the waste-pa basket in her home. She collected them, assorted them, and sent them to lonely hfe-saving station on & New Jersey seabeach. When she died, a friend who loved her continued the work in her name, and the system has been extended until every station on the coast of the United States is provided with little library of these waste magazines for the use of the crews in their solitary watches during the long, stormy winters.
 A missionary in Montana, man of scholarship and intellectual tastes, living in cabin and fighting off star vation with salary of two hundred dollars year, once wrote, "A poor family in New York send me their one and newspaper after they have read them. They have been like water to man dying of thirst. Many. a time they have kept me from despair in this solitude. I would read them at night and go to bed happy, thank ing God that there was so much con- fort and pleasure in the world"
 But the waste cinders are not al- ways thus put into the empty grate to throw forth glowing, radiant heat. In almost every house in our cities there are heaps of books and period ical which have been read, and are de- stroyed as useless. Throughout the west and south there are tens of thou sandsof poor homes into which this waste matter would bring light and 
 The rich mans child throws his toys into the fire, and on the next street a little cripple lies on his bed in the garret, with not rag doll to bear him company.
 In this house a woman, upon whose musical training a fortune has been spent, is miserable with ennai, and across the way is hospital for incur ables, watching their few remaining days creep wearily away. A song or strain of music every day would come into their dull lives like airs from heaven.
 Here is young girl endowed with education, fortune and gentle, winning manners, spending her years in abso- lute idleness, and in the alley near her, in her own kitchen. it may be, is an- other girl, poor, ignorant, eager, into whose empty mind and soul the knowledge and time she is wasting might bring strength and life.
 Is there nothing lying waste in our houses or in our lives for which God has 8 use?