CHAPTER XVIII.

I had gone with Georgina to a picnic one day at her request, meeting her at the house of Mrs. Woodruff, with whom she was staying for a fortnight, at the Point. The picnic meant merely a drive for miles back into the country and a lunch in the woods prepared by a French cook, but it was a delightful road through shadows of tall forest trees, the glare of sunlight alternating with green copsewood coolness. They were cutting the grass and clover in the fields, and the air was fresh with the scent of new-mown hay: half the land on either side of us was covered with ripening grain, and the light breeze that played perpetually over it gave us endless shimmerings and glimmerings of wonderful light almost as beautiful as the tints that play over the sea.

I had every need to find the beauty of the summer gracious to me that day. It was but another of many days when every throb of my feeling for Georgy Lenox became an anguish hard to bear. She was opposite me as we rode through the fair country, but she neither looked at nor spoke to me. I was much lionized, however, by Mrs. Woodruff, a pretty, faded, coquettish woman, who had been balancing herself on the very edge of proprieties for years, but who still, thanks to a certain weariness she compelled in men, was yet safe enough in her position as a matron. Georgy's companion was a titled foreigner just then a favorite at the Point, but of whom I need not speak.

"Did you ask me to come that I might hear you talk with the count?" I asked her when once that day I had a chance to address her.

"But the count would talk to me," she returned, laughing. "Do you suppose I care for him? I think him the most odious man I know, with his waxed moustache, his small green eyes, his wicked mouth and teeth. But Mrs. Woodruff is dying for him, and half the women here hate me in their hearts because he pays me attention. I like you infinitely better, Floyd."

"Then come away and sit upon the rocks with me."

"Oh, I cannot afford to do those romantic, compromising things. You see that, as we are both staying at The Headlands, where everybody's curiosity is centred this summer, we are much observed, much commented upon."

"It seems to me you are not at all afraid of compromising yourself with other men."

"Now you are cross and jealous. Perhaps if you betrayed a little less interest in me you might make me less afraid of concession. And you must not watch me so: the count himself spoke about your eyes ready to burn me with their melancholy fire."

"Hang the count!"

"With all my heart! I am tired of his hanging about me, however. Now go away: at the dance to-night I will talk to you all you wish."

There were plenty of beautiful girls at the picnic, and not a few of them sat outside the circle quite neglected or wandered away like school-girls in couples, picking ferns and gathering pale wood-blossoms; but since I could not speak to Georgina at my ease, there seemed to me neither meaning nor occupation for the slowly-passing hours. I have sometimes wondered how those women feel to whom society brings no homage, no real social intercourse, who sit outside the groups formed around their more brilliant sisters and behold their easy triumphs. They seem patient and good-natured, but must they not wonder in their hearts why one woman's face and figure are a magnet compelling every man to come within the circle of her attraction, while others, not less fair and sweet, seem depolarized?

Georgy had many successful days, and this was but one of them. She understood allurement now not as an accident, but as a science, and she practised it cleverly. She had already heard bold language from the count, so held him in check as he sat beside her, giving him at times, however, "a side glance and look down," and to his trained habits of observation showed constantly that she was perfectly aware of his presence even if she seemed to ignore him. She was openly flirting with Frank Woolsey (a cousin of mine), but since she knew him for a veteran whose admiration only counted to lookers-on, she consoled herself by other little diversions, and scarcely a man there but felt his pulses tingle as she sent him a bright word or a careless smile.

Thorpe was there, but dull, moody, distrait, and he joined me and poured into my ears his disgust at this form of entertainment. He had eaten ants in his salad, he affirmed, his wine was corked, his _pate_ spoiled.

"What are we here for?" he asked. "I see no reason in it. I suppose Miss Lenox is enjoying herself, and she thinks the men about her are in a seventh heaven. What do even the cleverest women know about the men they meet? Woolsey hates her like poison; the count is on the lookout for a _belle heritiere_ and is yawning over his loss of time; and I doubt if one of that group except Talbot would marry her. I don't think many of us are pleased with that sort of thing. We don't want too fierce a light to beat about the woman we are dreaming of. She has no love or respect for sweetness and womanly virtue for their own sake--no faith in their value to her, further than that the semblance of them may attract admirers."

"You're out of humor, Thorpe," said I: "don't vent it on her."

"I _am_ out of humor," he exclaimed, "devilishly out of humor! For God's sake, Randolph, tell me if you think I have any chance with Miss Floyd."

"Look here, Thorpe," I returned under my breath: "I have no business to make any suppositions concerning that young lady, but I will say just this much. Do you see that bird in the air hovering above that oak tree?"

He followed my look upward toward the unfathomable blue. "I do," he returned.

"I think there is just as much chance of that bird's coming down at your call and nestling in your bosom as there is of your winning the young lady you allude to."

He looked crestfallen for a moment: then his thorough coxcombry resumed its sway. "You see," said he, with a consummate air of reserve, "you know nothing about the affair at all, Randolph."

"You'd much better drop the subject, Thorpe," I remarked: "I assure you it's much safer let alone."

I contrived to live through the long hours of the day. At sunset we drove back to the Point, I giving up my seat in Mrs. Woodruff's barouche to a lady and joining Frank Woolsey and Thorpe in a dog-cart. We none of us spoke, but smoked incessantly, our eyes upturned to the sky, which was lovely, mystical, wonderful, with the pale after-glow thrilling it with the most beautiful hues. Before we had reached the town a strange yellow moonlight had crept over the landscape, making the trees gloom together in solemn masses, while the sea glimmered in a thousand lines of trembling light away, away into remote horizons. We all enjoyed the drive, although none of us spoke until we got down from the cart at the steps of the hotel.

"That was the best part of the day," observed my cousin Frank. "What good times we fellows might have if there were no women to disturb us!"

Thorpe growled some inarticulate assent or dissent, as the case might be, and went up to his room, while Frank and I had our cigars out on the piazza.

A dance at Mrs. Woodruff's was to follow the picnic, and thither we resorted about ten o'clock and found the chairs placed for a German. Georgy Lenox was there, radiant in a ravishing toilette, waiting for Frank to lead the cotillon with her. She nodded to me pleasantly as she took her seat. I was angry with myself for my disappointment, doubly angry with her for causing it. It cost me my self-respect to be so utterly at her mercy. What did I gain by following her into this gay coterie but pang upon pang of humiliation and pain? Why did I come, indeed? It was not the first time she had broken her promises to me. Yet what could I expect of her? Bright, gay, dazzling creature that she was, warm and eager in her love of vigorous life, could she sit down with me in a corner and talk while the rest of the world palpitated and glowed and whirled around her to the music of the waltz, which stirred even my crippled limbs with a wild wish for voluptuous swaying motion in rhythm with the melodious melancholy strain? No, I could not blame her: I was merely out of my place. Let me go home and remember what a gulf of disparity separated me from my fellows.

So I walked out of the house through the grounds into the street, and along the road home to The Headlands. It was a long walk for me, yet I overcame the distance quickly, and long before eleven o'clock gained the house, entered quietly and sat down beside my mother on her sofa, unseen by Mr. Floyd and Helen, who were in the next room.

I was half mad with baffled desire, blind anger and fatigue that night, and the sound of Helen's voice as she sang some song like a lullaby was like a blessing. My mother did not speak to me; only smiled gently in my face and kissed me on my forehead. Her tenderness touched my heart, and my head drooped to her shoulder, then to her lap, and I lay there like a boy comforted by his mother's touch, just as I was. A kind of peaceful stupor came over me. Helen went on singing some quiet German piece of which her father was fond, with many verses and a sweet, moving story. Her voice was delicious in its way, with a noble and simple style, and a pathetic charm in some of its cadences I never heard surpassed. Mr. Floyd never tired of hearing her. After a time the ballad came to an end.

"Floyd has come, papa," I heard her say.

"Why, no! Has he? so early?"

"Go on singing, Helen," whispered my mother. "Floyd has gone to sleep."

She sang something soft, cooing, monotonous, a strain a mother might sing as she hushed her baby at her breast: then she came out, followed by her father, and both sat down beside us. I, half shyly, half through dread of talking, went on counterfeiting sleep.

"Poor boy!" exclaimed Mr. Floyd. "He has evidently walked back from the Point. He was tired out with his dissipations, or Miss Georgina was coquetting with other men or ate too much to suit him. If I were in love to extremity of passion with Miss Lenox, or rather with her brilliant flesh-tints and her hands and feet, I should recover the moment I saw her at table. She is the frankest gourmande I ever saw, and will be stout in five years."

"Now, papa, Georgy's hands and feet are nothing so particular."

"Helen's are smaller and much better shaped," said my mother jealously.

"Now, Mary, how little you understand the points of a woman! Helen has hands that I kiss"--and he kissed them--"the most beautiful hands in the world; and she has feet whose very shoe-tie I adore; but, nevertheless, there is nothing aggressive about her insteps and ankles. She considers her feet made to walk with, not to captivate men with."

"I should hope not," said Lady Disdain, with plenty of her chief attribute in her voice. "I prefer that nobody should know I have any feet."

"That is just it. Now, Miss Lenox never comes in or goes out of a room but every man there knows the color of her stockings."

"I am ashamed of you, papa!--Scold him, Mrs. Randolph. I think him quite horrid."

"Since, my mouse, you don't want to be admired for your feet and hands, what points of your beauty may we venture to obtrude our notice upon?"

"Oh, you may love me for whatever you like. But I don't want other people ever to think of me in that way at all."

"Your intellect is a safe point, perhaps."

"I do not want anybody to love me at all, papa, except yourself."

"Not even Floyd?"

"Floyd would never be silly," Helen said indignantly. "Floyd likes me because we are old friends: he knew grandpa and you, papa, and all that."

"You are easily satisfied if you are contented with affection on the score of your aged relatives."

"How soundly he sleeps!" murmured Helen; and I knew that she bent close to me as she spoke, for I could feel the warmth of her young cheeks. Half to frighten her, half because I wanted to see how she looked as she regarded me, I suddenly opened my eyes.

"You weren't asleep at all!" she exclaimed, laughing and quite unembarrassed. "But I think you were wicked to hoax us so. Did you hear everything we said?"

"Indeed, Helen," I said, "I was fast asleep, I do believe, until you confessed your affection for me. You did not expect me to sleep through that?"

She stared at me blankly, then looked at the others with dilating eyes. "Did I say anything about that?" she asked, growing pale even to her lips and tears gathering in her eyes.

"Why, no, you foolish child!" said her father, drawing her upon his knee: "he is only teasing you. As if anybody had any affection for one of the Seven Sleepers!--Well, Floyd, how happened you to come back so soon? The carriage was going for you at midnight.--Here, Mills, Mr. Randolph has already returned, and the coachman may go to bed."

"The day was pretty long," I returned. "I had had enough of it, and so set out and walked back. I was well tired out when I came in, and that put me to sleep."

"It was a shame for you to walk so far," exclaimed Helen imperiously: "you are not strong enough for such an effort. There are eight horses in the stables, every one of them pawing in his stall, longing for a gallop, and for you to be obliged to walk four miles! Don't do such a dreadful thing again, Floyd."

I sprang up and limped about, feeling impatient and cross. "In spite of my poor leg," I returned, "I am a fair walker. Don't set me down as a helpless cripple, Helen."

I was bitter and wrathful still, or I trust I was too magnanimous to have wounded her so.

"Floyd!" exclaimed my mother in a tone of reproof; but I did not turn, and went down the long suite of parlors and stood at the great window which overlooked the sea. It was all open to the summer night, and the lace curtains waved to and fro in the breeze. Solemnly came up the rhythmic flow of the waves as they beat against the rocks. I pushed aside the draperies and looked out at the wide expanse of waters lying, it seemed, almost at my feet, for everything else but the great silver plain of sea was in shadow. Above, the moon had it all her own way to-night: the constellations shone pale, and seemed weary of the firmament which at other times they span and compass with their myriad splendors. Mars moved in a stately way straight along above the southern horizon to his couch in the west: even his red light was dim.

But what stillness and peace seemed possible beneath this throbbing sea? I sighed as I listened to the sound of the waves and gazed at the great golden pathway of the moon across the silver waters. I knew that some one had followed me and stood timidly behind me: I guessed it was Helen, but did not know until a slim satin hand stole into mine, for surely it was not my mother's hand. Hers was warm and firm in its pressure: the touch of this was soft and cool like a rose-leaf. I held the hand close, but did not turn.

"Floyd!" she whispered timidly, "dear Floyd!"

"I hear you, Helen," I returned wearily.

"Are you angry with me? Do not be angry."

"I am only angry with myself: I am not behaving well to-night."

She came in front of me and looked up in my face. "I don't want you to think," she said in a little faint trembling voice, "that--that I--that I--" She quite broke down.

"I really don't know what you mean, Helen."

"Floyd," she cried passionately, "I think I would die before I would wilfully hurt your feelings!"

"Why, my poor little girl," said I, quite touched at the sight of her quivering face and the sound of her impassioned voice, "you did not hurt my feelings for an instant. What I said was in answer to my own thoughts. I like to say such things to myself at times, and remember that I do not possess the advantages of other men. Besides, facts are facts: I am lame. I cannot dance, and although I can walk, it is with a limping gait: I should be a poor fellow in a foot-race. I don't suppose that my being a cripple will forfeit me anything in the kingdom of heaven, but, nevertheless, it obliges me to forego a good many pleasures here on earth."

"You are not a cripple!" she burst out impetuously. "You have every advantage! What is it that you cannot dance? I despise men who whirl about like puppets: I have never seen them waltzing but they must make themselves ridiculous. I am glad you cannot dance: you are on the level of too much dignity and noble behavior to condescend to such petty things. And surely you do not want to run a foot-race!" she added with an intensity of disdain which made me laugh, high-wrought and painful although my mood was. Then her lip trembled, and I saw tears in her eyes as she went on. "If you were a cripple," she pursued in a low, eager voice, "really a helpless cripple, everybody would love you just the same. Why, Floyd, what do you think it is to me that, as you say, you do not possess the advantages of other men? Have you forgotten how it all came about? I was a little girl then, but there is nothing that happened yesterday clearer to my memory than that terrible morning when I cost you so dear. I know how I felt--as if forsaken by the world. I wondered if God looked down and saw me, alone, in danger, blind and dizzy and trembling, so that again and again I seemed to be slipping away from everything that held me. I could not have stayed one minute more had I not heard your voice. You were so strong, so kind, Floyd! When you reached me your hands were bleeding, your face scratched and torn, your breath came in great pants, but you looked at me and smiled. And then you carried me to the top and put me in safety, and I let you go down, down, down!" She was quite speechless, and leaned her cheek against my hand, which she still held, and wet it freely with her tears.

"If you mind your lameness," she said brokenly, with intervals of sobs--"if you feel that Fate is cruel to you--that there is any reason why you cannot be perfectly happy--then I wish," she exclaimed with energy, "that I had never been born to do you this great injury. I love my life, I love papa, I love your mother and you, and it seems to me as if I were going to be a very happy woman; but still, if you carry any regret for that day in your heart, I wish I had died when I was so sick before you came: I wish I lay up there on the hill with the grass growing over me."

What was anybody to do with this overwrought, fanciful child? She was so wonderfully pretty too, with her great dark, melancholy eyes, her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, her rich rare lips! "Oh, Helen," I murmured, holding her close to me, "I don't want you to go under the green grass: I'm very glad you are alive. I would have broken all my bones in your service that day and welcome, so that you might be well and unhurt. Come, now, cheer up: I am going to be a pleasanter fellow than I have been of late. Dry your eyes, dear. Your father will be laughing at you. Come, let us go and take a stroll in the moonlight: it is quite wicked not to indulge in a little romance on a sweet midsummer night like this."

When I had gone to my room that night, and sat, still bitter, still discontented, looking off through my open window toward the Point, and wondering who was looking in Georgy Lenox's starry eyes just then--thinking, with a feeling about my forehead like a band of burning iron, that some man's arm was sure to be about her waist, her face upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they danced,--while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother came in and sat down beside me.

"My dear boy," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I am going to give you a caution. You must remember that Helen, with all her frankness and impetuosity, is still no child. Don't win her heart unthinkingly."

I felt the blood rush to my face, and I think I had never in all my life experienced such embarrassment.

"I'm not such a coxcomb, mother, as to believe any girl could fall in love with me--Helen above all others."

She smiled, with a little inward amusement in her smile. "You must remember," she said again softly, "that Helen is not a child, and you surely would not make her suffer."

"Why, mother," I gasped, "we are just like brother and sister: our intimacy is the habit of years."

"Good-night, my son," my mother said, and went away still smiling: "I have perfect faith in your magnanimity."

I remembered with a flash of guilty self-consciousness one or two little circumstances about our talk by the window two hours before which I have not set down here. It had seemed an easy task to soothe the child. If there had been any absurdity like that my mother hinted at, would she--could I-- No, never! She was a careless child, with fits of coldness, imperious tenderness and generosity. Not a woman at all. The idea was quite distasteful to me that Helen was a grown-up woman with whom I must be on my guard.

However, Helen's manner to me next day and at all times was calculated to assure any man that she was a wilful, self-sustained young creature of extraordinary beauty and grace, who was devoted to her father, and to him alone. I saw Thorpe one evening pick up, by stealth, the petals of a crimson rose which had dropped from the stalk that still nestled in the black ribbon at her throat, and I laughed at him for his pains as he laid them carefully away in his pocket-book.

"Miss Floyd," said I, "here is another rose. Don't honor that poor skeleton of a vanished flower."

She saw the accident which had befallen her rose, and took mine from me and replaced her ornament with a fresh blossom. "Give me the poor stem," said I as she was about to throw it away.

"What is that for?" she asked, staring at me as I placed it in my buttonhole. "What do you want of the poor old thing?"

And, mistrusting some mischief beneath my sentimental behavior, she was quite tart with me the entire evening, and would not speak to Thorpe at all, but sat demurely between my mother and Mr. Floyd, her eyes nailed on some embroidery, and behaving altogether like a spoiled child of twelve years old.

Georgy Lenox had returned from her visit at Mrs. Woodruff's, and seemed a little quiet and weary of late. I was not so much at her service as before, but had begun to console myself by teaching in song what, like other young poets, I had experienced in suffering. I thank Heaven that no eyes but my own ever beheld the tragedy I wrote that summer: still, I am a little tender-hearted over it yet, and believe that it was, after all, not so bad as it might have been. At any rate, it enabled me to find some relief from my passionate unrest in occupation, and even my own high-sounding phrases may have taught me some scanty heroism. After all, if one fights one's own battle bravely, does it make so much matter about other things? Our battles to-day, like the rest of those fought since creation, show poor cause if regarded from any other standpoint save the necessity of fighting them. Most of our fiercest struggles for life have no adequate reason: it is not so necessary for us to live as we think it is. That we do not get what we want, or that we sink beneath our load of trouble, signifies little in the aggregate of the world's history. But, all the same, our cries of despair go up to Heaven, and there seems no need in the universe so absolute, so final, as that we ourselves should live and be happy.

It is hard for a man of middle age, with a cool brain and tranquillized passions, to retrace the history of his youth. There is much that he must smile over--much, too, which is irksome for him to dwell upon. Many experiences which in their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome--just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism--silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold lace and mock splendors, disenchant us sadly, and what we took for

Horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying,

is now discovered to be a cheap-trumpet imitation of the enchanted notes we dreamed of hearing.

After Miss Lenox returned from the Point she was, as I have said, a little pensive: this little shadow upon the splendor of her beauty lent a subtlety and charm to her manner. If there had been a fault in her loveliness before, it was that it remained always equal: the same light seemed always to play over face and hair, the liquid clearness of her eyes was always undimmed, and there was a trifle of over-robustness about the rounded contours of her figure. In spite of all her beauty, it had at times been hard for me to realize that she was a woman to give herself thoroughly to love. I had already had many dreams of her, yet never one where I thought she could have given me the infinite softness of a caressing touch or feel the motherly quality which lies at the bottom of every true woman's love for man. Now the splendor of her eyes was veiled, her smile was half melancholy, her voice less clear and ringing.

When a man loves a woman, and her mood changes and softens, he reads but one meaning in her tenderness; and it was not long before I had begun fully to believe that there was hope for me. There seemed to be no one to meddle in my wooing. True, Judge Talbot came constantly to the house to see Miss Lenox, and lacked none of the signs by which we read a man's errand in his demeanor; but I did not fear any rivalry from him. Youth, at any rate, is something in itself, independent of other advantages: no wonder it vaunts itself and believes in its own power. That Georgy would think for an instant of giving herself to this man did not seriously occur to me. His face was like the face of thousands of successful men whom we see daily in the great marts of the world. His forehead was broad but low, his eyes inclined to smallness and set closely together, his brows shaggy and overhanging: his cheeks were heavy, and the fleshy formation of his mouth and chin denoted both cruelty and sensuality. He was a wealthy man: such men are always rich. He had the reputation of holding an iron grip over everything he claimed, and never letting it go. He had been married in early life, and now had sons and daughters past the age of the girl upon whom he was eagerly pressing his suit.

He came to dinner now and then, and over his wine he was noisy, boisterous and bragging. He had been in Congress with Mr. Floyd years before, and, though of different parties, they had innumerable recollections in common, and, much as I disliked Mr. Talbot, I recognized his cleverness in anecdote and the clearness and conciseness of his narratives. I could endure him among men, but with women he was odious, and, for some reasons occult and inexplicable to any man, plumed himself upon his success with them. He understood himself too well, and relied too entirely upon his natural abilities, to make any effort to hide his gross ignorance upon all subjects requiring either literary or mental culture. He had been eminently successful without any such acquirements in every field he entered, and consequently considered them non-essentials in a man's career--very good to have, like the cream and confectionery at dessert, tickling the palates of women and children, but eschewed by sensible men. He had travelled twice over Europe, seeing everything with the voracious curiosity of a strong man eager to get his money's worth: after his experience of cities rich in high historic charm, works of art where the rapture and exaltation of long-vanished lives have been exultingly fixed in wonderful colors or imperishable marbles, he had carried away merely a hubbub of recollections of places where the best wines were found and his miseries at being reduced in certain cases to the position of a deaf-mute through his inability to grapple with the difficulties of foreign tongues.

No, it did not in those days occur to me that I had a rival in Mr. Talbot. Helen and I used to laugh at his crass ignorance, and mystify him now and then by our allusions. Miss Lenox was never vivacious at table, and used to listen languidly to all of us, turning to me now and then and regarding me with a sort of pleased curiosity when she thought I overmatched her heavy admirer.

As I have said, I had turned to composition as an amusement, an occupation, and perhaps a refuge from feelings which were rapidly becoming an ever-present pain. I recall one day when I had sat for hours at my desk writing busily, utterly wrapped up in my fancies--so engrossed, indeed, that when I had finished my work I looked with astonishment at my watch and discovered that it was long past two o'clock. I rose and went to the window, pushed aside the curtains and threw open the blinds, and gazed out. I overlooked the garden, which was deserted except by the bees and humming-birds busy among the flowers. The mid-day heat had passed, and a breeze rustled the leaves and moaned in the pine trees. It was a fair world, and I felt what one often experiences in coming back to reality after high emotion--a sort of strangeness in the beauty of tree and grass and sea and wood.

While I stood there some one advanced along the garden-path, looked up, saw me and beckoned. It was but a moment's effort to join her, and almost before I had realized what I was doing I was beside Miss Lenox in the garden.

"Come and sit down in the arbor," she said softly.

"No," I returned, remembering that I had sworn to myself not to yield to her caprices, "I am going for a walk."

She regarded me pensively. "May I go?" she asked.

"Oh yes, you may go, Georgy," I said with a little laugh. "I am only too happy, I am afraid, if you ask to go anywhere with me."

"Don't take me where it is wet," she observed simply, "for I have on thin slippers;" and she stretched out a little foot.

"I will take care of you," I answered her.

She took up the folds of her full white dress in her hands, and we set out. The mood was upon me to take the old paths across the sloping uplands into the woods on the hill that Helen and I had tramped over so often in our childhood. Beneath us lay the sea, a wide plain of placid waters, blue in the foreground, with opal tints playing over it as it spread out toward the horizon; above us were the woods luxuriant in their midsummer verdure, silent except for the occasional note of a wild bird; and about us were the green fields, fresh mown of late, with thickets of grape and wild convolvulus and star-wreathed blackberry-vines making a luxuriant tangle over the fences.

Georgy walked before me in the narrow path, and I followed closely, watching her fine free movements, the charm of her figure in its plain white morning-dress bound at the waist with a purple ribbon. Her golden-yellow hair lay in curls upon her shoulders: now and then I caught a glimpse of the contour of her face as she half turned to see if I were close behind her. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

My own thoughts flew about like leaves in a wind, but I wondered of what she was thinking. Although I had known her all my life, she was not easy for me to understand; or rather my impressions of her at this time were so colored by the passion of my own hopes that it was impossible for me to find a clew to her real feelings. Perhaps she was thinking of Jack: she was thinking--I was sure she was thinking--of something sweet, sad and strange, or she could not have looked so beautiful.

Suddenly she stopped in her walk and uttered a little cry. "It is wet here," she cried with vexation: "we must turn back, Floyd."

"I said I would take care of you," I exclaimed quickly, and putting my arms about her I raised her and carried her safely over the spot where a hundred springs trickled up to the surface and made a morass of the luxuriant grass. I did not set her down at once. For weeks now, sleeping and waking, I had been haunted by a fierce longing to hold her to my heart as I held her now, and it was not so easy to put by so great a joy. When at last I reached the stile I released her, and she sat down on the stone and looked at me with a half smile.

"If you call that taking care of me, Floyd--" said she, shaking her head.

"You are not angry with me, Georgina?"

"How could I be angry with you?" she said, putting out her hand to me and speaking so kindly that I dared to press her little rosy palm to my lips. "But how strong you are, Floyd! You carried me like a feather's weight, and yet I am tall and very heavy. You know how to take care of me, indeed."

"If I might always take care of you!" I said, my heart beating and the blood rushing to my face. "I can carry you home if you will. Don't you remember about the Laird of Bothwick declaring that no man should marry his daughter save the one who should carry her three miles up the mountain-side? If I could have such a chance with you!"

"But about the daughter of the old laird: did she find a lover so strong as to carry her to the mountain-top?"

"Yes: one of her suitors took her in his arms and strode along, crying, 'Love gives me strength--love gives me speed.' However, he was not happy after all, poor fellow! When he reached the goal he died. How could he have died then?"

"What did the young lady do?" inquired Georgy, laughing. "I suppose another lover rode by her side as she walked home, and that she married him for his pains. That is the way the brave men of the world are rewarded, Floyd. Don't be too generous, nor too strong, nor too self-forgetful. You will gain nothing by it."

"Do you mean that I shall not gain you, Georgy?"

"Oh, I said nothing about myself. Why do you ask me all these questions as soon as we are alone? I am afraid sometimes to let you talk to me, although there are few people in the world whom I like so well to have near me. Women will always love you dearly, Floyd. You are so gentle, so harmonious with pleasant thoughts and pleasant doings: you seem less selfish and vain than other men. You deserve that some woman should make you very happy, Floyd."

"There is but one woman who can do it, Georgy."

"I am not so sure of that. I do not know why you think of me at all: what is it about me that attracts you? Helen is younger than I am--a hundred times more beautiful. No, sir, you need make no such demonstrations. If you like my poor face best, it is because we are old friends, and you are so true, so kind, to the old memories. Do not interrupt me yet. I think you are blind to your own interests when you pass Helen by: she is so rich that if you marry her you can live a life like a prince."

"But if I do not wish to lead a prince's life, Georgy?" said I, a little nettled at the indifference which must prompt such comparisons of Helen to herself. "Nothing could induce me to marry a rich woman, even if Helen were to be thought of by a poor fellow like me. I have no vague dreams about the future: my hopes are clear and definite. I want a career carved by my own industry, my own taste: I want--above all things, I want--the wife of whom I am always thinking."

"And who is she, my poor boy?"

"You know very well, Georgy," I returned, throwing myself beside her and gazing up into her face. "Since I was a little fellow in Belfield, and used to look out of the school-room window with Jack Holt, and see you going past the church with your red jacket and your curls on your shoulders, I have had just one dream of the girl I could love so well that I could die for her. I used to lie on the hilltop then and fancy myself a bold knight on a white steed who should gallop down those sunshiny streets and seize you in his arms, raise you to the saddle and carry you away into Fairyland to live with him for ever. My longing has not changed: I want the same thing still."

"But when I was to marry Jack you did not seem to mind," said Georgina, looking at me with that new pensiveness she had learned of late.

"You knew my heart very little. When Jack told me that you were still free, I hated myself, my joy, my renewal of hope, seemed so contemptibly little in contrast with his great despair. I would not have wronged him. God knows, I pity him when I remember what he has lost! Still, I too loved you as a child: I never had it in my power to serve you, but I had no other thought but you. Why may it not be, dear? Who can love you better than I do? Even although I am not rich, who will take better care of you than I shall? I am sure you love me a little. Do not put the feeling by, but think of it: do not deny it--let it have its chance."

She rose with an absent air. "We must go on," she said dreamily; and I helped her over the stile, and we walked slowly through the wood. She leaned upon my arm, but her face was downcast, and her broad hat concealed it from me.

"I wish," I said after a time, "you would let me know some of those thoughts."

She looked up at me pale but smiling. "Do you know, Floyd," she murmured, "I do think you could make me happy if anybody could."

"Promise me that I may have the chance. End now, Georgy, all your doubts, all my fears. You will be happier so."

"But we should be poor!" she cried sharply. "I could not be contented to marry a poor man. You may be clever, Floyd--I do not know much about cleverness in men--but, all the same, it is hard for a man to make money until he has worked for many, many years. I could not wait for you. I am older than you, and everybody is wondering why, with all my opportunities, I have not married. You'd much better give me up," she added, looking into my face steadily and smiling, although her lip trembled, "and let Mr. Talbot have me. He is rich, and can marry me at once. He is waiting for my answer now, and it is best that I should, as you say, end it all."

I shuddered as this pang disturbed my warm bliss. "For Heaven's sake, don't joke, Georgy!" I exclaimed. "I can't even hear you allude to the possibility of marrying such a man as that with equanimity. I am not so poor. Mr. Floyd--" But, after all, I could not tell her of Mr. Floyd's generosity to me: it seemed like basing calculations upon his death to assure her that the course of events was to bring me a fortune.

She looked at me with eagerness. "Tell me now," she said, putting her hand upon my arm. "If you love me, Floyd, you cannot keep a secret from me."

To describe the beauty of her face, the fascination of her manner, the thrill of her touch, words are quite powerless, mere pen-scratches. If any man could have withstood her, I was not that man. Shame to relate, I soon had told her everything--that Mr. Floyd had for years placed an ample income at my disposal--that I had seen his will, which gave me, without restriction, a clear third of his fortune.

She was meditative for a while. "But," she said then with a trifle of brusqueness, "if you marry me he will be angry and change all that: he does not like me. He has different plans for you: he wants you to marry Helen."

"Don't say that," I cried, "for I love Mr. Floyd so well, I owe him so much, I could refuse him nothing."

"You mean that if he asked you to marry Helen you would give me up, would take her?" she retorted with a flaming color on her cheeks and a gleam in her eyes. "You do not care for me, then. You are merely playing with me: you love her, after all."

"Now, that is nonsense, Georgy," I said gently, for through her jealousy I had the first glimpse, I fancied, of something like real love for me; "and I do not like to hear Helen's name bandied about in this way. You may be sure that she will stand in no need of suitors: I shall never be one of them. Now, then, who is it that is coquetting? You know whom I love--what I want. I am very much in earnest--unsettled in heart and mind, body, soul and spirit, until I have your answer. Tell me, Georgy darling, is it or is it not to be?"

But I was to have no answer that day. Miss Lenox said it was very tiresome hearing me reiterate that dreary question, and that she saw raspberries in the thicket which I must gather for her. Although, when she had eaten them, she let me kiss the lovely stained lips, I was still far enough from knowing whether they were mine or not--whether she liked to raise my ardent dreams merely to disappoint them, or whether at heart it was, as she sometimes hinted, that she did care for me with something of the intimate, clinging habit which bound _me_ so closely to _her_.

ELLEN W. OLNEY.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

DAWN IN THE CITY.

The city slowly wakes: Her every chimney makes Offering of smoke against the cool white skies: Slowly the morning shakes The lingering shadowy flakes Of night from doors and windows, from the city's eyes.

A breath through heaven goes: Leaves of the pale sweet rose Are strewn along the clouds of upper air. Healer of ancient woes, The palm of dawn bestows On feverish temples peace, comfort on grim despair.

Now the celestial fire Fingers the sunken spire; Crocket by crocket slowly creepeth down; Brushes the maze of wire, Dewy, electric lyre, And with a silent hymn one moment fills the town.

Over emergent roofs A sound of pattering hoofs And anxious bleatings tells the passing herd: Scared by the piteous droves, A shoal of skurrying doves, Veering, around the island of the church has whirred.

Soon through the smoky haze, The park begins to raise Its outlines clearer into daylit prose: Ever with fresh amaze The sleepless fountains praise Morn, that has gilt the city as it gilds the rose.

High in the clearer air The smoke now builds a stair Leading to realms no wing of bird has found: Things are more foul, more fair; A distant clock, somewhere, Strikes, and the dreamer starts at clear reverberant sound.

Farther the tide of dark Drains from each square and park: Here is a city fresh and new create, Wondrous as though the ark Should once again disbark On a remoulded world its safe and joyous freight.

Ebbs all the dark, and now Life eddies to and fro By pier and alley, street and avenue: The myriads stir below, As hives of coral grow-- Vaulted above, like them, with a fresh sea of blue.

CHARLES DE KAY.

THE PARIS EXPOSITION OF 1878.

IV.--MACHINERY.

The machinery in the Paris Exposition covers a larger space than any other of the eight departments of material, machinery and products which occupy the buildings and annexes. The ninth department, Horticulture, is outdoors on the grounds or in greenhouses. Foreign machinery has about half the space, and French machinery the remainder. Few countries are without annexes, the space allotted to each, though supposed to be ample, being utterly insufficient to hold the multitude of objects presented.

In preference to taking the classes of machinery in turn, and visiting the various nations in search of exemplars of the classes in rotation, it will be more interesting to take the nations in order and arrive at an idea of the rate and direction of their relative progress, modified so largely by the respective natural productions of the countries and by the habits and degrees of civilization of their inhabitants. When put to a trial of its strength, each nation naturally brings forward the matters in which it particularly excels.

Prominent in the section of the Netherlands, the name so descriptive of the land where not less than two hundred and twenty-three thousand acres are below the level of the sea and kept constantly drained by artificial means, are the engineering and mechanical devices for the reclamation and preservation of land, the formation of outlet-canals for the centres of commerce, and the bridging of the rivers and estuaries which intersect the maritime portions of the country. Some of the models and relief-maps were shown in the Netherlands section in the Main Building at Philadelphia, but the exhibition is more perfect here, as much has been added in the two intervening years.

The works for the drainage of the Haarlemmer Meer illustrate the means employed for the last great drainage-work completed. This lake had an area of 45,230 acres, an average depth of seventeen feet below low water, and was drained between 1848 and 1853. Being diked to exclude the waters which naturally flowed into it, three large engines were built in different places around it, and the work of pumping out 800,000,000 tons of water commenced. The engines have cylinders of twelve feet diameter, and are capable of lifting 2,000,000 tons of water in twenty-four hours from the depth of seventeen feet to the level of the _boezem_, or catch-water basin, of the district. The boezem carries the water to the sea, into which it discharges by sluices at Katwyk on the North Sea and at Sparndam and Halfweg on the Y, or the southern end of the Zuyder Zee. The land reclaimed is now in excellent tillage, and one farm on the tract is referred to in agricultural journals as one of the three model farms of the world. The three engines are called the Leeghwater, the Cruquius and the Lynden, from three celebrated engineers who had at different times proposed plans for draining the Haarlemmer Meer. Proposals for its drainage were made by one of these engineers as far back as 1663. The next enterprise in hand is the drainage of the southern lobe of the Zuyder Zee, which is stated to have an average depth of thirteen feet, and it is intended to cut it off by a dike from the northern basin and erect sufficient engines around it to pump it out in thirteen years at the rate of a foot a year, working night and day.

Another engineering device, very necessary in a land where foundations are so frequently built under water, is the enclosed caisson with compressed air, as shown in detail in this exhibit. It was originally invented by M. Triger to keep the water expelled from the sheet-iron cylinders which he sunk through quick-sands in reaching the coal-measures in the vicinity of the river Loire in France. The seams of coal in this district lie under a stratum of quicksand from fifty-eight to sixty-six feet in thickness, and they had been inaccessible by all the ordinary modes of mining previously practised. The system has been much amplified and improved since, especially in sinking the foundations of the St. Louis and the New York East River bridges, and does not require specific description. An improved air-lock, by which access is given from the exterior to the working chamber at the part where the men work in an atmosphere sufficiently condensed to exclude water from the lower open end--like a tumbler inverted in water--is the principal addition which America has made to the device.

We need not go abroad to find long bridges, but the great bridge, with three immense iron trusses and eight smaller ones, over the Wahal near Bommell would be respectable anywhere. Our Louisville bridge is a parallel example for length, but the truss is different.

The dikes and jetties of the new embouchure of the Meuse embrace the same features of extending a river's banks into deep water, and by confining the stream making it scour out its own bed, as now so successfully practised by Captain Eads in one of the passes of the Mississippi River. Limbs and saplings made into gabions and staked together form mattresses, and by loading with stone are sunk in position. They soon become silted up, and are practically solid. Others are made and laid upon them _ad libitum_, and at last raise the crest above the level of the sea, the last course being laid with the advantage of high-water spring tides. This foundation supports courses of pitched masonry on its side, and these protect the stone or gravel embankment, which forms a roadbed. The river's water, instead of, as formerly, depositing its silt at the embouchure as its motion is arrested on reaching the open sea, carries its silt along and deposits it farther out: if a favorable shore-current occurs, it is swept away laterally, and so disposed of.

The maritime canal of Amsterdam is another late success of this remarkable people, which leads the world in dikes and drainage of low lands, as the Italian does in the art and area of irrigation. The present canal may satisfy the great and still rising commerce of Amsterdam, the previous ship-canal, fifty-one miles in length, built in 1819-25 at a cost of $4,250,000, and deep and wide enough to float two passing frigates, having proved insufficient.

Belgium is happily situated, and well provided by Nature and art to enter into any competitive trial. With admirable skill, great provision of iron and coal and a people of economical habits that permit them to work at low wages without being impoverished, she is, besides working up her own abundant material, rolling the iron of England into rails, and making it into locomotives for Great Britain, whose own people lack the work thus done abroad. The "Societe Cockerill-Seraing" has an enormous space devoted to the machinery for the exploitation of iron. Compressed forgings in car-wheels and other shapes are piled on the floor, and a whole railway rail-rolling mill train is shown in motion. Two of the rolls are stated to have rolled 10,500 tons of steel rails, and are in apparent good order yet.

The Belgium system of sinking shafts for mines and wells, invented by Kind and Chaudron, exhibited here as in Philadelphia, attracts great attention from its gigantic proportions. Imagine an immense boring-chisel (_trepan_), weighing 26,000 pounds and with a breadth of over six feet, worked up and down by machinery, the steel studs on its face stamping the rocks into dust, so that they can be removed with a bucket with bottom valves which is dropped into the hole and is worked up and down until the detritus and water, if any, creep into it, when it is withdrawn and emptied. The repetition of these processes makes the shaft of two metres diameter. Then comes the larger trepan, with a width of 4.80 metres, and repeats the process on a larger scale. This enormous chisel weighs 44,000 pounds. The system is much in favor, and forty-five shafts have been thus sunk between 1854 and 1877 in Belgium, France, England and Germany. Cast-iron lining is lowered in sections as the shaft deepens, the sections being added at the top and bolted together.

The Belgian exhibit contains also one of those immense paper-machines invented by the brothers Fourdrinier about fifty years ago, and now used almost universally for the best class of machine-made papers. They are used by Wilcox at Glen Falls, Delaware county, Penn., in making the government note and bond paper, and are a marvel of art. The Frenchmen who invented the machine brought it into use in England, but they were much hampered and discouraged by difficulties, and it was never a pecuniary success to them. It was a legacy to the future, and they have joined the army of martyrs to mechanical science. The machine in the Belgian section is one hundred and thirty feet long, and the Swiss machine, near by, is nearly as large. The French, with their customary ingenuity, have reduced the proportions very considerably. The Swiss machine makes paper one metre and a half wide.

The remainder of the Belgian exhibit of machinery may be summarized: rock drills on the principle of those used at Mont Cenis; the gas-engines of Otto; machine tools, lathes, drills and planers; a very curious machine for cutting bevel or straight gears, built by a firm at Liege, and worthy of attention by Mr. Sellers or Mr. Corliss, whose ingenious machines for the same purpose were at Philadelphia; the woollen machinery of Celestine Martin of Verviers, which I recollect to have seen in Philadelphia also; multitubular boilers, rudder propeller, and hand fire-engines Then we see a number of locomotives and tramway engines, rail and street cars, winding, mining, crane and portable engines, and a full set of vacuum-pans for sugar, with engines, centrifugal filters and hydraulic presses. A glance at Guibal's great mine-ventilator fan, fifty feet in diameter and with ten wooden vanes, and we may quit the section of Belgium, which is the next largest after England of all the foreign departments here.

The exhibition of Denmark is principally agricultural machinery, its iron ploughs being copies of the English, and its reapers of the American, while the dairy machines and apparatus are its own, and very excellent.

The embroidering-machine of Hurtu & Hautin is shown working in the Swiss section, and is a great success. The web or cloth to be embroidered is stretched between horizontal rollers in a vertical frame which hangs suspended in the machine from the shorter end of a lever above. On each side of this floating frame is a track on which a carriage alternately approaches and recedes. Each carriage carries as many nippers in a row as equals the number of needles, which in this case is two hundred and twelve. The needles have an eye in the middle and are pointed at each end. The carriage advances, the nippers holding the threaded needles, and pushes them through the cloth: the nippers on the other side are waiting to receive them and shut upon them, those which have just thrust them into the cloth opening automatically; the second carriage retreats and draws the silk through the cloth with the requisite tightness, and then comes forward, thrusting the other end of the needles through the cloth to be grasped by the nippers on the first carriage, and so on. The frame holding the cloth is moved by an arrangement of levers under the control of the operator, who conducts a tracer point on the long end of the lever over the design, which is suspended before him. The frame moves in obedience to the action of the tracer, but in a minified degree, and each needle repeats on a scale of one-twentieth the design over which the tracer is moved step by step between each stitch. Thus two hundred and twelve embroideries according to a prescribed pattern are made by each needle; and, in fact, though it was not stated, to avoid complicating the description, a second row of a similar number of needles is carried by the same carriages and operates upon a second web stretched between another pair of rollers in the same floating frame. The object of the rollers is to reel off new cloth as the embroidery progresses and to reel on the work done. A similar machine is shown in the French section, in the Salle de l'Ecole Militaire.

The Jacquard loom is shown in many sections--Swiss, French, United States, English and others--principally upon silk handkerchiefs and motto-ribbons. The exhibit of carpet-weaving is far inferior to the Philadelphian. The Swiss exhibit of machinery for making paper of wood pulp is very large and ample, but the Belgian annex shows the finest and largest varieties of paper so made to be found in the Exposition. The paper, white and of various colors, made from about forty trees and twenty different straws, grasses and forage-plants, is shown in large rolls.

Of Russia there is not much to say except as regards the work of the Ecole Imperiale Technique de Moscou. This is a remarkable exemplification of tools, methods of work, parts of engines and machines, all finished with extreme care and fitted with great nicety. It is fuller than it was in Philadelphia, but many of the portions are readily recognizable. The machine tools, hydraulic presses, stationary engines and hand fire-engines are closely associated with the military and naval objects, cannons, ambulances, field-forges and an excellent lifeboat, systeme de Bojarsky.

Austria comes with no more striking exhibit than the malteries and breweries of Nobak Freres and Fritze. The immense extent of the magazines for barley and hops; the size and height of the malteries, where by continuous processes the grain is damped, sprouted and dried and the malt ground; the number and capacity of the various vessels in which the infusions of malt and hops are made and mixed; and the apparently interminable series of engines, pumps and pipes by which the steam and liquids are conducted,--are confusing until some study evolves order out of the apparent confusion. The wort is cooled artificially, time being a great object as well as the saving of aroma, and the yet innocent liquid is poured in a torrent into the fermentation-vats, where Nature will have her own way and eliminate the ingredients which convert the mawkish wort into the sparkling and refreshing beer. Four hundred and fifty of these establishments have been erected by this firm in Europe; which must be some comfort to those, not vignerons, who think the prospects of the vine are materially clouded by the _Phylloxera_.

But Austria is not beery alone. She has fine exhibits in horology, electric and pneumatic telegraphy, and in tools, grain-mills, gang-saw mills, and machines for making paper bags. More important, as some might say, are the admirable locomotives and stationary engines, cars, fire-engines, and her collection of iron-work, in which are exhibited cast-iron car-wheels, made by Ganz & Co. of Buda-Pesth, which have been in use twenty-one years and have run without apparent severe injury a distance of 549,108 kilometres, or nearly 280,700 miles.

The beet-root sugar interest is becoming very important in Austria, but the evidences of the Exhibition indicate that the diffusion-process holds better credit there than in France, where it is not approved of. The rotative apparatus shown is an immense affair, with a series of eight tall tanks arranged on a circular carriage and rotating on a vertical axis, so as to bring each in turn to the charging and discharging positions. Each tank has its own system of pumps. Beet-root is difficult to exploit for various reasons, chemical and other. Like the vine, it is particular in its nutriment, requires great skill to remove extraneous substances, and can hardly be handled by the French system without a set of machinery costing about eighty thousand dollars.

From Austria to Spain is but a step, but it is not productive of much information in the matter we have in hand. A beaming-machine for cotton warps, red, white and yellow, stands solitary in its section, and next to it is a model of a _cirque de taureau_, composed of nineteen thousand pieces of tin laboriously put together without solder, as if that were a merit, and stated to be the work of two years. In the arena the wooden bull regards with indifference two mounted cavaliers and seven footmen in various provoking attitudes. Near by are various machines and presses for the treatment of grapes and olives, grinders and presses in variety, a sugar-cane press and a turbine. Barcelona would seem to be the most enterprising of Spanish cities. Several exemplifications of the excellent iron of Catalonia and Biscay suggest the direction in which Spain has taken its most important industrial start of late years. An admirable model of the quay of the copper-mining company of the Rio Tinto is another evidence in the same line which the maps, plans and ores amply corroborate.

Two steps, in violation of all preconceived geographical notions, but in obedience to the Exposition authorities, land us in China, where we find things mechanical in much the same state of progress as Marco Polo viewed them some centuries since. The silk tissues brought from the far East were famous in the days of the Roman magnificence, and here is the loom. The marvel is how such a web can be made on such a rough machine. A blue silk warp of delicate threads is in the loom, which has nine heddles, and the partly-finished fabric shows a woof consisting of a narrow gilded strip of paper. The sheen of the figured goods is something remarkable. It is a parallel case to that of the shawls of Kashmir, where the natives, trained for generations, succeed in producing by great care and unlimited expenditure of time fabrics with which the utmost elaboration of our machinery scarcely enables us to compete.

The machine for the whitening of rice by the removal of the brown coating from the pure white grain is similar to that shown from Siam at the Centennial, but, unlike the latter, the faces of the two round horizontal wooden blocks which act as mill-stones are serrated, whereas the Siamese rubbers were made of sun-dried clay, the serrations consisting of bamboo strips inserted in the clay while yet plastic. The motion is similar, not being continuously revolving, but reciprocatory, and the method is customary in all the rice-eating regions except India, and is well known in parts of the latter, though not universal. The grain of Eastern Asia, including India and Malaysia, is almost universally rice, of which two, and even three, crops a year are raised in some regions, and the processes of cooking are simple among these vegetarians, the variation consisting principally in the choice of condiments or of certain additional esculents or fruits in their season. The grinding of grain is, however, universally known, though meal forms but a small proportion of the daily food. The mortar and pestle in the Chinese section show the more usual method, and there, as in some parts of India, the pestle is placed on the end of a poised horizontal beam which is worked by the foot of the operator at the end opposite to the pestle.

We meet in the Chinese section with the original of our fanning-mill or winnowing-machine for grain. Though China has had the same machines for centuries, we have not knowingly copied many of them. The fanning-mill, porcelain and the _cheng_ may be fairly credited to her. The last is the original of all our free-reed musical instruments. It is shown here, and was also at the Centennial, and it was the carrying of one overland to Russia, where it fell into the hands of Kratzenstein, the organ-builder to Queen Catharine II., which initiated the free reed in Europe, and led to the accordions, concertinas, harmoniums and parlor organs which perhaps afford the cheapest and loudest music for a given expenditure of muscle and wind of anything we have.

The spinning and winding machinery of China is simple enough, but so much like that of our great-grandmothers that it does not arrest particular attention. It is otherwise with the irrigating-machine, which in its various modifications produces, by the fruitfulness induced, the food of scores of millions in China, India, Syria and Egypt--the cogged wheel on a vertical axis, with an ox travelling beneath it, and a horizontal shaft moved thereby and carrying an endless chain of pots or buckets, either hanging from the cord or moving in an inclined chute.

The ploughs, harrows, rakes, flails, spades, hoes and forks are of the usual clumsy description, not to be apprehended by the reader without cuts, and many of them only reasonably effective even in the mellow soil repeatedly stirred and occasionally flooded with water. The seed-drill for planting one row, with a share on each side to turn soil on to the grain, is an anticipation of some later inventions nearer home. The thresher is a square frame drawn over the grain--which is spread upon the bare ground--and is furnished on its under side with steel blades which not only shell the grain out of the ear, but also reduce the straw into chaff, which is desirable, as storing for feed more conveniently. Southern nations have but little conception of our use of hay. Grain for the man and straw for the beast is the usual division. The ancient Roman _tribulum_ and the modern Syrian _morej_, were or are similar, and the "sharp" threshing instrument of Isaiah may be seen to-day in the Tunis exhibit, being a frame of boards with sharp flint spalls inserted into its under surface.

We might linger with profit over the elaborate models of Chinese manufactures--sugar, rice, tobacco, paper, etc., showing the stages of cultivation, manufacture, and packing for transportation and market--but perhaps it will be as well to slip across the alley and visit the ancient island of Zipango.

Zipango, Nipon, Japon, have one consistent syllabic element, and the rulers of the country are so desirous that it should take its place among the civilized nations of the world that they have not shown to any liberal extent the native machinery, except in the form of models which attract but little attention, a few machines for winding and measuring silk, some curious articles of bamboo and ratan, fishpots and baskets, and cutlery of native shapes.

The exclusiveness which had marked the policy of Japan from time immemorial, and which was somewhat roughly intruded upon by Captain Perry, and subsequently by other explorers and diplomatists, has given place to a change which amounts to a revolution. Japan, under the name of Zipango, took its place on the map of the world some time before Columbus discovered, unwittingly to himself, that a continent intervened between Western Europe and Eastern Asia. When Columbus made his voyage in search of Asia, assisted by those very estimable persons Ferdinand and Isabella, it was on the part of the latter intended as a flank movement against the Portuguese, who, consequent upon the discovery of the passage of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama, had obtained a patent from the pope for the eastern route to India. The globe of Martin Behaim at that time depicted Zipango as off the coast of Asia and near the longitude actually occupied by the Carolinas and Florida, the eastward extension of Asia being fearfully exaggerated. The globe of John Schoener, of 1520, fourteen years after the death of Columbus, had Zipango in the same place, and Cuba alongside of it, ranging north and south. So loath were geographers to give up preconceived ideas. Columbus died supposing he had discovered "fourteen hundred islands and three hundred and thirty-three leagues of the coast of Asia," and hence our group are called the West Indies, and our aborigines Indians. Such are one's reflections as one wanders in the Japanese section, dreaming among the objects of a land which has just awaked from what may be called the sleep of centuries.

Italy has much that is valuable as well as beautiful in other classes, but her attempts in agricultural machinery are but rude. Here, for example, is a plough. Well, perhaps it is not exactly that which made the trench over which Remus leaped, to be slain by his twin wolf-nursling, but it is the plough of Bocchi Gaetano of Parma, is twelve feet long and weighs something under half a ton. Another, hard by, is two feet longer and has but one handle. Efforts are evident, however, to assimilate the country to the portions of Europe more advanced in mechanical matters. When we reflect upon how much we owe to Italy, we can but wish her well, but we cannot delay long with her in a search for objects of mechanical interest except to examine her models of tunnels, manner of scaffolding, boring and blasting. The Mont Cenis tunnel must stand as the grandest work of its kind until that of Saint Gothard is finished. An exemplification by a model constructed to a scale of the electric ballista of Spezzia for testing the hundred-ton gun lately made in England for Italy attracts a great many visitors, and the large photographs which give the condition of the butt after each impact of the projectiles brings up again the double problem as it is stated: How to construct a gun and projectile which shall be able to pierce the heaviest armor; and how to construct armor which shall be proof against the heaviest shot. Many saw with interest in the Machinery Building at the Centennial the eight-inch armor-plating made by Cammell of Sheffield, tested in one case by nine spherical shots overlapping, making an indentation of 3.12 inches with balls from a seven-inch gun driven by thirty pounds of powder at a range of seventy feet. They are here again, and so is the nine-inch armor with a much deeper indentation from a chilled Palisser bolt. Here is also a new-comer, John Brown, whose armor of four and a half inches of steel welded on to the same thickness of iron resists the Palisser bolt, which only penetrates the thickness of the steel. What might happen to it with a pointed steel bolt from a sixty- or one-hundred-ton gun is another matter. To set our minds at rest as to what would occur in the event supposed comes Sir Joseph Whitworth, who exhibits his gun with polygonal rifling, the bore being a hexagon with rounded corners. The projectiles are moulded of the same shape, and are fired as they are cast, without planing. One of these bolts, six diameters long and weighing twenty-nine and a half pounds, was fired from a twelve-pounder gun through a four and a half inch armor-plate. The exhibit also shows a flat-fronted Whitworth fluid-pressed steel shell, three diameters long, weighing eight hundred and eight pounds, which was fired at Gavre, France, without a bursting charge, from a Whitworth twelve-inch, thirty-five-ton gun, and penetrated iron sixteen inches thick and twelve inches of oak backing. The shell remained entire and was only slightly distorted. The question seems to be answered, unless the plates are made twenty inches thick, and that is impossible on a vessel to be manoeuvred.

Sweden comes next, and the scene changes; for the weapon which suggested the remarks was only, as it were, one gun in a garden. Instead of wine and olives we find iron and furs. Except some Indian steels, there is no better metal than that of Sweden, and horse-shoe nails are made of it all over Europe and the United States. Iron in ore, pig, rails, bars, rods, wire; iron in tools, files, wheels, balls, shells, pans, boilers, stoves, springs; iron _ad lib_.

The agricultural machines of Sweden, like those of Denmark, are copies of the American and English, and the same is true to a large extent of the engines, saw-mills, water-wheels and wood-working machinery. The statement would not be true of the very elaborate exercising-machines (_la gymnastique medicale mecanique_) invented by Gustave Zander of Stockholm. They embrace every conceivable variety of effort, and also another class of applications which may be termed shampooing, as they consist of kneading and rubbing. Among the twenty machines are those designed for flexing, stretching and extending the limbs, for kneading the back and neck, for rubbing the body and limbs to induce circulation and simulate the effect of exercise in the cases of weak persons or those confined to their beds by casualties. Some of these were in Philadelphia in 1876.

Steering-apparatus and gun-harpoons for whaling testify to the maritime character of the people, as do the boats and ropes. The great exhibit of _pate de bois_ shows the anxiety of the people to turn their extensive forests to good account in the markets of the world. White pine seems to be the principal wood thus used. Norway and Sweden have been shipping timber for some centuries, and yet seem to need no laws to restrain the denudation of their hills; certainly not to encourage rainfall. Bergen has 88.13 inches per annum, which is just double that of Philadelphia, and four inches greater than that of Sitka, where the people say it is always raining. Of course these figures are small when compared to spots on the Himalayas, where Hooker observed a fall of 470 inches in seven months, and on one occasion 30 inches in four hours; the latter equal to the average annual rainfall of France.

The American machinery, which occupies a position between Norway and England, is creditable in kind and quality, but fails very far in giving a correct idea of the multiplicity of our industries. Almost the only evidence of our textile manufactures are two of Tilt's Jacquard silk-weaving looms. The telephones of Edison and Gray excite unremitting astonishment and admiration, and have both received the highest possible awards. Our wood-working is practically shown in a large variety by Fay & Co. of Cincinnati, and one or two other special machines by other makers. The Wheelock engine, which drives all the machinery in our section of the main building, has very properly been awarded a grand prize. It is all that can be desired in an engine, and has a singular simplicity of construction, with few working parts. It is the same which drove the machinery in the Agricultural Building at the Centennial. The steam is admitted and exhausted by a valve at each end of the cylinder placed directly below the port. The cut-off valve is behind the main valve: the mechanism for operating the valves is on the outside of the steam-chest, and easily accessible. The valves and seats are made tapering in their general diameter, and the pressure of steam comes on one side, also acting to keep the collar in contact with the sleeve.

The Waltham Watch Company is considered by some of the most influential European journals as the most important in the American section on account of the revolution it is making in that important industry. When the Swiss commissioner went home from the Centennial he published a letter fairly throwing up the sponge, and when the company's exhibit appeared for the first time in Europe at an international exposition it was regarded as carrying the war into Africa. The American system of making by machinery all the parts of an article--say, of a watch--of a given grade by means of gauges and templets, so that the parts may be "assembled," and of such singular exactitude in their making that any part may be replaced by the corresponding piece of any other watch of the same grade, has in this manufactory attained its highest results, greatest precision and most perfect illustration. The whole collection of watches was sold within a few weeks after the opening. The latest improvements in the balance to secure perfect isochronism under varying conditions of temperature would delight the soul of Harrison, who worked from 1728 to 1761 on the problem of a compensator for the changes of rate due to the expansion and contraction of the metal, and received the reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling offered by the Board of Longitude.

Tiffany's exhibit has been admired and patronized, but is not quite within my range of subjects. Darling, Brown & Sharpe have their machine-tools and gauges, Bliss & Williams their presses and dies. We have the Baxter, Snyder and Lovegrove portable engines, Taylor's and Aultman's agricultural engines. Our railroad exhibit is not very full: we have a Philadelphia and Reading coal-burning locomotive, a Pullman car, the Westinghouse brake, Stephenson's street-cars, car-wheels from Baldwin's and Lobdell's: the latter also sends calender-rolls of remarkable quality. As a sort of set-off to the Austrian car-wheels which have run for twenty-one years, as previously mentioned, Lobdell has a pair which have run 245,000 miles on the Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska Railway. The Fairbanks scales in great variety, both of size and purpose, and of a finish and an accuracy which have become proverbial; the Howe scales; the Goodyear boot- and shoe-machinery; Stow's flexible shaft; Lechner's coal-mining engine; Allen & Roeder's riveting-machine; and Delamater's punches and shears,--are a few more of the representative machines.

Sewing-machines are not in as great variety in the American section as they were in Philadelphia. There are, however, enough of American and European to foot up about eighty exhibitors. Wheeler & Wilson's have been awarded the grand prize, and there are various medals for others, both home and foreign--the American machine, Cole's and Wardwell's among the number. The various hardware exhibits, such as the Disston saws, Ames shovels, Collins axes, Batcheller forks, Russell & Erwin builders' hardware, as well as the Remington, Colt, Winchester, Sharpe and Owen Jones rifles and revolvers, and the Gatling and Gardner guns, are a little on one side of my present line of subjects.

The United States has preserved its ancient reputation in its agricultural machinery. We are especially strong in the class which we term "harvesters," the name including reapers, automatic binders, mowers, horse-rakes and hay-loaders. Our baling-presses also are in advance of competitors. A juryman may perhaps stand excused for supposing that more than an average amount of interest is felt in the machinery which happens to be in his class, but on Class 76--"agricultural implements in motion and in the field"--additional interest was conferred by a series of competitive trials extending from July 22 to August 12, and embracing reapers, mowers, steam and ordinary ploughs, hay-presses, threshing-machines especially, but also including all the other machines for working in the ground, gathering crops and the storage and preparation of feed for animals. In this series of competitive trials eight different countries entered the lists. The prizes were twelve _objets d'art_ placed at the disposal of Monsieur Tisseraud, the "director-general of agriculture and horticulture of France," and the jury selected to attend the trials. Eleven of them were accorded to machines of "exceptional merit," the idea of novelty being included in the definition of the term. These _objets d'art_ are Sevres vases worth one thousand francs each, and in view of their exceptional value, and the large share that America has in the award, a list of the names may very properly be appended.[5] Several hundred machines competed: for instance, twenty-six reapers, sixteen mowers, fifty-four ploughs, and so on of numerous kinds of agricultural implements and machines for working in the soil, gathering crops and for the work of the homestead and barn.

Last on the foreign side is the British machinery, and the collection is very much larger and more varied than any of the preceding. There are few lines of manufacture which are not represented here. Machines for working in iron and other metals, for sawing and fashioning wood, for the ginning, breaking or carding of cotton, flax, wool, jute and hemp, for working in stone, glass, leather and paper, are shown. Then, again, the finished productions; prime motors, such as stationary engines, locomotives and fire-engines; lifting-machines for solids or liquids, cranes, jacks, elevators, pumps, each in endless variety.

Prominent in the hall, and employed in driving the machinery, is the large double compound horizontal engine of Galloway of Manchester. This form of engine is coming to the front, as is evinced especially in the marine service. Maudslay & Sons of London exhibit a model of the four-cylinder marine compound engine as fitted on the "White Star line" vessels, the Germanic, Britannic, Oceanic, Baltic and Adriatic, and on the steamers of the "Compagnie Generale Transatlantique," the Ville de Havre, Europe, France, Amerique, Labrador, Canada. The vessels of the New York and Bremen line have the same class of engines, built in Greenock, Scotland.

Amid so large a mass of machinery one can but select the most prominent, and among these we may choose such as, while not necessarily imposing in size, are suggestive of ideas which we may find valuable for home introduction. Appleby & Sons lead the world in the completeness and capacity of their great cranes and lifts for docks and wharves, machine-shops, erection of buildings, and travelling cranes for railways or common roads. We must make one exception--the elevators for hotels and warehouses, in which America is in advance of all other countries. While we have many varieties of these, we must give credit where it is due, and the _ascenseur Edoux_ of Paris is the original of all those in which the cage is placed upon a plunger that descends into a vertical cylinder into which water is forced to elevate the plunger, and from which it is withdrawn to allow the plunger and cage to descend. Very fine specimens of this class of elevator are in the New York Post-office building. The gantry crane of Messrs. Appleby Bros. of London is the most complete engine of its kind in the world. It was originally constructed for the growing requirements of the docks of the North-eastern Railway Company of England at Middlesborough. The term "gantry" is applied to the movable scaffold or frame, which in this case rests upon a pair of rails twenty-three feet apart, one of them being close to the edge of the quay. The clear height is seventeen and a half feet, which allows the uninterrupted passage of locomotives and all kinds of rolling-stock on each of the two lines of rails which are spanned by the gantry. The crane is designed for a working load of five tons, with a maximum radius of twenty-one feet from the centre of the crane-post to the plumb-line of the lifting chain, with a capacity for altering the radius by steam to a minimum of fourteen feet. The crane has capacity to (1) lift and lower; (2) turn round completely in either direction simultaneously with the lifting and lowering; (3) alter the radius by raising or lowering the jib-head; (4) travel along the rails by its own steam-power. All these motions are easily worked by one man, who attends to the boiler. The travelling motion is transmitted from the crane-engines by suitable gear and shafts to the travelling wheels, and warping-drums or capstans are fitted on a countershaft on the inner side of each frame, which drums can be driven independently of the travelling wheels for moving trucks into position below the crane as they are required for loading and unloading. Smaller cranes may pass with their loads below the gantry, and a number of these large cranes may be assembled so as each to work at the different hatchways of a large screw steamer, or two may be associated together for any exceptionally heavy lift. The value of elevation of the crane is not only in allowing the loaded cars to be brought on tracks beneath it, but in giving it capacity to work over the sides of large vessels, which when light may rise twenty feet above the level of the quay, and to load or discharge from trucks on two lines of rails on the land-side of the gantry, overhead of the trucks on the two lines which run below the gantry.[6]

Blake's stone-breaker, though only represented by model in the United States section, where it belongs, is shown by two English firms; and though some Europeans profess to have improved upon its details, no efficient substitute has been found for it, but it remains the premium stone-crusher of the world, and has rendered services in the exploitation of gold quartz and silver ores, and in the crushing of stones for public works and for concretes, which can hardly be exaggerated. In testimony taken in the United States in 1872 it was put in evidence that five hundred and nine machines then in service effected a direct saving over hand-labor of five million five hundred thousand dollars per annum.

Steam-pumps are here in force--direct by Tangye and others, and rotary by both of the Gwynnes, whose name has been so long and is so intimately associated with this class of machines.

The emery-wheels of Thompson, Sterne & Co. of Glasgow have the same variety of form and application usual with us, but the firm claims that while it uses the true corundum emery of Naxos, the American article is only a refractory iron ore, which soon loses its sharpness and becomes inefficient. This is a question of efficiency or of veracity which we leave to the trade. The machine adapted as a tool-grinder has six emery-wheels for varying characters of work. Four are assorted for gauges of different radii, for moulding-irons, etc. One has a square face for plane-irons, chisels, etc. One is an emery hone to replace the water-of-Ayr stone.

In examining the English locomotives exhibited two things were apparent: one half of them have adopted the outside cylinders and wrist-pins on the drivers, three out of four have comfortable cabs for the engineers. These are, as we view them, sensible changes. Outside-cylinder engines are also coming into extensive use in France. The machine tools shown by Sharp, Stewart & Co. of Manchester are remarkably well made, and their locomotive in the same space is an evidence of the efficiency of the tools.

The exhibit of hydraulic-machine tools by Mr. R. H. Tweddell is a very admirable one, and shows a multitude of stationary and portable forms in which the idea is developed so as to reach the varying requirements. When work is more conveniently held to the machines, the latter are adapted to reach it whether presented vertically or horizontally, or with one arm inside of it, as with boilers and flue-pipes. When it is more convenient to handle the riveter, the latter is suspended from a crane and swung up to its work, and the peculiarity of the various sizes and shapes for different kinds of work is remarkable. The cut shows one of the latest for riveting girders.

The Ingram rotary perfecting press, on which the _Illustrated London News_ is worked off, prints from a web of paper of the usual length, and is claimed as the final triumph in the line of inventors, which is thus stated in England: Nicholson, Koenig, Applegarth and Cowper, Hoe and Walter. We should be disposed to add a few names to the list, among which would be Bullock and Campbell. A is the roll of paper, containing a length of, say, two miles; B B the type and impression cylinders for printing the inner form; C C calendering rollers to remove the indentation of the inner form type; D D the outer form type and impression cylinders; E E cylinders with a saw-tooth knife and an indentation respectively to perforate the sheet between the papers; F F rollers to hold the sheet while the snatching-rollers G G, which run at an increased speed, break the paper off where it has been indented by E E. The folder is in duplicate to give time to work, as each only takes half the papers. The vibrating arm H delivers the sheets alternately to K and J, which are carrying-tapes leading to two folding-machines. If the sheets are not required to be folded, the arm H is moved to its highest position, and there fixed, without stopping the machine: it then delivers the sheets to the roller L, and by means of a blast of air and a flyer they are laid on a table provided for them.

The rise of British factory-life and great energy in manufacturing began with the invention of the spinning-frame by Arkwright, the power-loom by Cartwright, the spinning-jenny by Hargreaves, and the mule by Crompton--all within a space of twenty years ending 1785. To these must be added the steam-engine by Watt, which made it possible to drive the machinery, and the gin by Eli Whitney, which made it possible to get cotton to spin. Much as iron has loomed up lately, the working of the various fibres--cotton, wool, flax, hemp and jute--constitutes the pet industry of her people, and very elaborate and beautiful are the machines at the Exposition, especially attractive and less commonly known being those for working long or combing wool, flax, hemp and jute. The United States is not doing as much as it ought in the working of these fibres, and the money which is paid for the purchase of foreign linens and fabrics made of other materials than cotton and wool might, some economists think, be employed at home in making them. The day will come probably, but does not seem to be hastening very fast, when we shall conclude to make our own linens, as we have within a comparatively few years past determined in regard to all the staple varieties of carpets.

One of the most important machines in the Exposition, from the American point of view, is the "double Macarthy roller-gin," exhibited by Platt Brothers & Co. of Oldham, England. It is a curious instance of how machines sometimes revert to their original types. The oldest machine for ginning cotton is undoubtedly the roller-gin, and it was known in India, China and Malaysia long before Vasco da Gama turned the Cape of Good Hope and opened the trade of the East to the Portuguese and their successors. The common roller-gin of Southern Asia was shown at the Centennial from Hindostan, Java and China, and is exhibited here from Java. It has a pair of rollers about the size of broomsticks, close together and turning in different directions, which pinch and draw the fibre through, while the seeds are prevented from passing by the closeness of the rollers. Whitney's invention of the saw-gin in 1794 revolutionized the business and changed the whole domestic aspect of our Southern States. In it the fibre is picked from the seed by means of saw-teeth projecting through slits in the side of the chamber in which the seed-cotton is placed. But the roller-gin has again come upon the stage, and with the late improvements is likely to become the gin of the future. When the close of our civil war put an end to the "cotton famine," as it was called, in Europe, and American cotton resumed its place in the market, the export of the East Indian and Egyptian cottons would have been immediately suppressed if they had not possessed the roller-gin in those countries. Ten thousand of the double Macarthy gin are used in India, and five thousand of the single roller-gin in Egypt. It is understood that the saw-gin is used in but a single district in India. While the saw-gin injures any variety of cotton by cutting, tearing, napping and tangling the fibres, its action upon the long and fine staple called "sea island" is ruinous, and the roller-gin alone is suitable for working it. The slow action of the single roller-gin, cleaning about one hundred and fifty pounds of lint per day, made its cultivation too expensive, but the double roller-gin will clean nine hundred pounds in ten hours, or one hundred and twenty pounds an hour of the common upland short-staple cotton. It is thought by Southern members of the United States commission that the introduction of the double roller-gin into our country would greatly increase the profitableness of the culture of cotton, and especially of the "sea island," which is at present much neglected, and in the growth of which we need fear no rivalry. Each roller is made of walrus leather, and rotates in contact with a fixed knife, dragging by its rough surface the fibres of cotton between itself and the knife. A grating holds the seed-cotton. Besides these parts there are moving knives to which are attached a grid or series of fingers. At each elevation of the moving knives, the grids attached thereto lift the cotton to the elevation of the fixed knife-edge and of the exposed surface of the rollers: on the descent of each moving knife the seeds which have become separated from the fibre are disentangled by the prongs of the moving grid passing between those of the lower or fixed grid about seven hundred and fifty times per minute, and are by this rapidity of action flirted out.

It would be scarcely fair to neglect altogether the English annex in which all the agricultural implements are exhibited, nor that which contains its carriages. So much commercial intercourse, so many journals published in the respective countries, have made each pretty well acquainted with the agricultural machines and methods of the other. The principal difference is in the splendid plant for steam-ploughing exhibited by Fowler & Son and by Aveling & Porter, and in the great number and variety of the machines and apparatus for preparing food for animals--chaff-cutters, oat- and bean-bruisers and crushers, oilcake-grinders, boilers and steamers for feed and mills for rough grinding of grain.

A shed by the annex contains two curious machines for working stone--one a dresser, belonging to Brunton & Triers, which has a large wheel and a number of planetary cutters whose disk edges as they revolve cut the stone against which they impinge. The other machine, by Weston & Co., is for planing stone mouldings. The stone-drills are in the same annex; also the Smith and the Hardy brakes, the former of which is the European rival of the Westinghouse, acting upon the vacuum principle, and already in possession of so many of the lines in Europe that it proves a serious competitor.

Perhaps nothing in the French Exposition excites more surprise in the minds of those who are conversant with technical matters than the immense advance of the French since 1867 in the matter of machinery. The simple statement of the names of the exhibitors, their residences and the subject-matter occupies a large volume, and the quality and variety are equal to the quantity.

Reference has been made to the web perfecting printing-machine in the English section, but quite a number are shown in the French department, three of them by Marinoni of Paris, one of which prints the journal _La France_, eighteen thousand an hour. It prints, cuts, counts, folds and piles the papers. Another by the same maker prints twenty thousand an hour of the _Weekly Dispatch_ (English paper), and counts and piles them in heaps of one hundred each. A third works on the _Petit Journal_, printing forty thousand per hour with two forms. Alauzet & Co. have also a web perfecting press, _a double touche_, for illustrated papers and book-printing. This wets, prints, cuts, counts and folds in octavo four thousand per hour of super-royal size. They also show a double railway topographic press, printing in two colors. Vauthier's roller-press is arranged to work on an endless roll of paper or on sheets fed in as usual, and prints in six colors. Electro shells are secured in position on the respective rollers, which are in horizontal series, and the paper is conducted by tapes to the rollers in succession. The French section shows a great variety of polychrome, lithographic and zincographic printing-machines, and also a great number of ordinary job and card presses, the most interest, however, centring in the large number and variety of the web perfecting presses for newspapers and for bill-work where long numbers are required.

France has a right to exemplify the Jacquard in its fulness, for it is hers. The original machine of Vaucanson and that of Jacquard are in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, as well as a long series of exemplifications of successive improvements. The Grand Maison de Blanc of Paris has a large one, making an immense linen cloth of damask figures, all in white, and representing what I took at first to be an allegorical picture of all the nations bringing their gifts to the Exposition. I found afterward that it was called _Fees du Dessert_. It is about three metres wide, and just as long as you please to make it, but the pattern is repeated every five metres. The design, on paper, is hung against the wall, and is twelve by eight metres, all laid off in squares of twelve millimetres, and these again into smaller ones exactly a square millimetre in size. The number of small squares on the sheet of paper is ninety-six million, which represents the number of the intersections of the warp and woof in the pattern. There are nine thousand and sixty-six perforated cards in the Jacquard arrangement for floating the threads which form the damask pattern, and the whole machine stands on a space of about twenty by twelve feet and is eighteen feet high. It is worked by one man, without steam-power, the shifting of the harness being done by two foot-levers and the shuttle thrown by a pull-cord.

We may here observe the looms that weave the marvellously fine silk gauzes realizing such fanciful Indian names as "morning mist," which poetically express the lightness of a web that when spread upon the grass is not visible unless one stoops down and examines closely. To even name the various looms here would be to make a list of ribbons, velvets, cloths and other tissues. The subsidiary machines for dressing the fabrics are here also--for napping, teasling, shearing, stretching and brushing, for measuring, folding and packing.

The other modes of making fabrics shown are a machine for making fishing-nets of great width, and a number of knitting-machines, from the stocking-frame of eighty years ago to the small domestic machine, and the larger one with nine hundred needles in the circumference and making a circular seamless fabric eighteen inches in diameter. The march of improvement is eminently shown here, where an old man is patiently knitting a flat web of ten inches with a series of five motions between the rows of stitches, while just by are the circular machines, whose motions are so rapid that the clicks of the needles merge into a whir, and a man is able to attend to six machines, making one hundred and thirty pounds of knitted goods per day.

Passing the large exhibit of machines for the working of fibres preliminary to the loom--the carding, roving, spinning, reeling and warping--and the allied but different machines which make wire-cloths of different meshes and size, we come to the ropemaking-machines for hemp and wire, which are shown principally in their products, the manufacture taking an amount of room and material which could hardly be expected to be efficiently shown in a crowded building where space is valuable.

The French plant for boring small shafts to find water or obtain sections of the strata, and the larger ones for sinking large ones for mines, are shown by several exhibitors. The annular drills remove cylindrical sections of the strata from ten to sixty centimetres in diameter: the large chisels resemble those described in the Belgian exhibit, having a diameter of four metres and a weight of twenty-five thousand kilos.

The department of mining has some excellent large models of mining districts, in which the face of the country is represented with the natural undulations, the villages, roads, fields and streams, and made in removal-sections which expose the underlying strata, the galleries, drifts and shafts of the subterranean world.

An attempt to describe the steam-engines, of such various size, shape, position and capacity, would exhaust all the space permissible in a magazine article.

The wood-working tools of France are excellent, and our manufacturers must look well to their laurels. We have as yet the advantage in compactness and simplicity, with adjustability and adaptation to varying classes of work. The band-saw is claimed as a French invention, and the crowds around the workman who saws a roomful of dolls' furniture out of a single block as large as one's fist are as great here as they were at Philadelphia. The Blanchard lathe for turning irregular forms is here in a variety of forms. This is an interesting object of study, as illustrating the usual course of invention, in which a master-hand grasps a subject which has been suggested in an incomplete and comparatively ineffective manner from time to time by others. De la Hire and Condamine during the last century described lathes adapted to turn irregular shapes, and the scoring-machine for ships' blocks invented by Brunel and made by Maudslay for Chatham dockyard in England, 1802-8, was as perfect an exemplification of the idea as the nature of the work to be done required. Blanchard, however, in 1819 gave the finishing stroke, and the lathe will bear his name for long years. Inventors of three nations attacked the problem, and each aided the result.

Brickmaking, diamond-cutting; machines for making paper bags, envelopes, cuffs and collars; distilleries, sugar-mills, with the successive apparatus of vacuum-pans, pumps and centrifugal filters; soap, stearine, paraffine, wax, candle, candy and chocolate machines and apparatus,--succeed each other, and we next find ourselves in a busy factory of cheap jewelry, Exposition souvenirs and medals, chains and charms. The leather machinery is deserving of a careful description, but it would be too technical perhaps, and there is no romance in the handling of wet hides, the scraping, currying, stretching and pommelling which even the thickness, prepare the surface and develop the pliability of the leather. Near this is the boot- and shoe-making, sewing and cable-screw wire machines, but none for pegging. Sewing-machines, copies of the various American forms, occupy the end of the hall.

Separate buildings around the grounds and on both banks of the Seine contain groups of machinery at which we can but glance. Two long pavilions have agricultural machines, and one each is appropriated to materials for railways, to civil engineering, pumps, gas-works, the forges of Terre Noire, the iron-works of Creusot, the ministry of public works, stoves, the government manufacture of tobacco, navigation, life-saving apparatus of floats and boats, fire-engines and ceramics. Add to these two annexes, each one thousand feet long, containing locomotives, cars, street-cars, telegraph-apparatus and many acres of the surplus machinery of all classes excluded from the large building for want of room, and a person may form some adequate idea of the immense extent and variety of this wonderful collection.

EDWARD H. KNIGHT.

THE COLONEL'S SENTENCE: AN ALGERIAN STORY.

"I've known many clever fellows in my time," said Paul Dupont, French sous-lieutenant in the --th of the line, as he sat sipping his coffee in front of the Hotel de la Regence at Algiers, "but by far the cleverest man I ever met was our old colonel, Henri de Malet. People said he ought to have been an _avocat_, but that was giving him but half his due, for I'll be bound he could have outflanked any lawyer that ever wore a gown. In his latter days he always went by the name of 'Solomon the Second;' and if you care to hear how he came by it I'll tell you.

"Before he came to us De Malet was military commandant at Oran, and it was there that he did one of his best strokes--outgeneralling a camel-driver from Tangier, one of those thorough-paced Moorish rascals of whom the saying goes, 'Two Maltese to a Jew, and three Jews to a Moor,' Now this Tangerine, when pulled up for some offence or other, swore that he wasn't Muley the camel-driver at all, but quite another man; and as his friends all swore the same, and he had managed to alter his appearance a bit before he was arrested, he seemed safe to get off. But our colonel wasn't to be done in that way. He pretended to dismiss the case, and allowed the fellow to get right out into the street as if all was over; and then he suddenly shouted after him, 'Muley the camel-driver, I want to speak to you.' The old rogue, hearing his own name, turned and came back before he could recollect himself; and so he was caught in spite of all his cunning.

"The fame of this exploit went abroad like wildfire, and it got to be a saying among us, whenever we heard of any very clever trick, that it was 'one of Colonel de Malet's judgments;' and so, when he was transferred from Oran to Algiers, it was just as if we all knew him already, although none of us had ever seen him before. But it wasn't long before we got a much better story than that about him; for one night a man dined at our mess who had known the colonel out in India, and told us a grand tale of how he had astonished them all at Pondicherry. It seems that some things had been stolen from the officers' quarters, and nobody could tell who had done it. The first thing next morning the colonel went along the line at early parade, giving each of the native soldiers a small strip of bamboo; and then he said, very solemnly, 'My children, there is a guilty man among us, and it has been revealed to me by Brahma himself how his guilt is to be made clear. Let every man of you come forward in his turn and give me his piece of bamboo; and the thief, let him do what he may, will have the longest piece.'

"Now, you know what superstitious hounds those Asiatic fellows always are; and when they heard this announcement they all looked at each other like children going to be whipped. The colonel took the bamboos one after another, as solemnly as if he were on a court-martial, but when about a dozen men had gone past he suddenly sprang forward and seized one of them by the throat, shouting at the full pitch of his voice, 'You are the man!'

"Down went the fellow on his knees and yelled for mercy, confessing that he _was_ the man, sure enough. As for the rest, they looked as frightened as if all the gods in the caverns of Elephanta had come flying down among them at once; and from that day forth they salaamed to the very ground at the mere sight of the colonel half a mile off.

"'How on earth did you manage that, colonel?' asked the senior major, a great fat fellow, as stupid as a carp.[7]

"'Nothing simpler, my dear fellow,' answered De Malet, laughing. 'The strips were all exactly the same length, and the thief, fearing to get the longest piece, betrayed himself by _biting off the end_.'

"This, as you may think, added a good deal to the colonel's reputation; and when we had that affair with the Bedouins at Laghouat we soon saw that he could fight as well as manoeuvre. In the thick of the skirmish one of the rogues, seeing De Malet left alone, flew at him with drawn yataghan, but the colonel just dropped on his horse's neck and let the blow pass over him, and then gave point and ran the fellow right through the body, as neatly as any fencing-master could have done it. You may be sure we thought none the less of him after that; but all this was nothing to what was coming.

"Well, De Malet had been with us about a year when the railway was begun from Algiers to Blidah, and the directing engineer happened to be one of my greatest friends, Eugene Latour, as good a fellow as I ever met. It was quite a fete with us whenever he dined at mess, for his jokes and good stories kept every one brisk; and then to hear him sing! _ma foi_, it was wonderful! One minute some rattling refrain that seemed to set the very chairs dancing, and then suddenly a low, sad air that fairly brought the tears into your eyes. They were in mine, I know, every time I heard him sing those last two verses of 'The Conscript's Farewell:'

I thought to gain rich spoils--I've gained Of bullets half a score: I thought to come back corporal-- I shall come back no more.

Feed my poor dog, I pray thee, Rose, And with him gentle be: He'll miss his master for a while-- Adieu! remember me![8]

"Well, as I was saying, Eugene had been put over the work, and I don't know where they could have found a better man for it. Whether it poured with rain or came on hot enough to cook a cutlet without fire, it was all one to him: there he was at his post, looking after everything, with his eyes in ten places at once. You may think that under such a chief the laborers had no chance of idling; and everything was getting on splendidly when one morning, as he was standing on the parapet of a bridge, his foot slipped and down he went, I don't know how far. The fall would have killed him outright if by good luck there hadn't happened to be an Arab underneath (the only time that an Arab ever _was_ of any use, I should say), and Eugene, alighting upon _him_, broke his own fall and the Bedouin's neck to boot.

"Now, if there had been nobody there to tell tales, this wouldn't have mattered a pin, for an Arab more or less is no such great matter; but, as ill-luck would have it, there were three or four more of the rascals near enough to see what had happened, and of course they raised a hue-and-cry directly. And when it was noised abroad that a Christian dog (as they politely call us) had killed a Mussulman, you should have seen what an uproar there was! The people came running together like vultures when a camel drops down in the desert, and there was a yelling and dancing and shaking of fists that made one's very head turn round. Poor Eugene would have been torn to pieces on the spot if the guard hadn't formed round him and defended him; and the only way we could pacify the mob was to promise them justice from the district magistrate; so away to the magistrate we all went.

"Now, I dare say Mr. Magistrate was a very good fellow in his way, and I don't want to say a word against him, but still, it must be owned that he wasn't exactly the kind of man to stand firm in the midst of a rabble of wild Mohammedans, all howling and flourishing their knives at once under his very nose. To tell the plain truth, he was frightened out of his wits; and the only thing _he_ thought of was how to shift the responsibility on to somebody else's shoulders as fast as possible. So he said (and it was very lucky he did, as it turned out) that Latour, being in government employ, must be tried by military law; and he packed them all off to the commandant, who, as I've told you, was no other than Colonel de Malet.

"It was no easy matter for the colonel to get at the facts of the case, for all the rascals kept shrieking at once, one louder than another; but at last, bit by bit, he managed to get a pretty clear idea of what had happened; and then he said, very solemnly, 'A French officer does his duty, let it be what it will. You have come here for justice, and justice you shall have.'

"There was a great roar of triumph from the crowd, and poor Eugene looked as blank as a thief in the Salle de la Police.

"'Before I pass sentence, however,' pursued De Malet, 'I wish to ask this young man' (pointing to the son of the dead Arab, who was the ringleader of all the mischief) 'whether he will accept of any compromise.'

"'No, no!' yelled the young brigand--'life for life!'

"'So be it,' said the colonel gravely, 'and you, by Mussulman law, are your father's destined avenger. Therefore, let the engineer be taken back to the very spot where his victim was standing, and do you go up to the top of the parapet and _jump down upon him_!'

"_Tonnerre de ciel!_ what a roar of laughter there was! The very Arabs couldn't help joining in. As to the young villain himself, he stood stock-still for a moment, and then flew out of the court like a madman; and that was the last of him. We gave Eugene a famous supper that night at the Cafe Militaire in honor of his escape; and the story was in all the papers next morning, headed 'A Judgment of Solomon.' And from that day to the end of his life Colonel de Malet never went by any other name among us but 'Solomon the Second.'"

DAVID KER.

STARLIGHT

How dark against the sky Loom the great hills! Over the cradled stream They lean their dusky shadows lovingly, Watching its happy dream.

The oil-well's little blaze Gleams red and grand against the mountain's dark: Yon star, seen through illimitable haze, Is dwindled to a spark.

Far greater to my eye The swimming lights of yonder fishing-boat Than worlds that burn in night's immensity-- So huge, but so remote.

Ah, I have loved a star That beckoned sweetly from its distant throne, Forgetting nearer orbs that fairer are, And shine for me alone.

Better the small and near Than the grand distant with its mocking beams-- Better the lovelight in thine eyes, my dear, Than all ambition's dreams.

CHARLES QUIET.

THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE OF 1878 IN VENEZUELA.

On Friday evening, the 12th of April, 1878, we were collected, as usual, in our drawing-room in Caracas, and were in the act of welcoming an old friend who had just returned from Europe, when there came suddenly a crash, a reverberation--a something as utterly impossible to convey the impression of as to describe the movement which followed, or rather accompanied, it, so confused, strange and unnatural was the entire sensation. It was like the rush of many waters, the explosion of cannon--like anything the imagination can conceive; and at the same time the earth appeared to leap beneath our feet, then swayed to and fro with an oscillating motion: the panes of glass rattled in the windows, the beams of the flooring above creaked ominously; lamps, chandeliers and girandoles vibrated and trembled like animated creatures. The great bells of the cathedral suddenly rang out a spontaneous peal of alarm with a sonorous, awe-inspiring clang, while the clock in the tower struck the ill-timed hour with a solemn, unearthly reverberation.

This was but the work of a few seconds: a few more and Caracas would have been a heap of ruins, as in the earthquake of 1812. But even in these short moments we had time, horror-stricken and pallid with terror as we were, to cry out, "An earthquake! an earthquake!"--to seize upon our European friend, who did not seem to realize the danger, to drag him from the chair which he was just about to take, I pushing him before me, while my sister pulled him by the arm down the long drawing-room into the corridor which surrounds the central court, while still the earth rocked beneath our feet and everything around us trembled with the vibration.

By this time the city was thoroughly alarmed. Cries of "Misericordia! misericordia!" resounded on every side, and every one prophesied another and a greater shock. These fears were not entirely uncalled for, for at twenty minutes past nine there was a second, and several more before daybreak, although none proved to be as severe as the first.

In a short time carriages began to roll by in all directions, bearing the more timorous to the villages and plantations outside of the city: the open public squares or _plazas_ filled rapidly with the excited population, especially when telegram after telegram began to arrive from La Guayra, Puerto Cabello, Valencia, La Vittoria and the intervening towns--all having felt the violence of the shock, and anxious lest the capital might have been destroyed. This proof of the extent of the _onda seismica_, as the scientists termed it, served to increase the general alarm. Tents were improvised in the plazas, composed of blankets, counterpanes, etc., stretched across ropes attached to the trees in the square, those who had no such appliances at hand remaining all night upon the public benches or upon more comfortable seats which they caused to be transported for their accommodation.

The scene in the principal square of Caracas, the Plaza Bolivar--upon which front the cathedral on the eastern side, the palace of the archbishop on the southern, the presidential residence (called the _Casa Amarilla_, or "Yellow House") on the western, and a number of other public buildings on the northern--was one which under less terrifying circumstances would have been most imposing, for the archbishop left his palace and descended by the great stairway into the plaza, accompanied by a train of his attending priests, to raise the fainting spirits of the terrified multitude, who, with pallid faces upraised to Heaven or crouched upon the bare ground in attitudes of supplication, implored mercy from on high. And inasmuch as calamitous events, such as the appearance of comets, earthquakes or pestilences, are usually the signal for great moral reforms, doubtless many a promise of a purer life was registered in that hour of terror by those self-accused by their quickened consciences.

The archbishop--who is a young man, devout, fervent and sincere, a very anchorite in his habits and mode of life, thin, spare of frame, and with features eloquent with the fire of intellect, morally and physically the splendid ideal of what a true priest ought to be--wandered among his flock, exhorting, comforting, admonishing and cheering them; while the _Hermandades_, a religious brotherhood, headed by their color-bearer, upon whose banner the effigy of the Virgin, their patron saint, was emblazoned, walking two by two in procession in the long gowns of their order--some red, some black, some white--and each carrying a lighted taper, traversed the plazas and paraded the streets the whole night. The glimmering light of the tapers falling upon these dusky shrouded forms in the gloom of this awful night, the melancholy refrain of the prayers which they chanted as they passed through the awestruck city, the lessening glimpses of the flickering tapers as the train passed solemnly by into some distant street,--all served rather to intensify than to tranquillize the alarm.

The excitement and agitation of the people were so great that no one thought of going to bed: those who, like ourselves, went neither to the country nor to the open squares, sat in their windows and compared their experiences or gathered news from every passer-by; for they feared to separate from their families, lest a worse shock might overtake some one of them apart from the rest. Besides this, the danger in the streets was greater than at home, because of their narrowness and the likelihood of the walls on either side toppling over upon pedestrians.

The night had been beautifully clear, and the moon brilliant as it is only in the tropics, but toward midnight the weather became cloudy and a drizzling rain fell at intervals, driving us within doors between one and two o'clock, but only to lie down fully dressed upon our beds, with lights burning and doors left open, so as the more readily to facilitate our escape if necessary. One or two slight shocks recurred during the night, but morning dawned at last, finding us unhurt; and with returning day our courage too returned, so _darkness_ "doth make cowards of us all." It was then ascertained that the cathedral had sustained some slight damage; the image of the Virgin in the church of the Candelaria had been thrown to the ground and broken to pieces; and the National Pantheon, the observatory of the new university and other public buildings, with many houses, had been injured, but none thrown down and no lives lost.

No one, however, could dwell long in lamentation over these accidents when the news reached us the next morning of the terrible calamity which had overtaken the beautiful valley of the Tuy. This valley lies to the south of the city of Caracas, at an elevation of twelve or fifteen hundred feet above the sea, and is noted for being one of the most fertile of the many rich agricultural districts in which Venezuela abounds. The river Tuy, two hundred miles in length and navigable for about forty miles, flows through the centre, fertilizing the soil and causing it to become the granary of the capital, its abundant crops usually sufficing, in fact, for the consumption of the whole province. Indeed, were there more public highways its surplus products might find their way to still more distant portions of the republic. The whole valley is studded with towns, villages and plantations: of the former, the principal are Ocumare, Charallave, Santa Teresa, Santa Lucia and Cua.

The city of Cua was beyond comparison the richest and most flourishing of all, being situated at the head of the valley, where it opens toward the vast _Llanos_ or plains, and being also the emporium of many extensive districts producing the staples of the country, such as coffee, cocoa, sugar and indigo. There too had been transported enormous timber from the still virgin forests--timber of the most valuable kind, whether for ornament, for building or for dyeing purposes. Nor was the city more remarkable for its advantageous situation and the importance of its commerce than for the refinement of its society. Unlike the generality of inland towns in South America, where the constitution of society is apt to be rather heterogeneous, Cua was the residence of many of the principal families of the country--gentlemen at the head of wealthy commercial establishments, or opulent planters owning large estates in the neighborhood, but making the city their permanent abode. Hence the society was far beyond what might have been imagined as regards position and general cultivation. Cua, like all Spanish American towns, was laid out at right angles, while many of the houses rivalled the handsomest in Caracas, and were furnished with equal splendor.

Such was the state of things in this smiling valley when, at the same moment precisely at which we in Caracas felt the shock of the earthquake, all the above-mentioned towns--Ocumare, Santa Lucia, Charallave, etc.--were shaken to their foundations. The latter especially suffered greatly, for not a house was left uninjured or safe to inhabit, although the occupants had time to escape. But Cua--unhappy Cua!--was utterly destroyed. Without a moment's warning, without a single indication of their impending fate, all the inhabitants were buried beneath the mass of ruins to which in a few seconds it was reduced. Perhaps it is not strictly correct to say there had been no sign. The heat had become so intense between seven and eight o'clock that numbers of persons were seated outside of the houses or had betaken themselves to the open squares to endeavor to seize a breath of fresh air, while many of the lower classes were sleeping under the open sky; to which fact, indeed, they owed their lives. The only habitations which survived the violence of the shock were the huts of the poor, being what is called _bajareque_, made of posts driven into the earth and otherwise formed of a species of wild cane tied together and cemented with mud and straw, these primitive dwellings being usually considered earthquake-proof.

Besides the extraordinary heat, a friend of ours, who was riding from his plantation into the town, observed another indication of some disturbance in the usual processes of Nature. While crossing the river he noticed that the fishes were leaping in great numbers out of the water, and called the attention of several persons to the fact. They attributed this, however, to the discomfort occasioned by the intense heat, for the temperature of the water had increased so much that it had become disagreeable to drink.

The gentleman to whom I have alluded, Don Tomas de la G----, describes the subterranean noise at Cua during the earthquake as something terrific, like the discharge of hundreds of cannon, while the earth rose simultaneously under his feet. There are two kinds of earthquakes--that of _trepidacion_, which comes directly from below, with an upward motion; the other, _de oscilacion_, where the earth sways to and fro like a pendulum, and which is generally less dangerous. Unfortunate Cua experienced both: the first shock was one vast upheaval, the whole town being uprooted from its foundations and every house uplifted and overturned, and before the bewildered population could realize what was happening they were buried beneath the ruins. The shock then changed into the oscillatory movement, and set all this mass of destruction to quivering as if it were the dire agony of some living creature. All was so sudden that few were saved by their own exertions, those who survived having either been dug out of the ruins afterward or cast forth by the counter-motion as the earth rocked to and fro in the second shock. It was as if the city had been lifted up _en masse_, and then thrown back with the foundations uppermost--upside down, in fact. Don Tomas de la G---- happened to be in the plaza in front of the church when the shock came: in the endeavor to steady himself he grasped a tree close by; the tree was uprooted, throwing him violently forward; then suddenly reversing its course in an exactly opposite direction, it flung him off to a great distance, bruising him severely. While clinging to the tree he beheld the church in front of him, a new and handsome edifice, literally lifted up bodily into the air and then overturned with an appalling crash, "not one stone left upon another." If this had occurred an hour or two previously, hundreds would have perished within the walls, for there had been religious services in the church until a late hour, it being the Friday before Holy Week, termed by Spanish Catholics _Viernes del Concilio_.

Don Tomas de la G---- described the whole scene as something too terrible for the imagination to conceive. After the stupendous crash caused by the falling of the houses, for a few moments there ensued an awful silence: then, amid the impenetrable darkness caused by the cloud of dust from the fallen walls, which totally obscured the murky light of a clouded moon, there arose a cry of anguish from those without--a wail as of one great voice of stricken humanity; then the answering smothered groan of those buried beneath the ruins--a cry like nothing human, rising as it did from the very bowels of the earth.

There ensued a scene the harrowing details of which can never be fully given--the search of the living and uninjured for those dead, dying or imprisoned ones who lay beneath the great masses of stone and mortar. Sometimes, in answer to the desperate cries of those outside or already rescued, smothered, almost inaudible cries for help might be heard, so faint as to seem scarcely human, and yet growing fainter and fainter still, until those who were working for the release of the captive became aware that their labor was in vain, and that only a corpse lay beneath their feet. No light could be obtained in this stifling Erebus of dust and darkness: all means of obtaining light had been buried in the undistinguishable mass, and where lighted lamps were overturned in the crash they had set fire to beams and rafters in the houses, and many who escaped being crushed were burned to death. Even proper instruments were wanting, and the number of persons who had collected to assist in the work of searching the debris was totally inadequate to the occasion. Many instances of distress I can vouch for as authentic, as the victims were intimate friends of my own, and all the individuals I am about to mention were persons of the highest respectability, the upper classes having suffered more than the lower, who, living in huts such as I have described, were generally uninjured.

One of the richest commercial houses in Cua was owned by three German gentlemen, brothers. The eldest, having married a Spanish American lady of the place, had lately built himself a magnificent mansion, and one of his brothers resided with him. The lady was seated between her brother-in-law and husband when the shock came: a huge beam from the ceiling fell across her brother-in-law and literally divided him in two, while the side wall, falling at the same time, buried her husband from her sight. She herself was saved by the great packages of hemp and tobacco which fell around her and prevented the wall from crushing her. Blinded by the darkness and choked by the dust, she yet managed with the only hand at liberty to tear an opening which allowed her to breathe, and through which she called for help. Faint accents answered her: they were the tones of her husband's failing voice. She called to him to have courage--that she had hopes of release. "No," he replied, "I am dying, but do not give way. Live for our child's sake." As well as her agitation and distress would permit she endeavored to sustain him with words of encouragement, but in vain. About fifteen minutes passed in this sad colloquy: the replies came more and more slowly, more and more painfully, and then they ceased: the imprisoned lady comprehended in her lonely agony that she was a widow. She, a living, breathing woman, fully conscious of her awful anguish, lay helpless between the stiff and stark corpses of her husband and brother-in-law, and quite ignorant of the fate of her infant child, which had been left in another part of the house. Her cries were heard at last by a muleteer, who made some efforts to release her, but alone and in the darkness he could accomplish little. He went in search of aid, but his companions, after he had returned to the house, refused to endanger their lives, as the shocks were incessant and a high wall still standing threatened to topple over upon them at any moment. They even endeavored to dissuade the muleteer from any further effort, but the good creature replied that he was indebted to the imprisoned lady for many kindnesses, and that he was willing to risk his life in her behalf. One or two remained with him, and they succeeded at last in releasing her, but were obliged to cut her clothes from her body, as they seemed immovably nailed to the floor, the Good Samaritan of a muleteer covering her with his own cloak. The bodies of her husband, brother-in-law, two clerks and several servants were recovered the next day and buried.

Another lady was found, when the ruins of her house were cleared away, upon her knees, with her children surrounding her in the same attitude--all dead! Their bodies were uninjured, so that it is probable that they were suffocated by the dust of the falling walls. A gentleman named Benitez, who had been standing at the door of his house, ran into the centre of the street and fell upon his knees: a little boy from the opposite doorway rushed in his terror into Benitez's arms. At that moment the two houses fell, and in this attitude the bodies of the man and the child were found the following day. A bride of twenty-four hours was killed with three of her children by a previous marriage. A fourth child was supposed also to have been killed, but on the third day a soldier who was passing the house pierced a basket which was among the ruins with his bayonet out of curiosity, when to his amazement a childish voice cried out, "_Tengo hambre_" ("I am hungry"), and the basket being lifted a living child was discovered, thus almost miraculously saved.

One lady was crushed to death under the weight of the body of her daughter, who could not move a limb, although she knew her mother was dying beneath her. A beam had fallen transversely across the daughter, and in this position she crouched, listening in agony to the death-struggles of her parent. More, almost, than the bitterness of death itself must have been the horror of such a situation and the terrible contact during long hours of silent darkness with a cold, rigid corpse. This lady belonged to the family of Fonseca-Acosta, one of the most distinguished in Cua, its head being the eminent physician Dr. Acosta, now of Paris, one of the favored circle of the ex-queen Isabella of Spain, with his wife, who was Miss Carroll, a sister of the present governor of Maryland.

The Acosta family suffered perhaps more than any other, no less than fourteen of its members having perished, among them Dona Rosa, a still young and remarkably handsome woman, with her son, a lad of fifteen, and her baby grandchild. It was to save the life of this grandchild that Dona Rosa forfeited her own, as she ran into the house to snatch it from its cradle. Of the same family two little boys had fallen asleep at their play: one lay upon a sofa, and the other had crept beneath it. The earthquake literally turned the room upside down, the sofa being overturned by the falling wall, the child beneath thrown out and killed by the descending rafters, while the boy who had been sleeping upon it fell beneath the lounge, and, being thus protected, actually remained in this position uninjured for the greater part of two days. He had been numbered with the many dead in that house of sorrow, and was only found when the mourning survivors were searching for his remains to inter them--alive, but insensible, and entirely unable to give any account of what had befallen him.

Every member of the police force, twenty-five in number, was killed, together with nine prisoners under guard.

But it is impossible to give an adequate description of that night of horror in Cua by enumerating individual instances of suffering. Those that I have given are merely a few out of hundreds of others equally distressing.

The survivors encamped upon the banks of the river Tuy, where they might well repeat those tender lines of the Psalmist: "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept." Even the discomfort of the heavy rains which set in could make no impression upon hearts bowed down and crushed by the terrible calamity which had swept away their all--home, friends, everything that makes life worth having--at one quick blow. Not a house was left standing in their beautiful city: even the outlines of the streets were no longer visible: it was with the greatest difficulty that any particular building or locality could be recognized.

Tents of various materials were improvised upon the river-side, sheltering without regard to age, sex or social condition the wounded, and even the dead. Many were in a state of delirium, some in the agonies of death, hundreds weeping for their lost friends and relatives, and many unable to recognize the recovered bodies on account of their having been burned beyond recognition by the fire caused by the upsetting of petroleum lamps. For the first two days the bodies were buried in the usual manner, but on the third decomposition had set in to such an extent that it was found necessary to burn them. An eye-witness exclaims: "Of all that I have seen in what was the rich, the beautiful, the flourishing city of Cua, now a cemetery, nothing has made so profoundly melancholy an impression upon me as the cremation of the bodies of the unfortunate victims of the late disaster, tied together with ropes and dragged forth from the ruins, one over another, the stiffened limbs taking strange, unnatural attitudes, and upon being touched by the flames consuming instantly, on account of their advanced decomposition." The body of a little child was thrown upon this funeral pile, when suddenly the eyes opened, and the voice cried out, "_Pan! pan!_" ("Bread! bread!") Imagine the feelings of the spectators at beholding how nearly the little creature had been immolated!

The explosion and principal strength of the subterranean forces were concentrated in the town of Cua and within a radius of four or five leagues (twelve or fifteen miles) around it. Within this distance great chasms of various widths had opened, all running from east to west. From some of these streams of a fetid liquid issued, intermingled with a grayish-tinted earth, which caused many persons to surmise that a volcano was about to burst forth, especially as the earthquake-shocks still continued for many days, accompanied by loud subterranean reports. Although the catastrophe was confined to the valley of the Tuy, the shocks were felt for many hundred miles in every direction, even as far as Barquesimeto and other places toward the Cordilleras.

As the population of Cua had entirely deserted the city and encamped upon the river-side, and as large sums of money and other valuables were known to be buried beneath the ruins, some heartless, lawless wretches took advantage of the unprotected state of things, under pretence of assisting in the work of extricating the victims, to appropriate everything that they could secrete without being discovered. Only one of the public officials, General E----, had escaped: the police had perished. It was a situation where only prompt and stringent measures could avail. General E----, therefore, with Don Tomas de la G----, whom I have before mentioned, assumed the responsibility of issuing a most energetic order of the day, and Don Tomas was commissioned by the general to draw up the document. In relating the anecdote to me, Don Tomas avers that the order had to be drawn upon the back of a letter which he discovered in his pocket, and that great delay was caused by its being an impossibility to procure ink. A poor black woman, however, hearing of his perplexity, announced that her son had been learning to write, and that as her _rancho_ or hut was still standing, the bottle of ink would probably be found tied to a nail in the wall, as well as the pen; that is, provided the thieves had not made away with it, of which she appeared to be somewhat suspicious. She consented to go for the articles herself, stipulating, however, that Don Tomas and one or two others should accompany her, believing, apparently, that numbers would guarantee her against injury from the earthquake. The ink was found where she had described it, but, unfortunately, no pen. Here was another dilemma! She bethought herself at last that a neighbor of hers possessed a pen; so the party was obliged to retrace its steps to the encampment for further information. The neighbor was sufficiently generous to lend the pen, but stoutly refused to re-enter the stricken city. She described its _locale_, however, as being between a rafter and a _cana_ in the roof at the entrance of her hut. The thieves, it proved upon investigation, had spared the precious implement, although, probably, if they had surmised the use to which it was to be put, that of fulminating destruction to their machinations, they might not have been so honest. All difficulties having been at length overcome, the important document was drawn up, and duly published the following morning by _bando_--that is, by sound of the trumpet, drum and fife--a body of citizens doing duty in lieu of troops, and the individual with the most stentorian lungs thundering forth the edict from where the corner of the streets might have been supposed to be. The proclamation was to the effect that any person or persons discovered robbing houses or insulting females should be shot on the spot, without trial or benefit of clergy. This measure of lynch law had the desired effect, and proved sufficient to maintain order until the arrival of a corps of three hundred soldiers sent by the government for that purpose.

As soon as the disaster was made known, General Alcantara, the president of the republic, sent carts laden with provisions, blankets, shoes, hats, etc., besides money, and coaches to convey the unfortunate Cuans to their friends in the adjacent towns. The president also recommended the unfortunate people of Cua to the generosity of Congress, which was then in session. A sum of one hundred thousand dollars for rebuilding the city was immediately voted--a large sum for so impoverished a nation--and subscriptions from neighboring states, as well as private ones, have been most liberal. But these are but a drop in the bucket. Some of the finest plantations in the country surrounded Cua--coffee, sugar, cocoa, indigo, etc.--all with handsome mansions and expensive offices, with stores, sugar-mills and steam-engines, many of them worth from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars. After the disastrous 12th no one for many miles in the vicinity slept under roof, but all encamped on the adjacent plains: not even the rainy season, which soon set in with great violence, sufficed to drive them from their hastily-contrived shelter. From the 12th of April to the 30th there were ninety-eight or ninety-nine shocks of earthquake.

In Caracas too the people still continued to sleep in the public squares, although the capital had hitherto escaped the greatest violence of the shocks. Various rumors among the most ignorant part of the population, however, still kept up the general excitement. A certain astronomer or professor of the occult sciences, a Dr. Briceno by name, had even the audacity to circulate a paper throughout the city, headed by the ominous title, "_Vigilemos!_" (_Let us watch!_). He prophesied that on the 17th of April, at twenty-nine minutes past one, there would certainly occur a great _cataclismo_, connecting the movements of the moon with the occurrence of earthquakes, and assuring the populace that at that hour this heavenly body would be in the precise position to produce this extraordinary _cataclismo_, whatever that might prove to be. The public excitement was intense, but the fatal day and hour arrived, passed, and found the city still safe and unharmed.

ISABELLA ANDERSON.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE HISS AND ITS HISTORY.

"I warrant thee, if I do not act it, they will hiss me."--_Merry Wives of Windsor._

Hissing is a custom of great antiquity. Cicero, in his _Paradoxes_, says that "if an actor lose the measure of a passage in the slightest degree, or make the line he utters a syllable too short or too long by his declamation, he is instantly hissed off the stage." Nor was hissing confined to the theatre, for in one of his letters Cicero refers to Hortensius as an orator who attained old age without once incurring the disgrace of being hissed. Pliny notes that some of the lawyers of his day had paid applauders in court, who greeted the points of their patron's speech with an _ululatus_, or shrill yell. This Roman manner of denoting approval seems akin to the practice of the Japanese, who give a wild shriek as a sign of approbation, and hoot and howl to show their displeasure. But the sound of the goose--the simple hiss--is the most frequently-employed symbol of dissent. "Goose" is, in theatrical parlance, to hiss; and Dutton Cook, in his entertaining _Book of the Play_, remarks that the bird which saved the Capitol has ruined many a drama.

The dramatist is of all creative artists the most unfortunate. He can never present himself directly to his critics; he must be seen through a medium over which he has but slight control; he must depend wholly on the actors of his play, and too often he is leaning on a reed. Colman accused John Kemble of having been the cause of the original failure of _The Iron Chest_, and Ben Jonson published his _New Inn_ as a comedy "never acted, but most negligently played by some of the king's servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the king's subjects, 1629; and now, at last, set at liberty to the readers, His Majesty's servants and subjects, to be judged of, 1631."

Nor are Colman and Jonson alone in their tribulations. Sheridan was hissed, and so were Goldsmith and Fielding and Coleridge and Godwin and Beaumarchais and About and Victor Hugo and Scribe and Sardou, and many another, including Charles Lamb, who cheerfully hissed his own _Mr. H_.

The operatic composer is even more unfortunate than the dramatist, for he is dependent not only on the acting but on the singing of his characters; and he is also at the mercy of the orchestra. Wagner's _Tannhaeuser_ led a stormy life at the Paris opera for a very few evenings, and its failure the composer has never been willing to let the world forget. Rossini was more philosophical. On its first performance the _Barber of Seville_, like the comedy of Beaumarchais, whence its libretto is taken, was a failure; and when the curtain fell, Rossini, who had led the orchestra, turned to the audience and calmly clapped his hands. The anger at this openly-expressed contempt for public opinion did not prevent the opera from gradually gaining ground, until by the end of the week it was a marked success. Had it been a failure, the composer would have borne it easily: Mr. Edwards informs us that when Rossini's _Sigismondo_ was violently hissed at Venice he sent a letter to his mother with a picture of a large _fiasco_ (bottle). His _Torvaldo e Dorliska_, which was brought out soon afterward, was also hissed, but not so much. This time Rossini sent his mother a picture of a _fiaschetto_ (little bottle).

Nor is it, in modern times, authors or actors alone who are subject to the hiss. The orator may provoke it by a bold speech in support of an unpopular measure or an unpopular man. But here the hisser is not so safe, nor the hissee--to coin a convenient word--so defenceless. The orator is not hampered by the studied words of a written part: he has the right of free speech, and he may retort upon his sibilant surrounders. Macready records that on one occasion, when Sheil was hissed, he "extorted the applause of his assailants by observing to them, 'You may hiss, but you cannot sting.'" Even finer was the retort of Coleridge under similar circumstances: "When a cold stream of truth is poured on red-hot prejudices, no wonder they hiss."

Sir William Knighton declares that George II. never entered a theatre save in fear and trembling from dread of hearing a single hiss, which, though it were at once drowned in tumultuous applause, he would lie awake all night thinking about, entirely forgetful of the enthusiasm it had evoked. He must have felt as Charles Lamb did, who wrote: "A hundred hisses (hang the word! I write it like kisses--how different!)--a hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. The former come more directly from the heart." It is hard to entirely agree with Lamb here. Hissing seems to me to proceed for the most part from ill-temper, or at least from the dissatisfaction of the head. Applause is often the outburst of the heart, the gush of a feeling, an enthusiasm incapable of restraint. No wonder that the retired actor longs for a sniff of the footlights and for the echo of the reverberating plaudits to the accompaniment of which he formerly bowed himself off.

Indeed, applause is the breath of an actor's nostrils. Without it good acting is almost impossible. Actors, like other artists, need encouragement. Applause gives heart, and, as Mrs. Siddons said, "better still--breath." Mrs. Siddons's niece has put on record her views, as valuable as her famous relative's: "'Tis amazing how much an audience loses by this species of hanging back, even when the silence proceeds from unwillingness to interrupt a good performance: though in reality it is the greatest compliment an actor can receive, yet he is deprived by that very stillness of half his power. Excitement is reciprocal between the performer and the audience: he creates it in them, and receives it back again from them."

To one set of actors a hiss takes the place of applause. It is the highest compliment which can be paid to a "heavy villain," for it bears witness to the truth with which he has sustained his character.

Sometimes the performer mistakes reproof for approval. An amateur singer, describing to her father the great success she had achieved at her first concert, concluded by saying, "Some Italians even took me for Pasta."--"Yes," corroborated her mother: "before she had sung her second song they all cried, 'Basta! basta!'" ("Enough! enough!")

Pasta herself is the heroine of an amusing anecdote. She gave her servant, a simple _contadina_, an order for the opera on a night when she appeared in one of her greatest parts. That evening the great prima donna surpassed herself; she was recalled time and again; the audience were wildly enthusiastic; almost every number was encored. Returning home, she wearily asked her maid how she had enjoyed the play. "Well, the play, ma'am, was fine, but I felt sorry for _you_," was the reply.--"For me, child! And why?"--"Well, ma'am," said the waiting-maid, "you did everything so badly that the people were always shouting and storming at you, and making you do it all over again."

There are situations even worse than Pasta's, as Pauline Lucca has recently discovered in Vienna, where she was fined fifty florins for violating the law which forbids the recognition of applause. It seems cruel to mulct a pretty prima donna for condescending to acknowledge an encore.

Whether or not it be law in Austria to prevent a courtesy and a smile, rewarding the enthusiasm of an audience, it is certainly law in England and France that a dissatisfied spectator shall be at liberty to express his dissatisfaction. It has been held by the Court of Queen's Bench that, while any conspiracy against an actor or author is of course illegal, yet the audience have a lawful right to express their feelings at the performance either by applause or by hisses. The Cour de Cassation of France has decided in the same way. When Forrest, therefore, hissed Macready for introducing a fancy dance in _Hamlet_, he was doing what he had a legal right to do, though the ultimate result of it was the Astor Place riot and the death of many. In ancient Rome the right to hiss seems also to have existed in its fulness. Suetonius in his life of Augustus informs us that Pylades was banished not only from Rome, but from Italy, for having pointed with his finger at a spectator by whom he was hissed, and turning the eyes of the whole audience upon him. But as time passed on, and Nero took the imperial crown and chose to exhibit it himself to the public on the stage, all the spectators were bound to applaud under penalty of death.

The French law forbids disturbance of any kind except when the curtain is up. In France the boisterousness of the Dublin gallery-boy would hardly be tolerated. The Parisians would have been amazed at a recent incident of the Irish stage. When Sophocles' tragedy of _Antigone_ was produced at the Theatre Royal with Mendelssohn's music, the gallery "gods" were greatly pleased, and, according to their custom, demanded a sight of the author. "Bring out Sapherclaze," they yelled. The manager explained that Sophocles had been dead two thousand years and more, and could not well come. Thereat a small voice shouted from the gallery, "Then chuck us out his mummy."

There is a delicious tradition that Mrs. Siddons, when playing in Dublin, was once interrupted with cries for "Garry Owen! Garry Owen!" She did not heed for some time, but, bewildered at last and anxious to conciliate, she advanced to the footlights and with tragic solemnity asked, "What is Garry Owen? Is it anything I can do for you?"

Actors are not always willing to stand baiting quietly: they turn and rend their tormentors. Mrs. Siddons herself took leave of a barbarian audience with the words, "Farewell, ye brutes!" George Frederick Cooke, describing his own failings, said: "On Monday I was drunk, and appeared, but they didn't like that and hissed me. On Wednesday I was drunk, so I didn't appear; and they didn't like that. What the devil would they have?" Once at Liverpool, when he was drunk and did appear, they didn't like it. He reeled across the stage and was greeted by a storm of hisses. With savage grandeur he turned on them: "What! do you hiss me--me, George Frederick Cooke? You contemptible money-getters, you shall never again have the honor of hissing me. Farewell! I banish you!" He paused, and then added, with contemptuous emphasis, "There is not a brick in your dirty town but is cemented by the blood of a negro." Edmund Kean treated one of his audiences with less vigor, but with equal contempt. The spectators were noisy and insulting, but they called him out at the end of the piece. "What do you want?" he asked.--"You! you!" was the reply.--"Well, here I am!" continuing after a pause, with characteristic insolence: "I have acted in every theatre in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, I have acted in all the principal theatres throughout the United States of America, but in my life I never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I now see before me."

J. B. M.

A NEW TOPIC OF CONVERSATION.

There can be no doubt but what the increase of interest in the decorative arts has lightened the general tone of society in our cities. "I buy everything new that I can find," a lady remarked the other day when her bric-a-brac was praised: "not that I care anything in especial for this sort of thing, but because it is such a blessing to have something to talk about." One shudders now to remember the drawing-rooms of a generation ago--a colorless, cold, negative background for social life; rich sweeping curtains of damask satin and lace muffling the windows; impossible sofas and impracticable chairs gilded and elaborated into the most costly hideousness; an entire suite of rooms utterly barren of interest; a place given over to the taste of the upholsterer; nothing on any hand which contained a suggestion of life or emotion, thought or effort; every sign of occupation banished--nothing tolerated save the dullest uniformity, which depressed originality into inanity.

No wonder that this barrenness of household resource had its effect upon women, and that every one complained of the meagre results of ordinary social intercourse. Now-a-days, when tables are crowded with bric-a-brac, cabinets laden with porcelain and faience, and richly-hung walls brightened with plaques and good pictures, the female mind has received a fresh impulse, almost an inspiration, which will show clear results before many years have passed.

Enthusiasm for bric-a-brac and pottery, for embroidery and general decorative art, is strongest among practical and unimaginative people--people who know little or nothing of the world of thought opened by books, and who have hitherto been somewhat disheartened by a conviction of their own dulness. To them the present mania is an undoubted lease of the finer uses of intellect, and their mental horizons have widened until the prose of their lives is brightened into poetry. Every one now-a-days feels the stirring of the artistic impulse, and is able in some way to gratify it.

The American mind is always extravagant, and is certain to aim at too much and leap too high, and in this renaissance of decorative art carry its admiration of the beautiful and rare entirely too far in one direction--in the matter of dress at least. The costly velvets and satins and silks, which outweigh and surpass in beauty those of the early centuries, are seen on every side cut up and tortured into intricate and perplexing fashions of toilette. In the olden times these fabrics were wisely considered too rich to be altered from one generation to another, but were passed from mother to daughter as an inheritance. So far as the ornamentation of her own person is concerned, the American woman is too expensive and prodigal in her ideas, and wastes on the fashion of the hour what ought to grace a lifetime.

But in turning her talent to the fitting-up of her house the American woman is apt to be thrifty, ingenious and economical; and since she has learned what decorative art really is, she works miracles of cleverness and beauty. And, as we began by saying, it is a real blessing to have a new topic of conversation. True, there can be nothing more fatiguing to those who are free from the mania for pottery and porcelain than a discussion between china-lovers and china-hunters concerning, for instance, the difference between porcelain from Lowestoft and porcelain from China. Then, again, in the society of a real enthusiast one is apt to be bored by a recapitulation of his or her full accumulations of knowledge. You are shown a bit of "crackle." You look at it admiringly and express your pleasure. Is that enough? Can the subject be dismissed so easily? Far from it. "This is _real_ crackle," the collector insists, with more than a suspicion that you under-value the worth of his specimen; and then and there you have the history of crackle and the points of difference between the imitation and the real. And in glancing at his collection your tongue must not trip nor your eye confound styles. It requires a literal mind, besides a good memory and practised observation, to be an expert, and diffused and generalized knowledge amounts to little.

We have in mental view a lady who five years ago possessed apparently neither powers of thought nor capacity for expression, but who has, since she became a collector of china and antique furniture, developed into a tireless talker. Formerly she sat in her pale gray-and-blue rooms dressed faultlessly, "splendidly null," and you sought in vain for a topic which could warm her into interest or thaw out a sign of life from her. Now her rooms are studies, so picturesquely has she arranged her cabinets of china, her Oriental rugs and hangings, and her Queen Anne furniture; and she herself seems a new creature, so transfused is she by this fine fire of enthusiasm which illuminates her face and warms her tongue into eloquence. There is no dearth of subjects now. The briefest allusion to the Satsuma cup on the table beside you, and the lady, well equipped with matter, starts out on a tireless recapitulation of the delights and fatigues of collecting. She is a better woman and a much less dull one from this blossom of sympathy and interest with something outside of the old meaningless conditions of her life.

We all remember that it was a point of etiquette inculcated in our youth never to make allusion to the furniture and fittings of the houses where we paid visits. That rule is far more honored in the breach than in the observance now-a-days. It would show chilling coldness not to inquire if our fair friend herself embroidered the curtains of velvet and mummy-cloth which drape her doors and windows, and if that plaque were really painted by one of the Society of Decorative Art, and not imported from Doulton.

It would, in fact, seem as if this initiation in fresh ideas and aims--which, even if trivial, are higher than the old uncreative forms of occupation and interest--was an answer to the yearning of the feminine mind for something to sweep thoughts and impulses into a current which results in action. And certainly any action which lends interest, worth and beauty to domestic life, which draws out talent and promotes culture, is deserving of all encouragement.

L. W.

THE STORY OF THE TROCADERO.

There is no portion of the Paris Exhibition of 1878 which has excited more attention or attracted more visitors than has the Palace of the Trocadero. Yet few of the visitors who pass beneath its lofty portals ever imagine that the site of the sumptuous edifice is haunted by historical associations of no slight degree of interest. In fact, before the palace "rose like an exhalation" at the bidding of the skilled architects employed by the government few persons knew anything about the Trocadero at all. That lofty eminence, incomparably the finest building-site in Paris, with its graduated slopes gay with flowers and verdure, has long been a favorite lounging-place for Parisian artisans when out for a holiday, or for tourists seeking for a good view of the city and shrinking from the fatigue of climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Yet no one seemed to know anything of its history, or even why a hill in Paris should bear the name of a Spanish fort. And yet, to a certain extent, the spot is one of genuine historical interest. Successively a feudal manor, a royal domain, a cloister, and the site of unrealized projects of the later monarchs of France, religion, ambition, sorrow and glory have there at different times sought a refuge or a pedestal.

The Trocadero occupies a part of the site of the ancient village of Chaillot, whose existence can be traced back to the eleventh century. In its earlier days this village was celebrated for its vineyards and gardens and for its enchanting view; which last charm its site still retains. It was bestowed by Louis XI. on the historian Philippe de Comines, from whose heirs the domain was purchased by Catherine de Medicis. The building-loving queen caused a palace to be erected there, but of that edifice no trace now remains. After the death of the queen, Chaillot and its palace became the property of the President Janin, who probably tore down and rebuilt the royal abode, as he is accused in the memoirs of the time of being largely possessed by a mania for pulling down and rebuilding all the mansions in his possession. An engraving of the edifice as he left it exists in the Bibliotheque Nationale. It shows a very charming structure in the Renaissance style, erected, apparently, at a point halfway down the slope, since there are two lines of terraces behind it, as well as many in front.

The next owner of the domain of Chaillot was Francois de Bassompierre, former friend and boon-companion of Henri IV. He did not occupy it very long, being sent to the Bastile by Cardinal de Richelieu a very few years after the purchase was completed. During his imprisonment he lent Chaillot to his sister-in-law, Madame de Nemours. One day Richelieu sent to the Bastile to request his prisoner to let him occupy Chaillot as a summer abode. Bassompierre accordingly sent word to his sister-in-law that she must make way for the all-powerful minister. Richelieu remained at Chaillot for over six weeks, and declared that the furniture of the apartments was far finer than anything in that line which the king possessed.

The sad figure of Henriette Marie, the widowed queen of Charles I. of England, and youngest daughter of Henri IV., comes next upon the scene. She it was who, having purchased Chaillot after her return to France, established there the convent of Les Dames de la Visitation. A chapel was added to the extensive structure left behind by her father's old comrade, and it was in that chapel that her funeral sermon was preached by Bossuet--one of the first of those marvellous pieces of funereal eloquence which more than aught else have contributed to render his name immortal.

Next we have a vision of Louise de la Valliere, "like Niobe, all tears," flying to the arms of the abbess of the Visitandines for refuge from the anguish of beholding the insolent De Montespan enthroned in her place. It took all the eloquence and persuasive powers of Colbert to induce the fair weeper to return with him to Versailles. She yielded at last, but not without many sad forebodings that were destined to be only too perfectly fulfilled. "When I left the king before, he came for me: now, he sends for me," she sighed. She bade farewell to the abbess, assuring her that she would speedily return. But when, after three years more of suffering and humiliation, she finally retired to a convent, she did not enter that of the Visitandines, but that of the Carmelites, then situated in the Faubourg St. Jacques.

In 1707 a dispute between the Superior of the Visitandines and the officers of the king led to the abolition of the feudal privileges of Chaillot, and it was created a suburb of the city of Paris. Henceforward the quiet convent belongs no more to history. From the windows of their cells the nuns could behold the laying out of the Champ de Mars and the erection of the new military school decreed by Louis XV. But they were not destined to witness the Festival of the Republic, which took place on the Champ de Mars, since in 1790 the convent was suppressed and the nuns dispersed. The buildings still remained, and were devoted to various public uses till they were swept away to give place to the gigantic project of the First Napoleon, whose plans, had they been carried out, would have totally changed that quarter of Paris and rendered it one of the most beautiful portions of the city.

Percier and Fontaine, the architects of the emperor, have left behind them a full account of the projects of their imperial master relative to the heights of Chaillot. Being commissioned to erect a palace at Lyons, they opposed the idea on account of the difficulty of finding a suitable site for the projected building, and proposed instead the hill of Chaillot as being the finest site that it was possible to find in France. Their proposition was accepted: the buildings then occupying the height were purchased and torn down, and the works were commenced. The plan of Napoleon was a grandiose one, including not only the palace, to which he gave the name of his son, calling it the "Palace of the King of Rome," but also a series of buildings filling up three out of the four sides of the Champ de Mars, including two barracks, a military hospital and a palace of archives, as well as edifices for schools of art and industry. As to the palace itself, it was to have a frontage of over fourteen hundred feet on the Quai de Billy--an extent which is about that of the present Palace of the Trocadero. The whole of the plain of Passy, which was but little built upon at that epoch, was to be transformed into a wooded park stretching to and including the Bois de Boulogne. The grounds surrounding the palace were to be joined to the Avenue de Neuilly, to the Arc de Triomphe and to the high road of St. Germain by wide avenues bordered with trees.

This splendid project was destined never to be realized. Hardly had the foundations of the palace been laid when the disastrous campaign of Moscow put an end to the works. Money was wanted for soldiers and ammunition more than for palaces and parks. After the battle of Leipsic, Napoleon had the idea of making of his scarcely-commenced palace a Sans Souci like that of Frederick the Great--a quiet retreat where he could escape from the toils and cares of empire. But hardly had the works been recommenced on this diminished basis when the abdication of the emperor and his exile to Elba came to put a stop to them anew, and this time a decisive one; for, though a few workmen were employed in levelling the grounds and building the walls during the Hundred Days, there was neither spirit nor conviction in the work: the illusions of other days had fled, and were not to be revived. It was impossible for even the most sanguine partisans of Napoleon to imagine that the palace would ever be completed and receive him as a tenant.

Under the Restoration it was decided to utilize the deserted foundations and to erect thereon a barrack. The laying of the cornerstone of the new edifice was made the occasion of a solemn festival in honor of the successes of the French army in Spain. The day chosen was the anniversary of the taking of the fort of the Trocadero at Cadiz by the duc d'Angouleme, and the better to mark the occasion the height on which the new barrack was to stand was solemnly rebaptized by the name of the fort in question. The programme of the fete was long and elaborate. It consisted of a representation of the taking of the Trocadero, a sham battle in which twenty battalions of the royal guard took part. Then came the laying of the cornerstone, which duty was performed by the dauphin and dauphiness. But the projected barrack of the Bourbons shared the fate of the palace of Napoleon. It was never built, and for nearly thirty years the ruins of the abandoned foundations and terraces were left to be picturesquely clothed with weeds and wild grasses. Only the name bestowed upon the height remained, and it was still called the Trocadero.

Under the Second Empire the laying out of the numerous handsome avenues which extend around the Arc de Triomphe, and have it for a centre, necessitated the clearing and levelling of the deserted site. It was at first proposed to erect there a monument in commemoration of the victories of Magenta and Solferino, and the plans were actually drawn up: it was to have consisted of a lofty column, surpassing in its dimensions any similar monument in Paris. At the base of this column a fountain and a vast cascade were to be constructed, and the slope was to have been laid with turf and planted with trees. But this project, too, came to naught, and the Exhibition of 1867 only impelled the authorities into grading and laying out the ground, strengthening and repairing the flights of steps that led to the summit, and embellishing it with grass-plats and flower-beds. Later, the project was conceived by Napoleon III. of erecting on the summit of the Trocadero a Grecian temple in white marble, destined to receive the busts of the great men of France with commemorative inscriptions--a project which the downfall of the Second Empire found unrealized. The ancient site of the village of Chaillot seemed like one of those spots of which we read in monkish legends, which are haunted by a demon that destroys the work and blights the existence of whoever attempts to build upon them. Palace, barracks, monument and temple alike never existed, and were but the shadowy precursors of disaster to their projectors. It was reserved for the Third Republic to break the evil spell, and to crown the picturesque and historic eminence with an edifice worthy of the beauty of the site and of its associations with the past.

L. H. H.

SWISS ENGINEERING.

Switzerland, of all the countries of Europe, presents the most grave and numerous obstacles to intercommunication. The number and size of the mountains and glaciers, the depth of the valleys, the torrential character of the rivers,--everything unites to make the highways cost enormously in money, while the feats of skill they necessitate are "the triumph of civil engineers, the wonder of tourists, the despair of shareholders and the burden of budgets." Among these triumphs are the viaduct of Grandfey; the railroads that climb the Righi and the Uetliberg; the Axen tunnel and quay; and the Gotthard tunnel, over nine miles long--a solid granite bore through a mountain. One that was honored by a national celebration on the 16th of last August was the reclaiming from the water of the vast plain called Seeland, the territory occupying the triangle bounded by the river Aar and the Lakes of Bienne, Neufchatel and Morat. It was wholly under water, and had slowly emerged after many centuries; but despite an extensive system of drainage the land was never dry enough for serious cultivation. In rainy years it was even covered with water, making, with the three lakes, a sheet nearly twenty-five miles square.

The great work celebrated last August was no less than the changing the bed of the Aar and the lowering of the three lakes mentioned. The Aar in this region is about the size of the Seine at Paris or of the Hudson at Troy, but it is subject to sudden floods that are the terror of dwellers and property-owners along its borders. A Swiss colonel named La Nicca was the author of the grand scheme for reclaiming Seeland. The proposition he made was accepted in 1867, and, thanks to the sacrifices of the citizens in the communes and cantons immediately interested, and also to a heavy national subsidy, the enterprise was commenced, and so vigorously and ably prosecuted that in ten years it was finished.

To-day the Aar, turned out of its ancient bed near Aarsberg, runs nearly west instead of north-east toward Soleure, and empties into Lake Bienne near its middle. The new bed or canal made for this river is over five and a half miles long, and some of the way it is three hundred and twenty-eight feet deep. But this is only a part of the work. Another vast canal, also over five and a half miles long, at the eastern extremity of the lake, not far from the pretty village of Bienne, receives the overflow not only of Lake Bienne, but of Neufchatel and Morat, which are all three connected by broad canals, and are now in communication with the Rhine by steam navigation. The canal at the eastern extremity of Lake Bienne opens into the Aar some seven miles below where that river was cut off. It is in fact the bed of the river Thiele, deepened and reconstructed.

The deepening of the bed of the Thiele, the natural outlet of Lake Bienne, was effected according to principles that would ensure the lowering of the water-level of all the three lakes some ten feet! Thus a vast territory of swampy land, which once bore only reeds, now yields abundant harvests of grain and fruits. Of course the lowering of these three lakes had to be effected gradually, for the volume of water removed--no less than three thousand two hundred and eighty million cubic feet--represents a stupendous force. By this enterprise the whole plain of Seeland has become higher than the surface of the lakes, and consequently drains into them naturally. Already a beautiful village, Witzwyl, has sprung up, surrounded by some seven hundred and fifty thousand acres of fine arable land reclaimed from a forbidding, malaria-exhaling marsh.

M. H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. By Jennie J. Young. New York: Harper & Brothers.

"More crockery!" exclaims one aweary of the ceramic craze. "And the biggest book of all!--the winding-up shower, let us hope," quoth another non-sympathizer.

This portly octavo, with its four hundred and sixty-four wood-cuts, a seemingly exhaustive compend of the subject, may indeed be accepted as the peroratory rain destined to give the soil its last preparation for the rich growth to follow under a clear and sunny sky. What pen and print can do to perfect the requisite conditions for a Periclean age of pottery must by this time have been done. The case is summed up and stated. The issue rests with the jury of millions who use and admire burnt clay. Their wants, their sense of beauty and their purse will render the verdict. We might more safely and properly say that they will render a number of verdicts, all in their way and sphere just and true, since in no one of the arts so much as in this of all times and all nations is it so difficult to subject the infinitude of styles and fancies to one rigid canon. That the Greek vase is an absolute exemplar in grace and elegance of form every one hastens to concede. But who would hesitate to give up a part of what the Greeks have bequeathed us rather than lose the marvellous filigree in clay of "Henri Deux," the rich realism of Palissy or the wild and delightful riot of line and color and unequalled delicacy of manipulation presented to us by the Japanese? One and the same eye, as highly and soundly educated as you please, may be charmed almost equally by works of each of these schools and of others not here named; and that almost without wishing to see the peculiar merits of each combined and merged in one. A perfect eclectic vase is not to be expected, if desired, any more than a fruit or a wine which shall unite the best flavors of all orchards or all vintages. What can be done is to strive in that direction, as the French cook seeks, by "composing," to attain in one supreme _plat_ the _ne plus ultra_ of sapidity. We shall not be able, any more than he, to reach that climax or to dull the charm of variety. The fusing of the Greek brain and the Oriental eye and finger in the alembic of Western Europe and the New World will still continue to be attempted.

Trade, the great amalgamator, is promoting this end. Chinese porcelain has long been sent to Japan for decoration, the resemblance between the styles of the two countries, due primarily to race, being thus increased. American biscuit is sent to England for the like purpose; and we read with more surprise that the unfinished ware of Dresden seeks ornamentation in the same country, whence it is returned to be placed upon the market as true Meissen. A firm of New Yorkers, again, have migrated to France and built up the beautiful fabric of Limoges with the aid of French artists. The craftsmen of Japan and China are year by year borrowing Western forms and methods, as comparison of the ancient and modern work of those nations will show clearly enough.

While national idiosyncrasies the most opposite and the most widely separated in every sense ally themselves in behalf of progress, individual effort is encouraged by the reflection that no walk of art offers a more open field to original genius. Della Robbia, Bernart, Palissy and Wedgwood each found his own material and created his own school. Neither of them possessed the facilities, educational or mechanical, now at the command of hundreds. Neither had as wide or as eager a market for his productions as the coming artist in clay may command. Surely, such an artist is at this moment maturing his powers in some one of the scores of training institutions which have sprung up, under public or private auspices, within the past quarter of a century. Thorwaldsen was not a man of great originative genius, and nothing at all of a potter, troubling himself little about hard or soft paste or this or the other glaze; but he infused the love of classic form into the bleakest corners of Scandinavia, and made her youth modellers of terra-cotta into shapes unexcelled by any imitators of the antique. The prize awaits him who should, upon such knowledge and discipline, graft a study of Oriental designs, an eye for color, an independent fancy, and such minute precision of manual dexterity as seems the hardest thing of all for the Western to acquire. He will not have, like his great forerunners, to invent his material. Science does not repress, it invites and assists him. It offers him mineral colors and modes of graduating heat unknown to them. All the secrets of porcelain are open to him; and were they not, Europe did all her best things in ceramics before she was able to make a porcelain teacup. He may find room for improvement in material too. Pottery is the most durable of fabrics so long as it is not broken. But it is fragile, as bronze is not. Why may not that defect be remedied, as other defects have been by the Japanese and our bank-note printers in that particularly evanescent texture, paper? Some day, perhaps, burnt clay will be held together by threads of asbestos as greenbacks are by threads of silk and the sun-burned Egyptian bricks were by straw. Malleable glass we have already. Why not malleable faience?

The book before us presents the art, its history, its processes and its results in a manner every way satisfactory. Its account is full without being prolix. The author's taste is catholic enough. The different styles are placed before the reader side by side, with an evident purpose to do justice to all of them. There is little of the jargon of the connoisseur. Marks are curtly dismissed with the sound dictum that "the art and not the mark should be studied." Much use is made of the engravings, which are more closely connected with the text than, unfortunately, is generally the case in illustrated works. They are strictly illustrations of it, and serve as good a purpose in that way as cuts without the aid of color could well do. Nothing is more difficult to reproduce than a first-class work in clay or porcelain. Color, drawing, form, surface and texture present a compound of difficulties not to be completely overcome by the resources of the graver, the camera and the printer in colors. Only on the shelves of the museum can it be studied understandingly. It must speak for itself. The chromo undertakes to duplicate, with more or less success, the painting in oil or fresco, but the vase is a picture and something more. It is the joint product of the painter and the sculptor, and the substance whereon they bestow their labor has a special and varying beauty of its own.

In the pages devoted to the history of American pottery we confess that we have been chiefly attracted by its antiquities. The specimens given of remains from all parts of the two continents show at a glance their common origin. They all come unmistakably from the hands of the same Indian, civilized or savage. The Moquis, the Mound-builders, the Aztecs and the Peruvians all wrought their mother, Earth, into the same fashion, and adorned her countenance, purified by fire, with scrolls and colors in the same taste. The pigments employed have proved as lasting as those in the Egyptian tombs, and the forms are often as graceful as in a majority of the Phoenician vessels found in Cyprus. In the representation of the human head the Peruvian artist, so far as we may judge from these relics, excelled his rival of Tyre and Sidon.

That this will become a handbook on the subject of which it treats cannot be doubted. If we might venture to suggest an amendment to the second edition, it would be the addition to the illustrations of two or three figures carefully executed in colors--Greek, Japanese and Sevres.

Like unto Like. By Sherwood Bonner. (Library of American Fiction.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

Sherwood Bonner has been singularly happy in her choice of a subject for this, her first novel. She has broken new ground on that Southern soil which seemed already for literary purposes wellnigh worn out, and she has touched upon a period in the struggle between North and South which, so far as we know, has been little treated by novelists. The antagonists are represented not in the smoke of battle, but at that critical and awkward moment when the first steps toward reconciliation are being made. A proud but sociable little Mississippi town is shown in the act of half-reluctantly opening its doors to the officers of a couple of Federal regiments stationed within its bounds. The situation is portrayed with much spirit and humor, as well as with the most perfect _good_-humor. Thoroughly Southern as the novel is, it is not narrowly so: its pictures of Southern society are drawn from within, and show its writer's sympathy with Southern feeling, yet its tone, even in touching on the most tender spots, is entirely dispassionate, and at the same time free from any apparent effort to be so.

The first chapter introduces us to a triad of charming girls, whose careless talk soon turns upon the soldiers' expected arrival in Yariba and the proper reception to be given them by the Yariba damsels. Betty Page, Mary Barton and Blythe Herndon are, in a sense, typical girls, and represent the three orders in which nearly all girlhood may be classified--namely, frivolous girls, good girls, and clever girls or girls with ideas. Ideas are represented by Blythe Herndon, whose outspoken verdict in favor of tolerance and forgetfulness of the past draws upon her the patriotic indignation of Miss Betty Page. How long the fair disputants preserve the jewel of consistency forms the _motif_ of the book. Betty dances and flirts, neglects her loyal young Southern lover--who, we hope, is consoled by Mary--and finally surrenders to a handsome moustache and the Union with a happy unconsciousness of any abandonment of her principles. Blythe, with her ardent nature and youthful attitude of intolerance toward intolerance, is easily attracted by the intellectual freedom which appears to open before her in the conversation of an enthusiastic New England radical. Her mind is, however, not wholly thrown off its balance by this vision of culture: she awakens to the fact that the breach is wider than she had at first dreamed, and shrinks from the sacrifice not only of prejudice, but of first principles and affections, which is demanded of her. Lovers who are separated by hereditary or political strife have ever been a favorite theme with poet and romancer. In the majority of instances these unhappy beings have regarded the barrier between them as a useless obstacle erected by a perverse Fate in the way of their happiness. But Mr. Roger Ellis adheres with narrow obstinacy to the least article of his broad political creed, without a particle of consideration for the different one in which Blythe has been nurtured. He flourishes the American flag in his conversation in true stump-orator style, kisses black babies in the street--when, as Betty Page remarks, no man was ever known to kiss a white baby if he could help it--and refuses to eat without the company at table of a little black _protege_.

Plot there is none in _Like unto Like_, and of incident very little. Light, often sparkling, conversations and charming bits of description follow each other in ready succession like beads upon a string. Lack of incident is atoned for by charm of writing, and in the vivacity of the scenes the reader disregards the slenderness of the connecting thread, or perhaps forgets to look for it. The style is easy and pleasant, while free from the slips to which "easy writers" are so prone. Of bright, witty sayings a number could easily be gathered as samples, but the readers would still have to be referred to the book for many more. Perhaps the main charm of _Like unto Like_ lies in its description of the quaint life in Southern provincial towns, where the people "all talk to each other as if they were members of one family," where married ladies are still called by their friends "Miss Kate," "Miss Janey," or "Miss Ada," and where, "when a youth and maiden promise to marry each other, they become possessed immediately with a wild desire to conceal their engagement from all the world." There clings to the book a suggestion of that Southern accent which in the mouth of a pretty woman has such a piquant foreign sound.

His Heart's Desire: A Novel. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

We can complain of no lack of plot or paucity of incidents in _His Heart's Desire_. Were the material less ably handled we should suggest an unnecessary redundancy, but we hesitate to pronounce superfluous anything which is so exactly fitted, so neatly dove-tailed into the main structure, as is each incident and character in the present novel. About a dozen individual and more or less finished personages contribute their life-histories to the book, yet each of these lives has some bearing upon that of the heroine, Nora St. John, and notwithstanding these intricacies the plot never becomes confused. It has been too firmly grasped by the author's mind to be a puzzle to the reader's. Its various ramifications are never allowed to get into a "snarl:" the mystery all turns upon a single point which we will not spoil the reader's pleasure by mentioning, and, arrived at the last pages, the various threads of the story unwind themselves easily and naturally like a single coil. The same skill is displayed in the management of the characters. Though drawn with unequal power, many of them being seized with much vividness, whilst others must be accounted failures, they are well grouped. Numerous as the figures are, they never crowd or jostle each other, and elaborated as they are in many cases, all are subordinate to that of Nora, whose character and story stand out in a strong relief not easy to obtain upon so varied a background. This character is finely conceived and drawn with real power, being impressive by the very truth of the rendering, for she is not invested with any strikingly heroic qualities. A strong, passionate nature made cold by suffering and the constant struggle to keep the secret of her one season of passion from rising again to confront her--a woman of forty, who has no longer any illusions or pleasure, in whose character intense pride is the only motive-power left, and even pride is weary of its loneliness and the assaults made upon it--Nora excites interest, and even pity, by her position and by the aspect of a strong nature under subdued but real suffering. In the later pages of the book, and notably in the scene with Mr. Sistare, in which revelations are made by both, the changes gradual or sudden in her feelings and thought are portrayed with the delicacy of light and shade, the picturesqueness and self-forgetfulness, with which a fine actress renders a part. This dramatic quality is perhaps the most striking trait in _His Heart's Desire_. Many of its scenes are intensely dramatic, full of passion, striking in situation, and showing a rather rare accomplishment--that of conducting a dialogue which shall be equally brilliant on both sides without resembling a monologue.

In praising this novel so highly we do not forget its faults. But, though perhaps as numerous as its merits, they are by no means equal to them in importance. Something of naturalness and simplicity has been sacrificed to the exigences of the plot; and, while the higher truth is adhered to in the principal scenes and characters, some of the minor ones appear to us rather highly colored. By distributing the fatal gift of beauty with a less lavish hand the author might, we think, have subdued this color: a few commonplace figures would have added to the naturalness of the scene.

Sensational the book may be pronounced from a glance through its chain of incidents, yet neither by its tone nor its writing does it belong to the class which we call sensational. Its tone is earnest and sincere, grave social questions being handled with a purity and feeling which makes the book, in spite of its apparent unconsciousness of purpose, a distinctly moral one.

_Books Received._

Books for Bright Eyes, embracing "On the Farm," "More Happy Days," "Mountain-Tops," "One Day in our Long Vacation." By Mrs. M. E. Miller. New York: American Tract Society.

Cross's Eclectic Short-hand: A New System, adapted both to general use and to verbatim reporting. By J. George Cross, A. M. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co.

The Waverley Dictionary: An Alphabetical Arrangement of all the Characters in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels. By May Rogers. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co.

The French Revolution. By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine. Translated by John Durand. (First Volume.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Maximum Stresses in Framed Bridges. By Professor William Cain, A. M., C. E. (Van Nostrand's Science Series.) New York: D. Van Nostrand.

The Ethics of Positivism: A Critical Study. By Giacomo Barzellotti, Professor of Philosophy, Florence. New York: Charles P. Somerby.

Grammar-Land; or, Grammar in Fun for the Children of Schoolroom-shire. By M. L. Nesbitt. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

The Family Christian Almanac for 1879. By Professor George W. Coakley. New York: American Tract Society.

American Colleges: Their Students and Work. By Charles F. Thwing. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

A Story or Two from an Old Dutch Town. By Robert Lowell. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Life and Adventure in Japan. By E. Warren Clark. New York: American Tract Society.

Cupid and the Sphinx. By Harford Flemming. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The Old House Altered. By George C. Mason. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Handsome Harry. By Sarah E. Chester. New York: American Tract Society.

Thanatopsis. By William Cullen Bryant. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Modern Frenchmen. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

What is the Bible? By J. T. Sunderland. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Six to One: A Nantucket Idyl. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Sibyl Spencer. By James Kent. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Songs of Italy. By Joaquin Miller. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This is the name given from time immemorial to that part of Biscay that extends from Bilbao to the eastern boundaries of the province of Santander. It contains fifteen thousand inhabitants, and abounds in minerals, fruit and grain. The original Basque language, owing to the constant intercourse with Castile, has yielded to the Spanish, which, however, is mixed with many Basque words and expressions.

[2] That is, a similarity of the final vowel or last two vowels. Thus, jardin_e_r_o_s and du_e_n_o_ amist_a_d and sac_a_r are considered to rhyme.

[3] The word _ciego_, "blind man," is also used to denote the blind ballad-singers with whom the country abounds.

[4] The first four of the above-mentioned volumes, together with the _Libro de los Cantares_, have been published by Brockhaus in his _Colleccion de Autores Espanoles_, Leipzig, vols. vi., xviii., xix., xxvi., and xxxiii.

[5] Special awards of objects of art to competitors in the trials of agricultural implements in the field:

McCormick (grand prize), binding reaper, United States. Wood, binding reaper, United States. Osborne, binding reaper, United States. Johnston, reaper, United States. Whiteley, mower, United States. Dederick, hay-press, United States. Mabille, Chicago hay-press, France. Meixmoron-Dombasle, gang-plough, France. Deere, gang-plough, United States. Aveling & Porter, steam-plough, England. Albaret, electric light for field-work at night, France.

[6] The cut shows a smaller crane, which has a fixed jib for use on a permanent or temporary track.

[7] Why this unfortunate fish should be so distinguished I have never been able to learn, but the saying is universal in the French army.

[8] This is a paraphrase rather than a translation, the patois of the original being impossible to render exactly.

End of Project Gutenberg's Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878, by Various