Part 2

But Providence is able and merciful to cleanse the character of the innocent and calumniated in the end, and after many weary months Ludovico’s was cleared before all the village by the death-bed confession of one of his former associates, who, under the impulse of a late remorse, stated that the robbery had been committed by himself--that Ludovico had on the night in question been designedly drugged by some of his accomplices--his knife taken and purposely left in the room, and his shoes borrowed for the same end, of warding search or suspicion from themselves by his condemnation. By way of expiation for the diabolical villany, he secretly menaced his partners in the plot that he would reveal their names and give them up to justice, unless the money with the interest in full was forthwith restored, which in consequence was quickly done. And now that his son’s good fame was established in the light of day, my father’s breast was lightened of the burthen of conscious disgrace, but only to suffer the more keenly the poignancy of self-reproach for the extreme and unjust severity of his treatment; and often would he bitterly accuse himself of savage inhumanity, and madly wish that by the sacrifice of his own life he could restore his exiled son to his embrace once more. As I listened to his painful lamentations and upbraiding, I formed a scheme, which was no sooner devised than I hurried to execute, of following Ludovico to England, of finding him, as in the credulity of inexperience I doubted not readily to do, and bringing him back with me to home, to reputation, and to happiness. Knowing the opposition I would meet if I mentioned my secret, I collected as speedily as I could what money I supposed would defray my first expenses, procured this organ, and my poor little marmoset, as I knew my wandering countrymen were wont to furnish themselves; and leaving a letter with a young neighbour to give when I was gone, took my way to Naples, whence I got a passage to London. My heart often died within me as I wandered through its great and busy streets, and many is the hour of sorrow and hardship I endured; but desire for Ludovico, and the hope of finding him which never failed me, carried me through all. For nearly a year I traversed England, much of Scotland and Ireland, supporting myself by grinding this poor music. I have not my brother’s fine voice and skill, but the people here are for the most part indulgent, and not so delicate to please as those of Italy. But the good God guided me at last to a happy meeting with an old Neapolitan, who alone, of the hundreds whom I questioned, was able to give me any information of Ludovico, with whom he had fortunately fallen in a few months before in this very city. With that cordial confidence which one is apt to flare in a fellow countryman when cast among strangers, Ludovico had made known to him all his story, adding that, having now by prudence and exertion of his talent for music--and few could touch a guitar or raise a voice like him--gathered a sufficient sum of money, he was about to return to Italy and to the neighbourhood of his native village, to apportion Bianca once more, and set on foot some inquiry to redeem, if possible, his forfeited character, and fix the guilt of the robbery upon the real offenders, whom long reflection on the circumstances had erewhile led him to suspect. Oh! how my heart thrilled and burned within me as I listened to the long-sought blissful words, and knew that in very deed I was at last upon the track of him--though the rapture of an unexpected meeting in this foreign land I was not to have--after whom I had made such a weary pilgrimage in vain. Not in vain neither. I have done what I could, and when I stand proudly amid my family once more, and receive their embraces and congratulations, say, shall I be without my reward? My daily gleanings I hoard with the eagerness of a miser: little do I spend on food or lodging: for when I think of my own dear Montanio, of those to complete whose happiness I alone am wanting, I have but one wish, one prayer--to have wherewithal to carry me to my own beautiful land again, to my father’s blessing, my brother’s love, my mother’s and my sister’s arms.”

Tears of tenderness and rapture started to the eyes of the ardent and devoted youth as he thus concluded his narrative, in which the fervour and interest of truth were, as he told it, beautifully blended with much of the elevation and singularity of romance.

Further particulars respecting this generous witness to the disinterestedness and fortitude with which family and fraternal love can inspire the young, the delicate, and the undisciplined, my necessary limitation of space compels me to forego. I need scarcely add that I was instrumental in furnishing a supplement for his insufficient means, and I did not lose sight of the noble lad, till, with mixed emotions of buoyant anticipation, and perhaps momentarily regretful gratitude, he parted from me on his return to Italy. In imagination I often make one of the reunited family, and at times, too, indulge the hope that the chances and changes of a shifting lot may some time enable me in very deed to look on old Girardi and his spouse, Carlo and the reformed Ludovico, the fair Bianca and the faithful Francesco, and claim a return in kind--an evening spent among their gleeful rural party--for the fellow-feeling I had the good fortune to conceive for the desolation, and the part I was privileged to take in abridging the banishment, of the Italian Organ Boy.

J. J. M.

KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE.

Second Article.

BOULDERS--CONTINUED.

If the dreary waste of the sandy desert, when the hot and suffocating blast sweeps over its parched surface, appears to the affrighted traveller invested with all the characters of sublimity, not less impressed with awe is the wanderer of polar regions, when, gazing on the heart-chilling magnificence of the interminable ice which surrounds him, he hears the sigh of the coming snow-storm, fraught with danger or with death. But at a time when repeated voyages and spirit-stirring narratives have rendered familiar to every one the beauties and the dangers of ice in every conceivable form of floe, of field, or of berg, and have excited sympathy for the sufferings or admiration of the daring of those who, to advance the cause of science, or to pursue for commercial purposes the mighty whale, have ventured within the precincts of that icy kingdom, it is not necessary to describe the solitary grandeur of a scene in which ice spreads like a sea beneath the feet, and rises as a mountain above the head. Not even, then, by the side of a cheerful fire, in these more temperate regions, shall we unnecessarily indulge in shudderings at the thought of distant powers of congelation, or enter further into the subject of polar picturesqueness. It is as a geological agent that we have now to contemplate ice in the various forms of fields and bergs, or of glaciers; its efficiency as a moving power being first considered. Scoresby justly denominates ice-fields “one of the wonders of the deep. They are often,” he says, “met with of the diameter of twenty or thirty miles; and when in a state of such close combination that no interstice can be seen, they sometimes extend to a length of fifty, or nearly a hundred miles.” The average thickness of these fields is from ten to fifteen feet, and their surface is varied by hummocks, which rise to a height of from forty to fifty feet. The weight of a piece of field ice, one mile square and thirteen feet thick, is, according to Scoresby’s estimate, 11,314,284 tons; and from the difference of specific gravity between ice and sea-water, this floating mass is sufficiently buoyant to support a weight of stones or other heavy bodies equal to 1,257,142, or in round numbers one million tons.

Grand, however, as such floating fields of ice are, they are exceeded in magnificence by bergs. One of these, Scoresby relates, was one mile in circumference, fifteen hundred feet square, and a hundred feet above the level of the sea; so that, allowing for the inequalities of its surface, he considered its depth in the water seven hundred feet, its total thickness eight hundred feet, and its weight about forty-five millions of tons--an enormous mass, capable of transporting at least five millions of tons of extraneous weight. In number, too, they are as remarkable as in magnitude: above five hundred were counted by Scoresby from the mast-head at one time, of which scarcely one was less than the hull of a ship, about a hundred as high as the ship’s mast, and some twice that height, or two hundred feet above the surface of the sea; hence in total thickness about sixteen hundred feet. These, then, it must be admitted, are mighty engines fitted for the transport of rocks of colossal magnitude. But in the reasonings of sound philosophy, the apparent fitness of an object to perform some particular function cannot be deemed sufficient to establish the reality of its action: further proof is necessary, either derived from analogy or from positive facts. In respect to ice-fields, the easiest of observation, it is remarkable that neither of the Captains Scoresby speaks of having noticed extraneous matter upon them, unless the expression “heaps of rubbish,” in a passage of the voyage of Scoresby senior, means rubbish of stones as well as rubbish of ice. Examples will indeed be quoted from other writers, but the comparative scarcity of transported matter on the upper surface of the fields of ice, seems a natural consequence of their mode and place of formation. Formed in bays or gulfs, some portions of them are broken off by the violence of the waves at a distance from the shore, and never therefore come in contact with rocks or stones; whilst others, grounding in shallow water, encase many in the substance of their lower surface, although none are seen on the upper.

The conditions, indeed, which are necessary to ensure a load for the carrying ice, such as proximity to the rocks the detached fragments of which are to rest on its surface, are more peculiarly present in ice formed under or brought into contact with precipitous rocky banks, and in that formed in deep narrow gulfs--in short, in ice constituted after the manner of glaciers. A large portion, therefore, of field ice must necessarily float about unencumbered with rubbish or fragments of rocks. Boethlingk, in treating on the diluvial and alluvial formations of South Finland, incidentally touches upon this subject. “The dispersion,” he observes, “of these blocks, is very probably in accordance with a phenomenon which may be observed on many seas and rivers, and which depends on the presence of blocks of stone near the shore. Through what force and in what manner the deposition of large blocks on the surface of all those formations which are at the water’s brink even now happens, can be observed every spring, by any one who, at the breaking up of the ice, repairs to those parts of the coast where the shore bears testimony, by the numerous blocks heaped up one upon the other, of their forcible deposition. Near Kiwinjemei, on the Wwoxen, there is, as it were, a wall nine feet high, stretching along the flat shore, composed of blocks of stone which have been gradually raised by the masses of ice. In several places such stones, three feet in diameter, were lying on flakes of ice, which, pressing onwards to the shore, had been shoved one over the other to the height of six or eight feet; so that no one could doubt the fact that the ice-flakes had been the carriers of the stones; and also, where the steepness of the ground permits the near approach of ice-shoals to the shore, that the blocks would be heaped up one over the other into a terrace or wall; whilst, on the contrary, on shallow coasts they would be scattered in the water, at a distance from the shore. The deposition of blocks depends therefore on the shore being accessible to ice-shoals driven in by winds or currents. Small blocks, also, are often cemented together by ice when the water over shallows, the bottoms of which are covered with loose stones, freezes; and when the water rises in the spring, or in consequence of storms setting in from the sea, the ice also rises, and with it the encased stones; and being driven out to sea, the stones, by the melting of the icy cement, are dropped in various places. In this way it is very probable that the boulders which lie scattered over the surface of the countries south of the Baltic were transported from Scandinavia and Finland on ice-shoals, at a time when the East Sea yet spread over those regions. Banks also are thrown up along the shore by the ice; they are never composed of large stones, but on flat sandy shores principally of sand.

Where the water-level was constant for a considerable time, during which banks were formed, they show by their height above the present flow of the water how much the condition of the latter has been changed. When two such banks lie one behind the other, at the same level, or successively like terraces, we are justified in concluding that the level of the water has changed and the land been increased, or that the one has sunk and the other in consequence advanced upon it. In confined basins this sinking may have been the consequence of the outlet widening by wear, and in open seas by the upheaving of the land. On all the large lakes of Finland are seen banks and terraces, as well as single blocks of stone, on the slopes. The terraces often lie one above the other, which indicates sudden depressions of the water’s surface at different periods, each bank or terrace marking the water-line of a particular period, in which were deposited in strata many kinds of detritus mixed up with vegetable substances.” These remarks of Boethlingk, originally recorded in the “Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg,” are here cited from the “Neues Jahrbuch von Leonhard und Bronn.” They are valuable, as results of personal observation, and have doubtless already given a tolerable inkling of the reasons upon which this species of explanation of the phenomenon of boulders has been founded. Captain Bayfield, of the Royal Navy, the able surveyor of the Canadian lakes and of the river St Lawrence, records similar facts observed by him in that river. The St Lawrence is in winter low, and the ice on the shallows along both banks of the river is frozen into one connected mass by a temperature which often sinks to thirty degrees below zero, or sixty-two degrees below the freezing point. When the thaw sets in, these masses are raised up and floated away, and with them an extraordinary quantity of blocks and stones which had been encased by the frost in their substance. In like manner, anchors which for the security of the ship in winter had been fixed near the shore, were obliged to be cut out of the ice, or they would have been carried away. Half a ton weight of one of the strongest chain cables was torn off and carried many yards away, when means were taken to cut it out. Captain Bayfield also mentions the fact that he had often seen at sea icebergs laden with stones, in the Straits of Belleisle the captain examined one amongst many which must have come from Baffin’s Bay; it was thickly covered over with blocks, gravel, and stones. M. Reinecke, an officer of the Russian navy employed on a survey of the coast of Finland, relates two pleasing though minor incidents of a similar kind. The fishermen of Sweaborg pointed out to his officers that the sea-bottom of their coast was subject to frequent change, partly from the action of the waves in violent storms, but more particularly from the force of traction exercised by enormous bodies of ice which are set adrift at the breaking up of the frost, and being arrested in their progress by some of the numerous headlands of the coast, or by the shoals which there encumber the sea, are heaped up one upon the other into colossal masses, which, liberated by some new shock, are again violently urged forward, and drag along with them the sand of the bottom, and even large fragments of the rocks. At the village of Kittelholm, near Sweaborg, the inhabitants directed the officers’ special attention to two such erratic blocks of stone, which at a very recent period had changed their place: resting on a rock of the coast called Witthella, and at a height of three sagènes (about 21 feet) above the level of the sea, there now appears a block of granite, called by the sailors “sea calf,” from its resemblance to a seal basking in the sun. This block was first seen in its present position in 1815. It had been encased in a mass of ice, which, raised up by the waves in a storm, had rested on the level top of the rock, and there melted as it thawed: the boulder, brought probably from a distant region, being left where it now stands. The other erratic block or boulder of Kittelholm had been observed by the inhabitants in the winter of 1806 to shift its place, being dragged on by the ice for a distance of about one-third of a mile. But all these were carriers of small note and name when compared to those of vast bulk and power described by Scoresby. “Many,” says he, “of the icebergs contained strata of earth and stones, and some were loaded with beds of rock of great thickness, and weighing by calculation from 50,000 to 100,000 tons.” When, therefore, we see such operations going forward in our own time--the iceberg loaded with its freight of gravel and of rocks, moving slowly from the frozen north to the south, where, melted by the increasing heat, it is destined to discharge its cargo indiscriminately on mud, on gravel, or on rock, in the plain or on the hill, in the valley or on the mountain top (for all these forms of matter and of feature may be reasonably assumed to diversify the bottom of the present ocean, as it did that of a former one, now the surface of our dry land)--may we not conclude with Lyell or with Wissman, with Murchison or with Darwin, that were that bottom exposed dry to our view, it would in like manner exhibit its phenomena of gravel and of boulders?

Nor would those appearances be confined to the northern regions; the reign of frost and snow has extended over a wider space in the antarctic than it has in the arctic circle. Mr Murchison quotes from a letter of Captain Harcourt, R. N., who in returning from South America met with a vast number of ice-floes in the Pacific, in latitude 50 degrees. Some of them were not less than two miles square, and 250 to 300 feet above the water, and consequently about 2000 feet thick. It is remarkable that this phenomenon occurred from 85 degrees west longitude, at a considerable distance from any land, to the meridian of Cape Pillar, while the immediate coasts of Chili and Cape Horn offered no trace of them. The winter was comparatively mild, which might indeed account for the liberation of such large masses of ice from the South Pole, and their being wafted into seas usually quite free from them. The number and size of these ice-floes were so astonishing, that Captain Harcourt, during the long winter moonless nights of eighteen hours, had great difficulty in steering through them without shipwreck; their course seemed to be from south-east to north-west, and they were met with through five degrees of latitude (50 to 55 degrees), which would be the exact position of England if transferred to the other hemisphere. May we not then shudder at the thought of that dreary future, in which, by some physical changes of the earth’s surface, according to the theory of Mr Lyell, the conditions of the earth’s superficial temperature may be reversed, and bring down upon the coasts of our ill-fated island those frost-bearing monsters to bite up every living thing by one common congelation; for we may well suppose, that long ere that dismal period our cold-dispelling fuel, turf, coal, and all, will have been utterly consumed. But let us comfort ourselves with this selfish reflection--it will not be in our day.

Numerous as the icebergs of the antarctic regions are, they have as yet afforded few examples of transported materials. One, however, of very considerable interest, is thus recorded in a Journal of Discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean in 1839, by Mr John Balleny, communicated to the Geographical Society by Mr Enderby, the ship-owner. “March 13. Light variable winds from the eastward; surrounded by icebergs. In latitude 61 degrees, longitude 103 degrees 40 minutes, passed within a quarter of a mile of an iceberg about 300 feet high, with a block of rock attached to it.” The rock is described as about 12 feet in height and about one-third up the berg. The nearest certainly known land (Enderby’s Land) was distant from the spot 1400 miles; Sabrina Land, if such exists, was distant 450 miles; and it is very improbable that any land will be discovered within 100 miles. Mr Darwin, in an interesting note on this Journal, mentions a preceding case of an iceberg with a considerable block lying on it, seen east of South Shetland by Mr Sorrell, when in a sealing vessel; and though another voyager, Captain Briscoe, during several cruises in the antarctic seas, had never once seen a piece of rock in the ice, he remarks, that if but one iceberg in a thousand or in ten thousand transports its fragment, the bottom of the antarctic sea and the shores of its islands must already be scattered with masses of foreign rock, the counterpart of the erratic boulders of the northern hemisphere.