Boys are sometimes tempted to think that to be tender-hearted is to be weak and unmanly. Yet the tenderest heart may be associated with the strongest and most forcible mind and will. Take, for example, the story told of him to whom we owe our wonderful railway system. George Stephenson went one day into an upper room of his house and closed the window. It had been open a long time because of the great heat, but now the weather was becoming cooler, and so Mr. Stephenson thought it would be well to shut it. He little knew at the time what he was doing. Two or three days afterward, however, he chanced to observe a bird flying against that same window, and beating against it with all its might again and again, as if trying to break it. His sympathy and curiosity were aroused. What could the little thing want? He went at once to the room and opened the window to see. The window opened the bird flew straight to one particular spot in the room, where Stephenson saw a nest—that little bird's nest. The poor bird looked at it, took the sad story in at a glance, and fluttered down to the floor, broken-hearted, almost dead. Stephenson drawing near to look was filled with unspeakable sorrow. There sat the mother bird, and under it four tiny little ones—mother and young all apparently dead. Stephenson cried aloud. He tenderly lifted the exhausted bird from the floor, the worm it had so long and so bravely struggled to bring to its home and young still in its beak, and carefully tried to revive it, but all his efforts proved in vain. It speedily died, and the great man mourned for many a day. At the same time the force of George Stephenson's mind was changing the face of the earth, yet he wept at the sight of this dead family, and was deeply grieved because he himself had unconsciously been the cause of death.—Manchester Times.