The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chambers’s Journal, by Various.

QUEEN’S MESSENGERS.

Somewhat more than forty years ago, Mr Baillie Fraser published a lively and instructive volume under the title A Winter’s Journey (Tatâr) from Constantinople to Teheran. Political complications had arisen between Russia and Turkey‒an old story, of which we are witnessing a new version at the present time. The English government deemed it urgently necessary to send out instructions to our representatives at Constantinople and Teheran; and this could only be done in those days by means of Messengers bold and hardy enough to bear a great amount of fatigue in the saddle. Mr Fraser, intrusted with this duty, told the tale of his hard work. The word Tatâr, in Turkey, is applied to a native courier, guide, and companion, a hardy horseman who fulfils all these functions, speaking two or more languages, and ready to do the best that can be done to overcome the multiplied tribulations of regions almost roadless and innless. When travelling Tatâr, these men have been known to make truly wonderful journeys on horseback. One of special character was made in 1815, when the British government wished to convey to Persia the stirring news of the escape of Napoleon from Elba. The British Embassy at Constantinople sent a Messenger from thence to Demavend, a Persian city nearly two thousand miles distant, across a dangerously rugged country; this amazing horse-ride was accomplished in seventeen days; averaging nearly a hundred and twenty miles a day.

Mr Baillie Fraser gives a vivid description of his own experience in this kind of life, riding day and night, and stopping only when the absolute need of a few hours’ rest drove him into a wretched post-house or a mere hovel. It was ‘a Tatâr journey of two thousand six hundred miles, which for fatigue and anxiety, and suffering from cold and exposure, I will venture to match against anything of the sort that ever was done.’ First came seven hundred and fifty miles across European Turkey, from Belgrade to Constantinople; and then seven hundred along the whole extent of Asia Minor to Amasia; but during the remaining seven weeks of the journey, he says: ‘We have been wading night and day through interminable wastes of deep snow, exposed to all the violence of storms, drift, and wind, with the thermometer frequently from fifteen to twenty degrees below zero. Our clothes and faces and beards were clotted into stiff masses of ice; our boots, hard as iron, frozen to the stirrup; and our limbs tortured with pain, or chilled into insensibility by intense cold.’

Another famous journey across European Turkey, in 1849, has been described by Major Byng Hall, whose volume we shall presently advert to. A Messenger was directed to haste as fast as horse-flesh could carry him from Belgrade to the Morava, then on through Alexinitz and Nissa, across the Balkans, and so on through Sofia to Constantinople‒in great part the very route which Russian and Turkish troops have been devastating. When he crossed the Balkans at one of the passes or ravines, he had been riding continually night and day, and reeled backward and forward in his saddle; and more than once he nearly fell to the ground through exhaustion and want of sleep, at places where precipices were perilously near. He reached Constantinople in five days eleven hours from Belgrade, contending the whole time on horseback against wind, mud, and rain. Sir Stratford Canning (now Lord Stratford de Redcliffe), British ambassador at Constantinople, complimented him by saying that it was ‘the quickest winter journey ever known.’ Lord Palmerston adverted in the House of Commons to this journey, on an occasion when some members were animadverting on the great cost of the diplomatic service: ‘As a proof of the zeal with which these royal Messengers render their services to the government of this country, I will mention an instance in which one of these gentlemen performed his duty on an occasion when it was required that he should make an extraordinary effort in order to carry a despatch of very considerable importance from the Foreign Office to Constantinople, at a time when a question was pending between Russia and Turkey. He was{50} days and nights in the saddle without quitting it, and performed the journey in the worst weather and under the greatest possible difficulties.’

Major Byng Hall, just named, has published a pleasant work under the title of the Queen’s Messenger, recounting some of his own journeys and those of his colleagues. Amongst others was a sledge-journey to St Petersburg in midwinter; when his driver got intoxicated, drove into some sledges coming in the opposite direction, and nearly brought about a perilous scene of scuffle and bloodshed‒all in a dark night amid enormous accumulations of snow. He draws attention to the varied qualifications necessary to any one who fills this office: ‘No man, be he who he may, who holds the post of one of Her Majesty’s foreign Messengers, and who must, for the due performance of the constant and arduous duties intrusted to him, be acquainted with foreign languages, but must obtain much knowledge by the wayside, impracticable if not impossible to the holiday traveller’‒which all becomes essentially serviceable to him in subsequent journeys. A writer in Blackwood pleasantly spoke a few years ago of these ‘foreign Mercuries, who travel throughout Europe at a pace only short of the telegraph. They are wonderful fellows, and must be very variously endowed. What capital sleepers, and yet so easily awakened! What a deal of bumping must their heads be equal to! What an indifference must they be endowed with to bad dinners, bad roads, bad servants, and bad smells! How patient must they be here, how peremptory there! How they must train their stomachs to long fastings, and their skin to little soap!’

And now for a brief account of the organisation of this small but remarkable body of men.

The Queen’s Messengers of the present day are virtually employés of the Foreign Office; seeing that the conveyance of despatches to and from British ambassadors and representatives at foreign courts is the chief duty intrusted to them. Many a declaration of war has been thus conveyed.

About thirty years ago the House of Commons requested and obtained from the Foreign Office an account of the expense connected with the system of Queen’s Messengers. The payments to these gentlemen were found to be made up in an odd way, such as no commercial firm would dream of adopting. There was a small annual salary, whether the Messenger were travelling or not. There were board wages, so much per day when in actual service. There was an allowance for his trouble, anxiety, and fatigue in riding and driving along‒so much a mile if on horseback, so much in a vehicle, so much in a steam-boat. There was a reimbursement for actual outlay for railways, vehicles, horses, postillions, hostlers, road and bridge tolls, passports, loss on exchange of moneys, &c. This reimbursement was in nearly all cases more than he actually paid, owing to the liberal scale on which it was calculated.

Every Messenger, it was found, received about four hundred a year for himself, and six hundred for travel-outlay. Some of the journeys, we learn from the parliamentary paper, were enormously expensive; railways on the continent were at that time comparatively few, and the old system of posting and horse-riding had still to be kept up over very long distances. One single journey from London to Frankfurt was set down at L.46; to Berlin, L.70; to Turin, L.83; to Vienna, L.86; to Madrid, L.123; to Rome, L.143; to Naples, L.162. The giant items were: London to St Petersburg viâ Berlin (1964 miles), L.166; and London to Constantinople viâ Vienna (2192 miles), L.269. It is probable that at that time there was scarcely any rail beyond Vienna, whatever may have been the case on this side; and that the Messenger to Constantinople had to travel by relays of horses or of post vehicles more than eleven hundred miles of his journey. The outward journey alone is mentioned in each instance; the homeward was probably about equal to it in cost. One Messenger, Mr Crotch, went from Calais to Paris (carrying despatches which had come from London viâ Dover) sixteen times in the year, and sixteen times in the reverse direction; receiving about L.25 per journey for expenses and emoluments.

In 1868 the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs resolved that the time had come for remodelling the system. In a circular addressed to all British representatives abroad, he pointed out numerous ways in which the number of despatches sent might be reduced, and the expense lessened still more considerably. The post and the electric telegraph might safely be intrusted, under the improved modern arrangements, with many of the questions, answers, and instructions hitherto conveyed by Queen’s Messengers. It was also pointed out that, when telegrams were sent, an unnecessary verbiage was indulged in, tending to increase the cost without in any way conducing to the intelligibility of the message. The employment of cipher-writing [A] would be available by post and by telegraph as well as by Messenger, so long as the key to the cipher is known only to the Foreign Office.

Irrespective of the quantity of circumlocution involved in the matter, there is the question of emolument to the Messengers employed. The Foreign Secretary found, on close examination, that these gentlemen were in the receipt of eight hundred a year each on an average. The amount had doubled itself in the course of twenty years, chiefly by means of the profit derived from the allowance for travelling‒economical railway and steam-boat fares being charged to the government as if they were the expensive old-fashioned fares. Thus the mileage profit increased as the mileage expenditure decreased. All these lumbering arrangements were swept away, and a fixed salary decided on, just as for government clerks, &c. Five hundred a year was the amount decided on, to be paid whether the Messenger were employed or unemployed, whether at home or abroad.

It need hardly be said that by the introduction of railways the duties of these Messengers have{51} been immensely simplified. ‘For many years they have scarcely if ever been called upon to travel on horseback; the communication with Constantinople, which was formerly carried on partly by that means, having for some time past been wholly kept up by railway and steam-vessel. In consequence of the accelerated rate of travelling by railway, they are rarely kept out of bed as formerly, for six, eight, ten, or even more nights; and even when they are travelling at night, they are almost always able to enjoy uninterrupted rest, instead of being obliged, as formerly, to be constantly on the alert, in order to stimulate the exertions of postillions and owner.’

The salary was subsequently settled by making the amount five hundred guineas instead of pounds.

Important personages in their way are these foreign Messengers, sufficiently high in social position to comprise among their number (at the present time) an ‘honourable,’ a major, and six captains. Evidently the post is eagerly sought for when a vacancy occurs. One of those at present in the service has been a Messenger during the long period of thirty-five years: what a prodigious amount of travel he must have gone through! Good salaries are not the only attractions; several past Messengers have retired on pensions, pretty well wearied of knocking about Europe; while widows of Messengers receive allowances under exceptional circumstances.

Smart-looking personages are these messengers, as attired to distinguish them from ordinary civilians. The official regulations on this subject tell us that ‘the Messengers must be furnished with a uniform‒consisting of a dark-blue cloth double-breasted frock coat with turn-down collar; blue single-breasted waistcoat, buttoned up to the throat, with edging of gold-lace; trousers of Oxford mixture, with a scarlet cord down the side seams; gilt buttons embossed with the royal arms encircled by the crown and garter, and having a greyhound pendent; blue cloth cap with leather peak, band of black braid, and the royal cipher and crown gilt in front; a badge of the regulation size, with the royal crown and silver greyhound pendent, suspended from the neck by a dark-blue ribbon. This uniform, and more especially the badge, must be always worn by Messengers when travelling; but the badge must not be worn at any other time.’

We have said nothing of home Messengers, those who carry despatches to and fro within the limits of the British Islands. Nor indeed is there much to say concerning them. They are fewer in number, and less handsomely paid than those employed abroad. Under the system which prevailed before the reforms effected eight or nine years ago, each home Messenger had quite a medley of emoluments‒so much fixed salary, so much board wages, so much excess or surplus above actual travelling expenses of all kinds. This is now altered; each Messenger receives a definite annual remuneration for his services‒less than formerly, but quite sufficient for the kind of work done. In fact postal facilities and the electric telegraph are gradually lessening the necessity for the adoption of the Messenger system. Nevertheless there are times when a home Messenger is thrown upon his own resources. When the Queen is at Balmoral, and floods and snow-storms block the railways and render the roads impassable, the Messenger must perforce get on somehow or other with his despatch bag, at any cost of money, toil, and anxiety; and he does get on, although the newspapers are not told much about it.

HELENA, LADY HARROGATE

CHAPTER V.‒IN THE WASTE.

It was Wednesday, a half-holiday at the village school of High Tor, and the work of learning and the yet harder toil of teaching were for that day over. Ethel Gray had seen the last of her released pupils scamper joyously off homewards, and was busied in putting away books and maps, when the clatter of heavy shoes caused her to turn her eyes towards the doorway, wherein stood a tall slip of a girl, looking absurdly big and bony for the clothes which she had outgrown. Ethel knew the freckled face, and smiled pleasantly in answer to its owner’s grin of recognition.

‘If you please, miss,’ said the new-comer, sidling towards the school-mistress‒‘if you please, mother sent I down from the moor to say how ’twas my little brother didn’t ’tend here nouther Monday, nor yetterer Tuesday, nor now. Little Lenny be down in the fever; that’s why he ben’t here, please.’

‘What fever?’ asked Ethel. She had not been long enough at High Tor to become thoroughly familiar with the diction of the country folks.

‘The fever, to be sure!’ reiterated the tall girl, who might have been some fourteen years of age, amazed that so learned a personage as she took Miss Gray to be should boggle over so patent a physiological fact. ‘It do be going about most at fall-time; but Lenny’s only a wishy one, ye know, so he’s took with the shiver fits in June, getting wet at the hayfield; and so, mother bein’ main fond o’ he, as we ’m all, when he begs her to “let Miss Gray, to school, know ’twarn’t his fault,” why mother says: “Betty, get thee down to village and do the child’s arrand.” That be all.’

The quick tears rose glistening to Ethel’s eyes. There was something pathetic in the idea of this tiny sufferer tossing on his bed of pain beneath the rotting thatch of the cottage among the moorlands, and anxious to excuse his involuntary default to the kind teacher whom he had already learned to love. He was a pet pupil of Ethel’s, this wee boy Lenny, or Leonard Mudge by name, as being one of those rare learners who seem to thirst after the fountains of knowledge towards which others have to be cajoled or driven. Day after day had the new school-mistress seen Lenny in class, the readiest to come, the least eager to leave, his bright large eyes intent upon the face of his instructress.

The parents had been proud of the little fellow’s cleverness, and with an unselfishness not universal in the poor and struggling class to which they belonged, had contrived not merely to save the school-pence that supplemented the government grant, but to send the boy down under such escort as could be found for him, day after day. Now it was a carter, who would perch Lenny on the shaft of his rough chariot; now a stalwart lass, bent on earning her ninepence for a day’s hard work at the washing-tub, and who allowed the little scholar to trot by her side; sometimes a mushroom-gatherer or gleaner of whortleberries{52} from the waste, and who was not unwilling to take temporary charge of Lenny. Sometimes, as a great concession, Sister Betty would be spared from weeding or cow-tending, to convoy Leonard, too young to go alone, to High Tor. As for Betty herself, she had been relegated, long ago in the bygone days of her own short schooling, into the category of unteachables. She was a good girl; but two successive mistresses had given her up as a hopeless dunce, long before Betty began to earn two-thirds of her own living, and Ethel Gray to be mistress of High Tor school.

‘I’ll go and see Lenny. It is a half-holiday for me, you know, as well as for the children. How far is it, Betty? But I’m sure it is not too far, for I am a tolerable walker, if you will shew me the way,’ said Ethel impulsively. Now this, as Betty knew, was the very consummation which her mother, whose perceptions had been for the time sharpened by the stimulus of maternal love, desired to bring about. The moorland lass was not much of a diplomatist, but she was quite well aware that to exaggerate the difficulties of an enterprise is often to damp the spirits of those who undertake it.

‘It’s not fur,’ said Betty argumentatively; ‘that’s to say,’ she added, as her conscience smote her, ‘not to call fur, but a goodish walk. But ’tis mortal fine to-day. And Lenny he’d be so glad!’

Ethel hesitated no longer, but merely mentioning her errand to the decent old village dame who was her housekeeper and factotum, threw her rain-cloak over her arm‒no bad precaution in that moist climate‒and under Betty’s guidance set forth. As to the beauty of the day, Betty was speaking within bounds when she described it as ‘mortal fine.’ The sparkling sky was as blue as a sapphire, and the breeze balmy enough to have blown over the orange groves and geranium hedges of Bermuda. It was, in short, one of those so-called ‘gaudy’ mornings which rarely, in the uncertain climate of our latitudes, finish as they have begun; least of all among the wilds of savage Dartmoor, the very cradle and nesting-place of bad weather.

A long walk it was, over rough and smooth, over wet and dry, by road and track of very various quality, to the cluster of moorland cottages, far off in an upland valley, where dwelt the Mudge family. Betty knew the mileage pretty well, but she kept the information to herself, lest, as she said in her own heart, ‘school-mistress’ should be ‘scared.’ She had a very poor opinion personally of the physical powers of book-learned fellow-creatures; but when she found how well her companion kept pace with her on the steep hill-side, she paused once to say, with shy approval: ‘’Tis yarely well ye walk, miss. We’ll be there before long.’

A curiously contrasted pair would these two have appeared, had any competent observer been there to note the difference between them, as they scaled the edges of the lofty table-land, gashed by ravines and dotted by crags, which constitutes Dartmoor. Betty’s personal appearance has been mentioned. To say that a young female looks lanky and gawky, may, however frequently such adjectives are upon feminine lips, be thought to imply some irreverence towards the sex. But it would be impossible to conceive an accurate idea of Betty Mudge without constructing an ideal portrait of her that should depict her as gawky and lanky, a large-boned, freckled, well-meaning young creature, willingly accepting the responsibilities of a life of hard work and contented ignorance.

Ethel Gray, on the other hand, was a very beautiful girl. Beauty, as we know, is independent of its surroundings, and there is no reason why a village schoolmistress should not possess that dangerous gift. Her plain dress, her plain little hat, could not hide the fact that her figure was faultless, and that she possessed a lovely face and hair that in its dark luxuriance deserved to be called magnificent. What was more remarkable was the sweet dignity of her manner, frank and unpretending as it was. No one could be gentler than Ethel. Children were at home with her at once. But she seemed to be one of those who are born to be respected, without advancing any especial claim to consideration.

Lenny Mudge’s sister ought to have known better than to have entered, with the rash confidence of youth, on what was really five miles of rough walking, on that most treacherous of days, locally denominated as ‘spoiled,’ when a sunny morning is succeeded by the oncoming of a mist as dense as if it had boiled up from the sullen shores of Cocytus or Acheron. The fog fell, as Dartmoor fogs did fall before Britain saw the Roman eagles, with the rapidity of a theatrical drop-scene cutting off the mimic presentment from the clapping hands and levelled opera-glasses of the spectators. Only in this case it was stern reality.

‘Doan’t you be afeard, miss,’ said Betty sturdily; ‘I be moorland born and bred, and I’ll hammer it out somehow.’

But this boast was more easy to make than to fulfil, for everywhere hung, poised in air, something like a silvery veil, shutting out from sight all familiar landmarks, and rendering it impossible to distinguish any object two paces distant. The mist had fallen so abruptly from the huge Tors, as it seemed, that rose here and there like watch-towers of the waste, that a fanciful imagination might have conceived the seething vapour to represent a semi-transparent drapery, suddenly cast from a giant hand over land and sea.

But a minute or two before, Ethel had allowed her eyes to rest admiringly on the many-coloured surface of the vast moor, here robed in purple of imperial splendour, there of tenderest green, and anon brown or crimson or bluish gray, as shrub and berry and weed and wild-flower dappled the rolling ocean of heather. Then below was the cultured plain, furrowed by thickly wooded clefts, through which the Dartmoor streams ran brawling to the sea, that lay calm and blue and flecked with white sails, so plainly within the range of vision. And now all was changed, and it was fog, fog, and fog only, girdling in the wayfarers on every hand, and there was no knowing whither to turn.

Betty Mudge did her best; but her zeal outran her discretion; and indeed the task of pilot in that rolling mist was no easy one. Had there but been a hard road, though never so narrow, beneath her feet, the girl would have gone on cheerfully enough. But there was no real road for about half the distance between High Tor and Shaws, as that solitary spot where stood the abode of the Mudges{53} was called, merely a congeries of winding cart-ruts, among which, in moderately clear weather, it was facile for one who knew the country to make short-cuts at pleasure.

‘If we were to go back?’ suggested Ethel, after a while; but Betty Mudge by no means accepted the proposition.

‘It be just as easy, miss, to go forrard as to go backarder,’ returned Lenny’s sister doggedly; ‘but what’s main hard in the thick is to know which is which.’

They went on for some time without speaking.

‘I was listening,’ at last said the young guide abruptly, ‘for a sheep-bell. If I could but hear that, shepherd would put us right.’

But though Ethel hearkened also, in hopes of catching the far-off tinkle of a bell from some folded flock, the silence remained as unbroken as though man, with all his works and ways, had been banished from the island. Nothing but blinding mist to greet the eye, nothing but heather and peat and stones beneath the feet, as the two stumbled and groped forward, going deeper and deeper, for aught they knew, into the heart of the wilderness. The misty vapour heaved and rolled like a billowy sea, taking fantastic shapes, here of a threatening giant, there of a winding-sheet spread by no mortal hand, there again of a battlemented castle rearing its towers aloft.

There are landscape painters‒even aspiring young Associates, newly elected, of the Royal Academy‒whom it would have greatly gratified to have been on the moor that day, and to have seen the fluctuating hues of the mist, here fleecy snow, there translucent silver, elsewhere such pearly grays as the colour-box fails to render, while sunwards a faint pale shimmering streak of tender opal stretched, like Jacob’s ladder, almost from heaven to earth. It was a study worthy of an artist’s heed too, the manner in which the bare bleak Tors, red, brown, gray, according to the nature of the stone, cropped up from the moor, each crag rising out of the peaty soil like the bones of a buried Titan. But poor Ethel became very tired as she wandered on under the aimless guidance of Betty Mudge, who was herself tired, and who could but guess, and that wildly, in which direction home might lie.

‘Ware!’ she cried, as Ethel was about to plant her foot unsuspectingly on an inviting patch of emerald turf. ‘Yon’s bog, yon is, deep enow to suck down a horse to the saddle-laps. Never trust the green, and the greener the softer, miss. Send, we moun’t a strayed to Heronsmere or the Blackpool, for there be swamps there would swallow bigger nor we. Gran’father, they tell, smouthered in Blackpool, but ’twere in winter-time.’

Then there came creeping like insidious enemies into Ethel’s mind all the weird legends which since her stay at High Tor she had heard regarding the waste. There were tales of belated horsemen and lonely foot-travellers overwhelmed by snow-storms in winter, and lying dead among the drifts, the prey of the hill-fox and the carrion crow. There were tales too of those who had been lost in the blinding mist, and had either perished in some quagmire, or died miserably of hardship and exhaustion, after many hours of walking on the moor.

‘It ben’t of no manner o’ good!’ said Betty, after another long spell of silence. ‘We may walk till we drop. I’m main tired myself. And what’s the use? For oughter we know, we may be going round and round.’

Ethel too was weary, so weary that it was with difficulty she could raise her voice to urge on her now desponding companion the expediency of a renewed effort. ‘Surely, surely,’ she said, ‘we shall, if we persevere, come upon some road or see the lights‒for it must be getting late‒in some farm or cottage.’

‘One Tor be terrible like another,’ returned Betty with a sob. ‘I got no more notion whirrabouts we be, nor if I were fresh dropped out of the moon. I’m no use here, and can hardly drag. And what’ll mother say!’

And the girl sat down on a fragment of rock which jutted from a bluff stony Tor rising overhead, and began to weep. And then there forced itself on Ethel’s mind the dreadful thought that they had perhaps really been walking in a circle until their forces were spent, and might die of fatigue, cold, and even hunger before they should be discovered. Who could tell when the fog would disperse! The mist might overhang the lofty table-land of the moor for whole days, possibly for weeks, cutting the lost ones as completely off from succour as some shipwrecked mariner on his desolate isle. No sound floated to Ethel’s ears as she listened long and eagerly.

‘Don’t cry, Betty; don’t cry. Something‒I know not what‒tells me that we shall get through this safely yet,’ said Ethel, as she too took her seat upon the rock, and laid her hand kindly on that of her young companion. But Betty only blubbered the more furiously.

‘’Tain’t so much for me, miss!’ she said. ‘It be my fault, every bit on’t. I brought you here. And Lenny‒and mother’‒‒ The train of ideas thus conjured up acted so strongly on the untutored imagination of Betty Mudge, that she wept so loudly and dolefully that her wails re-echoed through the solitary waste.

What was that? Surely a human voice calling aloud at some distance through the fog, as if in answer to Betty’s inarticulate plaint. Yes, there was no mistake this time. It was the hearty halloo of a deep voice, and the words were: ‘Ho! I say, there! What ails you? Anything wrong?’

‘We be lost in fog!’ called out the girl by way of answer.

‘It’s a woman or a child,’ exclaimed another voice from the mist. ‘Push on, Bates! The cry came from this direction to the left.’ And presently, bursting through the floating wreaths of vapour, appeared the figures of two men, the shorter and sturdier of whom, a gamekeeper by his velveteen coat and leathern gaiters, and the metal dog-whistle at his button-hole, led a pony with a creel strapped to the saddle-bow.

‘Here they are, my Lord!’ ejaculated this functionary, as he caught sight of the forlorn two upon the rock. The gentleman to whom he spoke came hurrying up across the stony ground, a fishing-rod in his hand.

‘Don’t be frightened, my little maid,’ he called out cheerily to Betty, who wept more unrestrainedly than ever, now that help was near; and then, catching a glimpse of Ethel’s pale beautiful face as she looked up, he exclaimed: ‘Why, this is a lady‒here!’ and instinctively he raised his hat. ‘Stop! It is Miss Gray from{54} the village, if I am not mistaken.‒You must let me see you safely off the moor. I live near, at High Tor; though I daresay you do not know me, Miss Gray. I have seen you at church.’

‘Yes, I know you, Lord Harrogate,’ returned Ethel, trying to rise, but sinking back fainting and giddy on her rocky seat. ‘I am sorry to give you trouble, but’‒‒ Her voice failed her, and her eyes seemed to be darkened. The quick revulsion of feeling, from what was all but sheer despair to the consciousness of being saved, had intensified the effects of great physical fatigue. She heard the young man’s voice addressing herself, but could not distinguish the words because of the low droning sound that filled her ears as she sat passive on the rock. Who he was she quite well knew. It was not possible for the member of a small congregation such as that in High Tor church to be ignorant of the features of so notable an occupant of Lord Wolverhampton’s pew as the Earl’s son and heir. Tall, handsome, and manly, Lord Harrogate was worth looking at for his own sake; but Ethel had never thus looked upon him until she found herself thus confronted with him in the mist, as her rescuer from certain suffering, perhaps from death.

‘If you are able to walk, Miss Gray,’ said Lord Harrogate earnestly, ‘will you take my arm and lean on me? My servant will charge himself with the child here; indeed I do not think he can do better than to set her on the pony, as she seems so tired. We must all of us rely on Bates’s guidance to get clear of the waste. Happily, he is a thorough moorman, and can pick his way where I should be at fault.’

‘Ay, ay, my Lord,’ returned Bates, flattered by the compliment, but honestly unwilling to be pranked in borrowed plumage. ‘But if we were t’ other side o’ Pinkney Ridge or Cranmere way, I’d not be so gey ready to take the lead in a fog like this one. I’ve heard of moormen straying round and round, and lying down to die in a drift within gunshot o’ their own house-door. But we were on the hard path just now, so if we can but strike it again, we’re safe.’

They started, Betty Mudge perched sideways on the pony, which the keeper led; while Ethel, in spite of her protestation that she could walk unaided, was glad to avail herself of the support of Lord Harrogate’s arm. It was not all plain sailing, for so dense was the fog that even the experienced keeper was puzzled for a time, until his sharp ear caught the well-known babble of a brook.

‘’Tis running water!’ cried Bates in triumph. ‘Safest plan on the moor is to follow running water, for that won’t deceive. We’ll win through it.’

And indeed a short half-hour brought the party to the firm high-road, with the gates of High Tor Park, topped by their stone wyverns, within sight. Betty Mudge, who announced herself as having an aunt in the village at whose cottage she could pass the night, was despatched under convoy to that relative’s abode. But Ethel Grey looked so worn and ill, that Lord Harrogate insisted on her retaining his arm up the carriage-drive leading to the house, where she could receive the attention her state required.

‘My mother and sisters will take care of you, I know,’ he said, as he supported her slow steps through the park, where the fog, so dense upon the frowning hills above, only floated in fitful wreaths. The house was reached, and great was the surprise of those within when Lord Harrogate appeared with Ethel, pale, patient, exhausted, but beautiful still, her dark hair and her dress dripping with wet, leaning on his strong arm. The Countess was kind; and her daughters, beautiful golden-haired Lady Gladys, honest-eyed earnest Lady Maud, even Lady Alice, a clever child of twelve, were still more kind. A bright wood-fire was soon blazing in what was called the Yellow Room; and Ethel, seated as near to the crackling logs as her chair could be placed, and propped up with cushions, was able to dry her wet tresses and drenched garments; while Lord Harrogate’s sisters, and Lady Maud in especial, pressed her to partake of tea and other refreshments, and spoke soothingly to her, and were very full of tender womanly sympathy.

Lady Maud, the Earl’s second daughter, knew the new school-mistress better than did the others, and liked her. She was herself a constant visitor at the school-house, and had heard many and many an urchin stammer through his or her lessons there, and could therefore the better appreciate the motive which had led Ethel into her late danger, through a natural wish to comfort little Lenny on his bed of fever. Warmth, and that kindliness of manner which women shew more than we do, did much towards bringing Ethel back from that death-in-life which excessive fatigue and chill tend to produce; and when the carriage was, in spite of her remonstrance, ‘ordered round,’ to convey her home to the school, she had strength enough to walk unaided to the door. Lord Harrogate had disappeared. The Earl had not as yet returned from some meeting of magistrates. ‘I will come down to see you, Miss Gray, to-morrow, if I can,’ said Lady Maud, as the carriage drove off.

CHAPTER VI.‒SIR SYKES MAKES AN ANNOUNCEMENT.

‘Lucy, my dear, and Blanche too, I want to know how you would like to receive here, at Carbery, a young lady who is a total stranger to all of us; but who, if she comes at all, comes with a distinct understanding that this house, until she marries, is her home. I ask you this, my dears, because I have received a letter’‒and the baronet pointed to a black-bordered envelope that lay, with others, beside his plate‒‘inclosing one penned, long ago, by a hand which can write no more. George Willis‒Major, when he died, in the Indian army‒was one of my earliest and truest friends. He is dead now. He left behind him this one girl, his only and motherless child, and‒and he begs me, in a letter, indorsed “After my death to be forwarded to Sir Sykes Denzil,” to become the guardian of this‒this poor orphaned thing. How do you say, my girls? Shall we have her here at Carbery, or not?’

It was very neatly and prettily put on the part of Sir Sykes, and the appeal was all the more effective because of the quietude and cool indifference of the baronet’s ordinary manner. He was a cold, unemotional person, in the everyday routine of life; and hence the quivering of his lips, the faltering of his voice, added much of{55} pathos to what might otherwise have seemed commonplace.

As for the answer to the question asked, could there be a doubt of it! It is to the credit of a woman’s heart that it always, when a plea is well urged, responds to the Open Sesamé of compassion. They may not, as men do, seek out hidden wrongs to be righted and unseen pangs to be assuaged. But the distress that lies at their door they seek to comfort; and had the young ladies of Carbery been very much poorer than they were, their reply to their father’s question would have been as generously outspoken.

‘By all means, yes, papa, let us have the poor girl here‒this Miss‒Willis I think is her name; and we will try to make her happy. How sad!’ And Blanche and Lucy were all but in tears over the woes of this Anglo-Indian orphan; while Jasper, hiding his face behind his coffee-cup, reflected that ‘the governor’ was a cool hand, and did his little bit of acting in a manner worthy of Barnum himself.

In most houses of sufficient dignity to own a special letter-bag, the temporary office of post-master is publicly discharged. The old Earl of Wolverhampton, for instance, found it pleasant to sort and classify the motley mass of correspondence which came daily to High Tor; but he would almost as soon have opened a servant’s letter as have opened the bag otherwise than in the presence of guests and kindred. Carbery Chase, however, was not High Tor, and Sir Sykes Denzil was a very different family chief from his noble neighbour. The baronet was an early riser, as are many men who have spent much of their lives in India; and he chose that the post-bag should be brought to him in the library an hour or so before the usual assembling for breakfast. Jasper, who was of a suspicious temper, resented this exercise of parental authority; but he was wrong. There may have been passages in Sir Sykes’s life which would not, if published, have redounded to his credit, but tampering with letters was not congenial to him. He never gave a second glance to any envelope addressed to Captain Denzil or the captain’s sisters, and was as loyal a custodian of the family correspondence as any gentleman in the whole county of Devon. There was this advantage in the baronet’s habit as regarded the post-bag, that nobody could tell what letters Sir Sykes received or when he did receive them. There are many of us, and those not the least loved or esteemed, whose letters are as it were public property, and with whom reticence on the subject of a missive newly received by the post would diffuse disquiet and perhaps dismay through the domestic circle. Sir Sykes had never been one of those who wear their hearts, metaphorically, on their sleeves; he told those around him as much as he wished them to know, and no more.

There was quite a flutter of pleasurable excitement among the Denzil girls at the prospect of a new member of the household, a new face at Carbery. They were sorry for this poor Miss Willis, sorrier for her by far than for the many orphans whose bereavement is notified to us every day by a grim list of deaths dryly chronicled in the newspaper. And they felt doubly disposed to welcome her and be good to her in that she was lonely and sad, and that her presence would introduce a new element into Carbery. They made no sacrifice in giving a cheerful acquiescence to their father’s suggestion that his ward should be received beneath his roof. In such a house the maintenance of an extra inmate was of no moment at all. But had Sir Sykes been living in furnished lodgings, and forced to look twice at half-a-crown, those honest girls would still not have grudged a share of their hashed mutton and scanty house-room to the daughter of an old friend of their father’s.

‘I don’t think, sir, that I remember to have heard you mention the Major’s name,’ said Jasper, stolidly buttering his toast, but furtively eyeing his father from beneath his pale eyelashes.

‘I think you have heard it,’ answered Sir Sykes, with a self-possession that all but staggered Jasper’s unbelief. ‘We were quartered together for years at Allahabad, Cawnpore, and Lahore. There were Reynolds and L’Estrange, and Moreton who is living yet, and this poor fellow Willis; the old set, with whom I was intimate. I don’t often bore listeners who have never been in India, with the details of my eastern experiences, else I think that the name of Major‒or Captain‒George Willis would be tolerably familiar here.’

That the girls, in their newly awakened interest, should ask questions was but natural. But their father had not very much beyond the substance of his original announcement to communicate. He had, he said, but a vague recollection of Mrs Willis, his friend’s wife, a bride when Sir Sykes returned to Europe, and who had now been dead for some years. She was a quiet domestic little person, from Wales or Ireland, the baronet did not know which; and she had some pittance of annual income, which would no doubt go to her child at the husband’s decease. Major Willis had no private means, at least so Sir Sykes thought. There was a London lawyer, however, who knew all about the financial affairs of the orphan, and who would of course render a proper statement to the baronet’s solicitors. Miss Willis would be entitled, as the child of an Indian officer, to no pension, being, as Sir Sykes understood, over the age of twenty-one; but of that again he was not sure, not being certain of the exact age of his friend’s daughter. She had no very near relatives, and had never, to Sir Sykes’s knowledge, been in England before.

‘It was the chaplain of the military station who wrote,’ continued Sir Sykes, ‘inclosing in his letter that which poor Willis had left for myself; and unless I telegraph to veto the arrangement, you are likely to see Miss Ruth‒did I say that her name was Ruth‒very soon, since she is to start by the next mail from Bombay.’

‘Well,’ muttered Jasper to himself, as some time later in the morning he sauntered through the plantations, the path across which made a short cut from Carbery Chase to Lord Wolverhampton’s park at High Tor, ‘I have seen some cool hands; but‒‒ Well, well! It was neatly done, very neatly. If the governor had not had the rare luck to come into a fortune, he would have been as fit to make one as any man I ever came across.’

The young man, whose preference for crooked ways was congenital, and who knew of no road to Fortune’s temple save miry and devious ones, began really to feel an admiration for his father’s abilities, since he had discovered to what profound depths of dissimulation the baronet could descend. His own craft had enabled him to lift a corner of{56} the fair seeming mask which Sir Sykes wore before the world, but as yet his knowledge was too imperfect to enable its possessor to make capital of the secret. Could he once‒‒

‘Why, Captain Denzil!’ exclaimed a ringing girlish voice, ‘I could almost give you credit for poetic reveries, so complete is your unconsciousness of the mere commonplace world around you. You had all but passed us without a word or a bow.’

Jasper could not repress a slight start, as he found himself in presence of the three Ladies De Vere and of their brother Lord Harrogate, in the main avenue of the park. The young man’s moody countenance brightened at once.

‘I am not, as a rule, greatly given to dreaming in broad daylight, Lady Gladys,’ he said good-humouredly; ‘and as for the poetry, I’ll promise to dedicate my first volume of sonnets, or whatever they call them, to yourself. I am afraid, though, you will have to wait a little before I take a plunge into literature.’

‘Of books‒of a sort, you have been rather a diligent compiler,’ said Lord Harrogate, smiling.

Jasper bit his lip; but it was in a careless tone that he rejoined: ‘That’s only too true; but let me tell you, Harrogate, there goes more of hard thinking to the composition of a betting-book than people usually suppose.‒I was on my way to the house, meaning to inflict a little of my dullness on you, Lady Maud, but you are early abroad.’

‘Yes; and you may as well walk down with us,’ said Lady Maud. ‘We are going to the school, to see how my friend, Miss Gray, the school-mistress, fares after her moorland adventure of Saturday. You heard of it, Captain Denzil?’

No; Jasper had not heard of it. And on receiving an account of it from Lady Maud’s lips, the captain said, with never so little of a sneer, that the episode was ‘quite romantic.’

‘Come and see the heroine of it,’ said bright-eyed Lady Gladys; ‘and you who affect to admire nothing, will be compelled to admit that you have seen a face such as we very seldom behold except in a picture.’

The party walked on together thus chatting until they reached the village. The young people of the two great houses, High Tor and Carbery Chase, had naturally been well acquainted with one another from an early period; and the two elder of the De Vere girls were disposed to pity Jasper rather than to blame him for the recklessness that had brought about his exile from the haunts of fashion. But the captain knew that Lord Harrogate and he were uncongenial spirits. He did not like Harrogate, and he had a shrewd idea that Harrogate despised him. We cannot, however, be very eclectic in the depths of the country as regards those with whom we associate, and hence these two young men, of natures so dissimilar, tolerated one another because of the ancient friendship existing between their families.

The school was reached, and Ethel its mistress, still pale, but lovely as one of the white roses in her tiny garden, came forward to receive her distinguished visitors, and paid her tribute of thanks to Lord Harrogate for the service he had rendered her, with a modest grace which was all the more charming from its extreme simplicity of words and manner.

‘I was too weak and faint the other evening, my Lord, to say what I felt as to your‒your great kindness.’

And a princess could not have spoken better. It was Lord Harrogate who seemed embarrassed, as your honest Briton, gentle or simple, is embarrassed by being thanked. And then, while Lady Maud eagerly told how jelly and hothouse fruit and port wine had been despatched from High Tor to the moorland cottage for the benefit of little Lenny Mudge, and how the parish doctor spoke hopefully of his small patient, Jasper looked at Ethel Gray with a sort of wonder, as at the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen, and the most thoroughly a lady, not even excepting Lady Gladys De Vere. But he said nothing, and lounged carelessly off with the party when adieus had been exchanged with Miss Gray.

STORY OF CAPTAIN GLASS.

About the time of the accession of George III. to the throne, few domestic events made a greater sensation in the papers and periodicals of the day than the adventures and fate of a sea-captain named George Glass, especially in connection with a mutiny on board the brig Earl of Sandwich. This remarkable man, who was one of fifteen children of John Glass, noted as the originator of the Scottish sect known as the Glassites, was born at Dundee in 1725. After graduating in the medical profession, he made several voyages, as surgeon of a merchant-ship (belonging to London), to the Brazils and the coast of Guinea; and in 1764, he published, by Dodsley, an interesting work in one volume quarto, entitled The History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, translated from a Spanish manuscript.

He obtained command of a Guinea trader, and made several successful voyages, till the war with Spain broke out in January 1762. Having saved a good round sum, he equipped a privateer, and took command of her as captain, to cruise against the French and Spaniards; but he had not been three days at sea, when his crew mutinied, and sent him that which is called in sea-phraseology a round-robin (a corruption of an old French military term, the ruban rond, or round ribbon), in which they wrote their names in a circle; hence none could know who was the leader.

Arming himself with his cutlass and pistols, Glass came on deck, and offered to fight, hand to hand, any man who conceived himself to be wronged in any way. But the crew, knowing his personal strength, his skill and resolution, declined the challenge. He succeeded in pacifying them by fair words; and the capture of a valuable French merchantman a few days after put them all in excellent humour. This gleam of good fortune was soon after clouded by an encounter with an enemy’s frigate, which though twice the size of his privateer, Glass resolved to engage; and for two hours they fought broadside to broadside, till another French vessel bore down on him, and he was compelled to strike his colours, after half his crew had been killed and he had received a musket-shot in the shoulder.

He remained for some time a French prisoner of war in the Antilles, where he was treated with excessive severity; but upon being exchanged, he resolved to embark the remainder of his fortune in{57} another privateer, and ‘have it out,’ as he said, with the French and Dons. But he was again taken in action, and lost everything he had in the world.

On being released a second time, he was employed by London merchants in several voyages to the West Indies, in command of ships that fought their way without convoy; and according to a statement in the Annual Register, he was captured no less than seven times. But after various fluctuations of fortune, when the general peace took place in 1763, he found himself possessed of two thousand guineas prize-money, with the reputation of being one of the best merchant captains in the Port of London.

About that time, a Company there resolved to make an attempt to form a settlement on the west coast of Africa, by founding a harbour and town midway between the Cape de Verd and the river Senegal. In the London and other papers of the day we find many statements urging the advantage of opening up the Guinea-trade; among others, a strange letter from a merchant, who tells us he was taken prisoner in a battle on that coast, and that when escaping he ‘crossed a forest within view of the sea, where there lay elephants’ teeth in quantities sufficient to load one hundred ships.’

In the interests of this new Company Glass sailed in a ship of his own to the coast of Guinea, and selected and surveyed a harbour at a place which he was certain might become the centre of a great trade in teak and cam woods, spices, palm oil and ivory, wax and gold. Elated with his success, he returned to England, and laid his scheme before the ministry, among whom were John Earl of Sandwich, Secretary of State, and the Earl of Hillsborough, Commissioner of Trade and Plantations.

With truly national patience and perseverance, he underwent all the procrastination and delays of office, but ultimately obtained an exclusive right of trading to his own harbour for twenty years. Assisted by two merchants‒the Company would seem to have failed‒he fitted out his ship anew, and sailed for the intended harbour; and sent on shore a man who knew the country well, to make propositions of trade with the natives, who put him to death the moment they saw him.

Undiscouraged by this event, Captain Glass found means to open up a communication with the king of the country, to lay before him the wrong that had been done, and the advantages that were certain to accrue from mutual trade and barter. The sable potentate affected to be pleased with the proposal, but only to the end that he might get Glass completely into his power; but the Scotsman was on his guard, and foiled him.

The king then attempted to poison the whole crew by provisions which he sent on board impregnated by some deadly drug. Glass, by his previous medical knowledge perhaps, discovered this in time; but so scarce had food become in his vessel, that he was compelled to go with a few hands in an open boat to the Canaries, where he hoped to purchase what he wanted from the Spaniards.

In his absence the savages were encouraged to attack the ship in their war-canoes; but were repulsed by a sharp musketry-fire opened upon them by the remainder of the crew, who losing heart by the protracted absence of the captain, quitted his fatal harbour, and sailed for the Thames, which they reached in safety.

Meanwhile the unfortunate captain, after landing on one of the Canaries, presented a petition to the Spanish governor to the effect that he might be permitted to purchase food; but that officer, inflamed by national animosity, cruelly threw him into a dark and damp dungeon, and kept him there without pen, ink, or paper, on the accusation that he was a spy. Being thus utterly without means of making his case known, he contrived another way of communicating with the external world. One account has it that he concealed a pencilled note in a loaf of bread which fell into the hands of the British consul; another states that he wrote with a piece of charcoal on a ship-biscuit and sent it to the captain of a British man-of-war that was lying off the island, and who with much difficulty, and after being imprisoned himself, effected the release of Glass. The latter, on being joined by his wife and daughter, who had come in search of him, set sail for England in 1765, on board the merchant brig Earl of Sandwich, Captain Cochrane.

Glass doubtless supposed his troubles were now over; but the knowledge that much of his property and a great amount of specie, one hundred thousand pounds, belonging to others, was on board, induced four of the crew to form a conspiracy to murder every one else and seize the ship. These mutineers were respectively George Gidley, the cook, a native of the west of England; Peter M’Kulie, an Irishman; Andrew Zekerman, a Hollander; and Richard H. Quintin, a Londoner. On three different nights they are stated to have made the attempt, but were baffled by the vigilance of Captain Glass, rather than that of his countryman, Captain Cochrane; but at eleven o’clock at night on the 30th of November 1765, it chanced, as shewn at their trial, that these four miscreants had together the watch on deck, when the Sandwich was already in sight of the coast of Ireland; and when Captain Cochrane, after taking a survey aloft, was about to return to the cabin, Peter M’Kulie brained him with ‘an iron bar’ (probably a marline-spike), and threw him overboard.

A cry that had escaped Cochrane alarmed the rest of the crew, who were all despatched in the same manner as they rushed on deck in succession. This slaughter and the din it occasioned roused Captain Glass, who was below in bed; but he soon discovered what was occurring, and after giving one glance on deck, rushed away to get his sword. M’Kulie imagining the cause of his going back, went down the steps leading to the cabin, and stood in the dark, expecting Glass’s return, and suddenly seized his arms from behind; but the captain being a man of great strength, wrenched his sword-arm free, and on being assailed by the other three assassins, plunged his weapon into the arm of Zekerman, when the blade became wedged or entangled. It was at length wrenched forth, and Glass was slain by repeated stabs of his own weapon, while his dying cries were heard by his wife and daughter‒two unhappy beings who were ruthlessly thrown overboard and drowned.

Besides these four victims, James Pincent, the mate, and three others lost their lives. The mutineers now loaded one of the boats with the money, chests, and so forth, and then scuttled the{58} Sandwich, and landed at Ross on the coast of Ireland. But suspicion speedily attached to them; they were apprehended; and confessing the crimes of which they had been guilty, were tried before the Court of King’s Bench, Dublin, and sentenced to death. They were accordingly executed in St Stephen’s Green, on the 10th of October 1765.

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE.

On a bright cold day in April 1719, a travelling carriage with three postillions dashed, full of the importance which always attends a fashionable well-built vehicle, into the famous but not progressive town of Innsbruck. The carriage contained four persons, said to be going to Loretto on pilgrimage‒the Comte and Comtesse de Cernes, with the brother and sister of the comtesse; and as the aristocratic party alighted at their hotel, they created some sensation among those who clustered round the porch in the clear sharp twilight. The comtesse and her sister were very much enveloped in furs, and wore travelling masks, which effectually screened their faces from the vulgar gaze, and diverted the curiosity of the homely Tyrolese to the undisguised figures of the comte and the comtesse’s brother. The former was the statelier of the two, but the latter was universally pronounced to be ein herrlicher Mensch. There was a certain sprightly grace in his movements which yet did not detract from the dignity essential in those days to a gentleman, and which would have saved him from being addressed with too great familiarity. The news soon circulated among the loungers that the fresh arrivals were Flemings; and the pleasant blue eyes of the comte and his brother-in-law‒though certainly not the sprightly grace of the latter‒accorded with these floating accounts of their origin.

The pretty Tyrolese hostess, whose face was so charmingly set off by the trim smartness of her velvet bodice and scarlet petticoat, together with various silver chains, gleefully returned to her parlour and her burly good-tempered husband, after attending the ladies to their apartments. She had seen the Comtesse de Cernes without her furs and travelling mask, dressed in lilac camlet turned up with silk; so handsome, so gracious, so talkative, that the hostess thought she must be French; for the hostess had seen plenty of French people before now, besides Flemings. The comtesse was dark-haired and dark-eyed; her sister, who had also divested herself of her mask, did not equal her in appearance. Every one at the inn was glad that the amiable party from Flanders were going to rest there four days.

Their supper was ordered in a private room, where the host and hostess waited on them in person, and consequently had the best of it with the loungers afterwards. The two gentlemen were in good spirits, and the hostess thought their talk none the less amusing for being in a language which she did not understand. Their laughing looks and easy action conveyed to her mind a sufficient sense of fun to make her fair face shine placidly in sympathy. Altogether they were the liveliest Flemings she had ever seen; and their good-humour seemed to be shared by the three postillions, two of whom were Walloons and one Italian, and who were making themselves very popular among the habitués of the inn.

‘Well, this is a pleasant little town of yours, mes amis,’ said the vivacious Walloon outrider, who contrasted strikingly with his great, tall, quietly smiling companion. ‘One could die of ennui here as well as at Liege.’

‘No, you could not,’ returned a long spare poetic Tyrolese, who spent most of his evenings at the inn, but never drank; notwithstanding which peculiarity he and the host were warm friends. ‘We mountain-folk are not dull; our hills and our torrents permit of no dullness.’

‘Very well perhaps for you who are born to it, to hang by your eyelids on rocky ledges, or balance yourselves over what are called in verses the silver threads of waterfalls, in pursuit of an undoubtedly clever and pretty little animal; but all that would be dull work to us. And then you have not a noblesse. What should we do without ours? There would be no one to whom one could be postillion.’

‘We are our own noblesse,’ said the spare poetic Tyrolese.

‘And you cannot say, Claude,’ observed the tall Walloon, ‘that Innsbruck is without noblesse at the present moment; nay more, it contains royalty in the shape of two captive princesses!’

‘One of them the grand-daughter of the hero who saved this empire from the Turks, for which the Emperor now keeps her in durance.’

‘Take care, Monsieur,’ said the host (he pronounced ‘Monsieur’ execrably); ‘we are all the Kaiser’s loyal subjects here in Tyrol.’

‘Pardon, mein Wirth,’ replied Claude, who pronounced German as badly as the host did French. ‘You know we men who run about the world laugh at everything, and too often let our tongues run faster than our feet.’

‘And after all,’ observed the Italian, ‘it is doing the young princess no bad turn to prevent her marrying a prince out of place, who is not likely to recover his situation.’

The Flemings spent the few days of their sojourn at Innsbruck in visiting the churches and seeing what was to be seen in the town. The Comtesse de Cernes’s brother was the busiest of the party. On the morning after his arrival he met in a church porch a rather impish-looking boy in the dress of a ‘long-haired page,’ and the two held a brief colloquy. To this stylish page, in whom the rather shapeless Slavonic type of countenance was widened out by smiles of assurance, the gentleman from Flanders delivered a letter, together with a wonderful snuff-box, cut out of a single turquoise, ‘for his mistress to look at.’ On the three remaining days likewise the two met in different spots; the boy restored the snuff-box, and brought some letters written in a fashionable pointed hand, in return for those with which the Fleming had intrusted him.

The party were to set out on their southward way at two o’clock on the morning of the 28th of April. The evening of the 27th was overshadowed by clouds, driven by a sharp north-east wind. Notwithstanding the aspects of the weather, the brother of the Comtesse de Cernes, standing in the midst of his little party in their private room, donned his cocked-hat and surtout.

‘Well, Wogan,’ said the comte, ‘if practice makes perfect, you are a professor in the art of effecting escapes. After having burst your way{59} out of Newgate, and been valued at five hundred English guineas (much below your worth of course), and cooled yourself for some hours on the roof of a London house, and reached France safely after all, you ought to be able to abstract a young lady from the careless custody of Heister and his sentinels.’

‘I shall be ashamed if I fail, after wringing from Prince Sobieski his consent to the attempt, and after his giving me the Grand Vizier’s snuff-box; but I always find that doing things for other people is more difficult than doing them for one’s self.’

‘I should say she was a clever girl,’ remarked the comte, ‘and her page a clever page.’

‘I wonder if Jannetton is ready?’ said the comtesse, retiring into the bedroom occupied by the ladies, whence she soon emerged with her sister, who wore her paletot, and was smiling sufficiently to shew two rows of exquisitely white teeth. The comtesse on the contrary seemed somewhat affected. ‘Adieu, Jannetton, mais au revoir. There will be no danger to you, and the Archduchess will take care that you join me in Italy.’

Jannetton vowed she had no fears; and went forth into the deepening twilight, being shortly afterwards followed by the gentleman in cocked-hat and surtout. Curiosity did not now dog the Flemish pilgrims, as it had done while they were altogether novelties, and the adventurers slipped out unobserved. Meanwhile the ‘long-haired page’ was busy at one of the side-doors of the castle, where he was often wont to converse with the sentinel on duty.

‘I don’t envy you your trade, Martin,’ he said, standing within the porch, to the hapless soldier pacing up and down in the keen wind. ‘Glory is one thing and comfort another; but after all, very often no one hears of the glory, whereas the comfort is a tangible benefit. With the wind in the north-east and a snow-storm beginning, I at least would rather be comfortable than glorious.’

‘A man who has seen campaigns thinks but little of a snow-storm, Herr Konska.’

‘But they generally put you into winter-quarters,’ said Konska, not wishing the sentinel to pique himself on his hardihood.

‘No matter; a soldier learns what hardship is. I wish you could see a shot-and-shell storm instead of a snow-storm, or a forest of bayonets poked into your face by those demons of Irish in the French service.’

‘Well, I say it is a shame not to treat you men better who have braved all that. See here; there is not even a sentry-box where you can nurse your freezing feet. Ugh!’ And Konska withdrew, presumably to warmer regions, while the soldier preserved a heroic appearance as he paced shivering on his narrow beat. But a few minutes later Konska, stealing back to the door, saw that his martial friend was no longer at his post. The impish page pointed for a moment in ecstasy to a tavern temptingly visible from the sentry’s beat. Then he darted back in delight to whence he came.

While the snow-clouds were gathering over Innsbruck, and before the Flemish chevalier had put on his surtout, two ladies conversed in low tones in a chamber of the castle, of which General Heister was then the commandant. Only one lady was visible; rather elderly, very stately, and somewhat careworn in appearance. But that the other speaker was of gentle sex and rank might be presumed from the tones of a voice which issued from the closed curtains of the bed. It might even be the voice of a young girl.

‘I hope you will not get into trouble, mamma,’ said the mysterious occupier of the bed.

‘Hardly, if you write a proper letter on the subject of your departure, as the Chevalier Wogan advises. You must cover my complicity by begging my pardon.’

‘I am afraid you must write it yourself, mamma, as I am hors de combat.’

‘That would not be to the purpose, my dear child: the general would know my handwriting. I will push a table up to you; no one will disturb us now till your substitute comes.’ She carried a light table, furnished with inkstand and papetière to the side of the bed, and made an aperture in the curtains, whence emerged the rosy bright-eyed face of a girl‒who certainly did not look the invalid she otherwise appeared to be‒and a white hand with an aristocratic network of blue veins.

‘Will that do, mamma?’ she asked, after covering a page with writing equally elegant and difficult to read. ‘Have I apologised and stated my reasons for going, eloquently enough? Oh, how I hope that I shall some day be a queen in my own capital, and that you and papa will come and live there!’

The mamma sighed, as swift imagination presented to her mind all the obstacles to so glorious a consummation; but she expressed herself well satisfied with the letter, which she placed on the toilet table. ‘I shall leave you now,’ she said; ‘you will find me in my room when you wish to bid me farewell.’ She spoke with a certain stately sadness as she left the apartment. The next person who entered it was the Comtesse de Cernes’s sister in her paletot, with a hood drawn forward over her face. She only said: ‘Que votre Altesse me pardonne!’ (Pardon me, your Highness.)

Instantly the curtains divided once more, and the whole radiant vision of the mysterious invalid, clad in a dressing-gown richly trimmed with French lace, and shewing a face sparkling with animation, sprang forth laughing: ‘You are the substitute?’

‘Yes, your Highness!’

‘I am sure I thank you very heartily, as well as Madame Misset and the Chevalier Wogan, and all the kind and loyal friends who are taking so much trouble for my consort and for me. The Archduchess will take good care of you, Jannetton.’

Jannetton again shewed her teeth in a courtly smile as she courtesied deeply. She was already persuaded that she would be well cared for, in reward for the mysterious services she had come to render the captive lady. She disencumbered herself of her paletot, and looked amazingly like a very neat French waiting-maid until she had bedizened herself in the young lady’s beautifully worked dressing-gown. Then she speedily disappeared behind the curtains of the bed; while the invalid, wrapping herself in the paletot, rushed into the next room to embrace with tears and smiles her anxious mamma, who said but little, and was now only eager to hurry her away. There too she took possession of her page, and a small box which{60} was to accompany her flight down the dark staircases. ‘Your Highness will find all safe,’ said the solemn page, who was careful to suppress outer signs of his innate roguishness in the presence of his mistresses.

‘The sentinel will not know me?’ said the young lady.

‘I am sure that he will not. Even if by chance he should look out from the window of the tavern where he is now ensconced, it is not very likely that he would know your Highness.’

The black clouds which obscured the blueness of the April night had broken forth into a lashing storm of hail and wind before the young girl and the page sallied forth into the darkness. She could hardly keep her footing in the wet deserted streets; her hood was blown back, and her fair hair became dangerously visible; her paletot was splashed with the mud thrown up by her tread, and battered with hail; still she laughed at all difficulties, for a hero’s blood flowed in her veins, and now and then steadied herself by a touch on the page’s shoulder as they floundered on. At the corner of a street they suddenly came upon a dark figure, whose first appearance as it crossed her path caused the fugitive to start back in some alarm. But it was only the Comtesse de Cernes’s brother; and the young lady’s mind was relieved when with a swift grace he bent for a moment over her hand with the words: ‘My princess, soon to be my sovereign, accept the homage, even in a dark street and a hail-storm, of your loyal servant, Charles Wogan.’

‘Oh, my protector and good angel! is it indeed you?’ replied the young lady. ‘Be assured that I would gladly go through many dark streets and hail-storms to join my consort!’

And certainly this was a generous expression to use concerning a consort whom she had never seen. She and the Flemish chevalier were apparently old friends; and he had soon conducted her to the inn, which the page Konska, however, was not to enter with his mistress; he was to wait in a sheltered archway until the Comte de Cernes’s travelling carriage should pick him up on its way out of Innsbruck in the darkness of early morning. With a grimace he departed for this covert, while his mistress was hurried into the warm atmosphere of the Comtesse de Cernes’s bedroom, where that would-be Loretto pilgrim knelt and kissed her hand. But better even than loyal kisses were the bright wood-fire, the posset, and the dry clothes which also awaited her in this room.

‘And you are Madame Misset, the noble Irish lady of whom my good angel Wogan speaks in his letters! How can I thank you for the trouble you take for me! I regard him quite in the place of my papa. But you all seem to be as good as he is!’

‘Madame,’ replied the lady thus addressed, with all the loyalty of eighteenth-century speech, ‘your Highness knows that it is a delight to a subject to serve such a sovereign as our gracious prince; and all that I have done is at my husband’s bidding.’

‘With such subjects, I am sure it will not be long before he regains his throne. Ah, this delightful fire! Do you know, Madame, it is snowing and hailing outside as if it were January!’

If Madame Misset felt some concern at the thought of the impending journey‒if not for her own sake, at least for that of her husband, she expressed none, except on her Highness’s account. However, her Highness gaily laughed at hardship and difficulty, and was not at all depressed at having left her mother in the castle-prison. Her only fear was that she should be missed from the castle before she had got clear of Innsbruck. But matters were too well arranged for so speedy a termination of the romance. By two o’clock of the windy spring morning the travelling carriage was ready, the Tyrolese landlord and landlady little suspecting, as they sped their parting guests, that the second lady who entered it in cloak and mask was any other than that sister of the Comtesse de Cernes who had arrived four days before.

‘Oh, my good Papa Wogan!’ exclaimed the latest addition to the party of pilgrims, as they were rolled into the darkness of that wild night, ‘how delighted I am to be free again, and about to join my royal consort! I owe more than I can express to all, but most to you!’ Which she might well say, seeing that it was ‘Papa Wogan’ who had selected her as the bride of this consort to whom her devotion was so great. She chattered brightly away, with the natural vivacity of eighteen in an adventure, rejoicing in her new-found freedom however cold it might be; and the only clouded face in the carriage was that of the Comtesse de Cernes. She was anxious on account of the vivacious little man who had formerly been postillion, and who was now riding far behind the carriage with his tall companion, to keep at bay possible couriers, who might soon be hurrying to the border fortresses with news that a prisoner had escaped the vigilance of General Heister at the Castle of Innsbruck. The two gentlemen in the carriage assured her that no harm would happen to two such dashing cavaliers; but perhaps the comtesse thought that to those who are safe it is easy to talk of safety. Not that any of the party were really safe, but the cheerfulness of the young lady, whose passport was shewn at all the towns as made out for the sister of the Comtesse de Cernes, seemed to preclude the idea of peril to her companions. At Venice the mind of the comtesse was finally set at ease by the reappearance of the outriders, telling a funny unscrupulous sort of story about having fallen in on the road with a courier from Innsbruck, to whom they made themselves very agreeable, and whom they finally left hopelessly tipsy at an inn near Trent.

‘It was very wrong of you, Messieurs,’ said the escaped fugitive, ‘to make him drink so much; you ought to have tied him up somewhere. But I thank you very much for all the dangers you incurred for my sake; and I assure all of you, my good friends, that your king and queen will never forget you.’

There were no telegrams in those days; but before a week was over, all Europe, or rather all political and fashionable Europe, was talking of the escape of the Princess Clementina Sobieski, grand-daughter of the hero who repulsed the hordes of Turkey on the plains before Vienna, from her captivity at the Castle of Innsbruck, where she and her mother had‒for political reasons connected with Great Britain‒been placed by her cousin, the Emperor Charles VI. of Germany. It was told with indignation at the courts of London and Vienna, with laughter and admiration at those of Rome, Paris, and Madrid, how she had been carried off by a party of dashing Irish people, calling themselves noble Flemish pilgrims;{61} and how she had left a French maid-servant in her place in the castle, and a letter to her mother apologising for her flight. The prime contriver of the adventure, it was said was that Chevalier Wogan who had been in mischief for some time past, and had made his own way with great aplomb out of Newgate.

At Venice, a singular readjustment of the dashing party took place: the vivacious outrider now appearing in the character of Captain Misset, the husband of Madame Misset, hitherto called the Comtesse de Cernes; and the tall outrider in that of Captain O’Toole, both being of the Franco-Irish regiment of Count Dillon, as was also the gallant Major Gaydon, alias the Comte de Cernes. The comtesse’s brother was now no longer related to her, but acknowledged himself to be that Charles Wogan who had really done much for the Chevalier, having fought for him, been taken prisoner for him, escaped for him, chosen his bride, and effected her liberation as cleverly as he had effected his own. In fact the Italian postillion Vezzosi was the only one of this curious group who had acted at all in propriâ personâ.

The 15th of May 1719 was a gala day in Rome, when a long string of coaches and the Prince‒whom a large number of British subjects, expressing their loyalty by peculiar signs of approval, considered to be rightful king of Great Britain and Ireland‒went out to conduct the fugitive young lady triumphantly into the Eternal City. She now no longer had need to use the passport which franked her as the sister of the Comtesse de Cernes, being openly and joyfully welcomed as the Princess Maria Clementina Sobieski.

THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.

In 1845 the late Professor Faraday delivered a lecture on the solidification of gases at the Royal Institution, and demonstrated his facts by experiments as interesting as they were successful. Under his skilful manipulation a tube filled with olefiant gas, quite invisible, was seen to become partially filled with a colourless liquid, which was the gas in a condensed form. Two conditions were shewn to be essential to the result‒extreme pressure, and extreme cold. The pressure was obtained by strong mechanical appliances, and the cold by means of solidified carbonic acid, which looked like lumps of snow. In this way the lecturer made clear to a general audience the process by which a number of gases had been brought into a liquid or solid form; and he stated that he had ‘hoped to make oxygen the subject of the evening’s experiment, but from some undetected cause it had baffled his attempts at solidification.’ Nevertheless, he looked forward to the time when not only oxygen, but azote and hydrogen would be solidified, and he agreed with Dumas, of the Institute of France, that hydrogen would shew itself in the form of a metal.

Faraday’s anticipation is now realised in one particular, for oxygen has been liquefied. This achievement is due to the enlightened and persevering efforts of Mr Pictet, an able physicist of Geneva. Working with apparatus capable of resisting a pressure of eight hundred atmospheres, and a temperature sixty-five degrees below zero (centigrade), he succeeded in converting oxygen (invisible) into a visible liquid which spouted from the tube in which it had been inclosed for experiment. It is a feat which involves important consequences for science. It is a further confirmation of the mechanical theory of heat, according to which all gases are vapours capable of passing through the three states‒solid, liquid, and gaseous. Geneva winds up the year with a fine scientific triumph. Will Albemarle Street supplement it by liquefying or solidifying azote and hydrogen? Just as these lines are going to press we hear a rumour that it has been done by a Frenchman at Paris.

Experiments have been made to measure the sound-impulse produced in a telephone by ordinary speaking; but it is too feeble to excite even a delicate galvanometer. But a slight swing of the free end of the instrument affects the needle, which moves in a different direction according as the swing is south, north, west, or east. There is no doubt, as we observed in a recent paper on the subject, that in the behaviour of the telephone and the phenomena of its currents scientific men have a promising subject of inquiry. Meanwhile, as explained at the end of this article, the notion that it would at once supersede other forms of telegraphy or telephony will abate. A telephone has no advantage over a speaking-tube within the distances where a tube is available. Moreover the needlessly high price at which it is to be sold will be an effectual bar to its general use. To ask thirty-five pounds and twenty-five pounds for an article that could be sold at a profit for so many shillings, is not and ought not to be the way to commercial success.

It is stated in a French scientific periodical that underground water may be discovered by observing the quivering of the air on a clear calm summer afternoon when the sun is low. If a well be dug at the spot where the quivering appears, a supply of water will, as is said, there be found. And as regards the influence of trees on moisture, careful observation has confirmed the theory that more rain falls on forests than on open plains; and comparing different kinds of trees it is found that the pine tribe get more water and retain more than leafy trees. Hence, it is said, pines are the best defence against sudden inundations, and the best means for giving freshness and humidity to a hot and dry climate such as that of Algeria, where attempts at amelioration have been made by planting, and by the digging of artesian wells.

Readers of this Journal will not be ignorant of the health-imparting properties of the Australian gum-tree, or eucalyptus, nor that the fir and pine possess similar properties, but in a minor degree, yet still sufficient to enhance the title to salubrity of certain watering-places. Mr Kingzett, an ingenious and persevering chemist, had tried for a long time to discover whether the active atmospheric element, ozone, was evolved from the{62} leaves of plants, and was forced to the conclusion that the element produced was not ozone, but peroxide of hydrogen. He then experimented on oils of different kinds, and found that they absorbed oxygen rapidly, and were thereby in some instances transformed into new substances. Among them all turpentine proved to be the best absorber; and it appeared on further experiment that while one portion became resinified, another portion was converted into peroxide of hydrogen and camphoric acid. The natural conclusion from this result was that the eucalyptus and the pine owe their salubrious properties to the presence of these two substances; or rather to the ‘terpene,’ or principle of turpentine, with which they are imbued. This point established, measures were taken to produce the sanifying substances on a large scale; and now a company owning a manufactory in the east of London advertise that they are ready to supply the new disinfectant under the name of Sanitas in any quantity. It is not poisonous, will not stain the materials to which it may be applied, can be used as a wholesome scent, and is efficacious in preserving articles of food. The process of manufacture is ingenious, and is so combined that there is no waste of turpentine even in the form of vapour; but of the details we need not attempt an explanation here. Suffice it that Sanitas, with full description of its virtues, is now largely advertised in the public journals.

Professor Galloway, of the Royal College of Science, Dublin, has published a pamphlet in which he states that salted meat is unwholesome, and produces scurvy, because by the process of salting the meat is deprived of important constituents, notably phosphate of potash. He says that if this salt were eaten with the beef served out on board ship, the meat would be nutritious, would not occasion scurvy; and he calls on the Admiralty to test his view by actual experiment.

What a convenience it would be if all the street lamps of a town could be lighted and put out at once! Mr Lane Fox has proved at a commercial station in the neighbourhood of Fulham that it can be done. All the lamps are connected by wires overhead or underground; to each burner is fitted an electro-magnet composed of a coil of wire round a soft iron core, and above it hangs a movable magnet. The ends of the connecting wires are attached to or detached from a battery at pleasure. When the gas is to be lighted, a current is sent through the wires; the electro-magnet on each burner is excited; the movable magnet swings round, and turns on the gas; a current from a powerful coil is then sent through the wires, and produces a spark at each burner, and thereby lights the gas. The putting out is effected by a reverse current. From twenty to forty lamps have been thus treated, and with entire success; and it is thought that three hundred might be included in the circuit with a like satisfactory result.

Thus in order to light up London or any other large town, the lamps would have to be divided into groups of three hundred. The lamplighter, or man in charge of the battery, would of course require to know that none had been missed, and this could be made certain by placing the first and last lamp of the group within sight of his station. If they are alight, then all are alight. The practicability of the operation appears therefore to be settled. The next question is‒Will it prove a saving to the ratepayers?

Complaints that ordinary gas-light is not so brilliant as it ought to be, are often heard, and not without reason. The Pure Carbon Gas Company claim for their gas that it is not open to the objections urged against other gas. The process of manufacture has the merit of being very simple, and free from the usual noxious results. At a demonstration made a few weeks since, proof was given that but little space and little skill are required in the manufacture. The tar formed during the process, instead of being carried away as at present, is passed back into the retorts, whereby, as is said, three thousand feet more of gas can be produced from a ton of coal than by the ordinary process. An arrangement is introduced which separates the ammonia and the sulphur, and in consequence this pure carbon gas has but little smell. Ordinary gas is passed as good if it contains not more than twenty-five grains of sulphur to the hundred feet: the quantity in the new gas is less than three grains. We are told that the cost of manufacture is not more than eighteenpence the thousand cubic feet, that it does not require skilled labour, that in consequence of its freedom from smell it could be carried on in a ship or in a house, while its simplicity renders it applicable to villages where at present there are no public lights. The Collinge Engineering Works, Westminster Bridge Road, are mentioned as the place where the demonstration above described was given.

With a view to account for the presence of mineral oil underground in certain parts of Europe and in Pennsylvania, some ingenious persons have assumed that the oil is a decomposition-product of long-buried organic remains. But the answer to this is that the oil is found in very old strata ‘where but few organic remains can have existed.’ Mr D. Mendelejeff, a foreign chemist, having visited the Pennsylvania wells, puts forward his opinion on this interesting question: The substance of the earth having been condensed from vapour, ‘the interior of the earth must consist largely of metals (iron predominating) in combination with carbon. Wherever fissures have been produced in the earth’s crust by volcanic action, the water, which of necessity made its way into the interior, and thus came into contact with metallic carbides at high temperatures and pressures, must have given rise to saturated hydrocarbons, which have ascended in the form of vapour to strata where they condensed,’ and thus formed the oil.

Captain Calver, R.N., has by command of the Admiralty surveyed the Thames below Woolwich to ascertain whether the discharge of the sewage of London into the river has created obstructions in the channel. The captain has published his report, and a very discouraging report it is, for it makes known that shoals have formed, and are forming, which in course of time will completely stop the navigation of the river. In this we have a proof that it is a mistake to send the solid portion of sewage into a stream, in the hope that it will be effectually carried away by the tide. It is not carried away; but is deposited at the bends, and in the eddies, with detriment to health as well as to the water-way.

Engineers who contend that none but neutralised{63} liquid sewage should pass into a river are manifestly in the right. To discharge the solids is a waste as well as a mischief; and if it goes on, the whole of the land will some day be utterly starved for want of nitrogen. Some theorists argue that it won’t pay to attempt to convert the solids into a fertilising material. The answer to this is the experience gained at Aylesbury, where the solid part of the town sewage is separated from the liquid by precipitation; is converted into a fertiliser, part of which is used on the town-farm, and the surplus, in the form of a dry, scentless powder, is sold at three pounds ten shillings the ton. A single grain of oats, sown on land treated with this powder, produced seven thousand grains from one root, and other grains yielded varying numbers down to two thousand. The powder on analysis seems poor; but its richness of productive power may be judged of from the foregoing statement.

A new process for making sulphate of soda has been invented by M. Fournier, a Frenchman. It leaves behind as waste liquid a large quantity of a certain chloride, which turns out to be excellent for the precipitation of sewage. Hence it appears that nature and science combine to shew how the fertility of the land and the free channels of rivers may alike be maintained. The process has been patented in this country, and if all go well we may hope, in time, to hear that the sewage of London, instead of filling up the bed of the Thames, is increasing the fruitfulness of fields, gardens, and meadows in Essex and Kent.

Meteorologists, in their review of the weather, inform us that in the gale on the 11th of November last, the barometer was lower, the wind stronger, and the rainfall greater, than on any other day in the year. The mean velocity of the wind was thirty-eight miles an hour; and the rainfall in twenty-four hours amounted to a little more than an inch and a half. The fall for the whole month was in Sussex, eight and a quarter inches; in Cumberland, nine and three-quarter inches; being, as regards the Sussex gauge, more than five inches above the average of the previous ten years. The total rainfall in eleven months, January to November, was thirty-three and one-third inches: a remarkable excess over twenty-eight inches, which is the usual average for the whole year. For those who are curious in comparisons we take a fact from the weather-records of New South Wales: at Newcastle in that colony there fell on March 18, 1871, more than ten and a half inches of rain in two hours and a half.

Two official papers published in India further discuss the question‒sun-spots and rainfall. ‘The Cycle of Drought and Famine in Southern India,’ contains a statement of the argument by Dr W. W. Hunter, and the conclusions to which he has arrived. These are: ‘That although no uniform numerical relation can be detected between the relative number of sun-spots and the actual amount of rainfall, yet that the minimum period in the cycle of sun-spots is a period of regularly recurring and strongly marked drought in Southern India‒That apart from any solar theory, an examination of the rain registers shews that a period of deficient rainfall recurs in cycles of eleven years at Madras ... that the statistical evidence shews that the cycle of rainfall at Madras has a marked coincidence with a corresponding cycle of sun-spots ... and that the evidence tends also to shew that the average rainfall of the years of minimum rainfall in the said cycle approaches perilously near to the point of deficiency which causes famine.’ The average is, however, above that point; and though droughts and famines may recur in the cyclic years of minimum rainfall, the evidence, in Dr Hunter’s opinion, is insufficient to warrant the prediction of a regularly recurring famine.

The observations on which these conclusions are founded include sixty-four years of the present century: too short a period on which to build a theory; but as no records exist earlier than 1810, it is by future observation only that the conclusions can be tested. Meanwhile meteorological observers will be watchful, especially of the rainfall, for India is a country which affords singularly favourable opportunities for a comprehensive system of observations.

The other paper referred to above is by Mr H. F. Blanford, Meteorological Reporter to the government of India. He points out that Dr Hunter’s views apply exclusively to Southern India, and that in Northern India famines are most frequent at the epochs of most sun-spots. This lack of agreement between two competent authorities shews how great is the need for a lengthened series of observations.

In the recent Arctic Expedition twenty-five species of fossil plants were discovered in Grinnell Land by Captain Feilden. They are of the period described by geologists as Miocene, and can be identified with species of the same period found in Europe, in North-western America, and in Asia. Among them are two kinds of Equisetum, poplar, birch, elm, and pine. It was suggested at a meeting of the Geological Society that the bed of lignite in which these remains were met with was in remote ages a large peat-moss, probably containing a lake in which the water-lilies grew, while on its muddy shores the large reeds and sedges and birches and poplars flourished. The drier spots and neighbouring chains of hills were probably occupied by the pines and firs, associated with elm and hazel. Among all these which indicate a primeval forest, the only sign of animal life discovered was a solitary wing-case of a beetle.

When water-lilies were growing in that now desolate region, fresh-water must have filled the ponds and lakes. Captain Feilden’s discovery may be taken as additional evidence of a change of climate, which the palæontologists and physicists who are now discussing that interesting question will not fail to make use of on fitting occasion.

A few years ago the British Association appointed a committee of eminent mathematicians to consider ‘the possibility of improving the methods of instruction in elementary geometry.’ The Report of this committee was published in the stout volume which contains the account of the meeting held at Glasgow. It states that the main practical difficulty in effecting the improvement is ‘that of reconciling the claims of the teacher to greater freedom with the necessity of one fixed and definite standard for examination purposes;’ that ‘no text-book yet produced is fit to succeed Euclid in the position of authority, and that a syllabus of propositions in a definite sequence to be regarded as a standard sequence for examination purposes, might be published.’ Such a syllabus as is here implied has been brought out{64} by the Association for the improvement of geometrical teaching; and the committee recommend it for adoption by the universities and other great examining bodies of the United Kingdom. ‘It may be well to observe,’ they say in their Report, ‘that the adoption of this or some such standard syllabus would not necessitate the abandonment of the Elements of Euclid as a text-book by such teachers as still preferred it to any other, as it would at the utmost involve only such supplementary teaching as is contained in the notes appended to many of the editions of Euclid now in use; while it would greatly relieve that large and increasing body of teachers who demand greater freedom in the treatment of geometry than under existing conditions they can venture to adopt.’

Supplementary to our recent notices of the telephone, the following remarks, translated from a late number of the Telegraph Bulletin of the Ottoman administration, and dealing with a question of some importance to telegraph manipulators throughout the world, may be read with interest:

‘Is the telephone, yes or no, destined to replace other telegraph instruments; and seeing the possibility that people may use it without special training, is it in the end destined to destroy the career of telegraph employés? Those questions merit from us the labour of being examined with care. We think that that instrument will never be able to be employed in telegraphic working destined to serve governments and the public. In effect, supposing the instrument perfect, arrived at the last limits of perfection, and able to work at all distances with or without relays, then‒1. To transmit a message with all the advantages offered by the system, it would be necessary that the sender should be able to speak himself directly with the receiver, without the intervention of an employé. Now, all those who know the organisation of the lines know that this is not possible, that there must necessarily be intermediary offices of deposit, that the public cannot be admitted to the offices where messages are transmitted or received, and consequently the sender must give his message written. 2. An employé once charged with the message, the instrument has already lost one of its principal advantages, for that employé must read the message, and pronounce it to his correspondent; but if the message is written in a foreign language, the impracticability is evident. Lastly, the telegraph administrations now possess instruments which permit them to send messages with much greater speed than can be attained in sending them by the voice. Those reasons alone, and there are many others, ought then to assure the employés that this new invention will not put in peril their means of existence.

‘This is not to say that the telephone will not be utilised. On the contrary, it will probably be much used, but in special cases and for private use. For example: To put any chief in immediate relation with his employés in offices or manufactories; for the police of towns for announcing fires; for service of mines; to replace with advantage electric bells in many cases; and in a crowd of circumstances not yet foreseen. Let us wish then good success to this invention, which does honour to the era of steam and electricity.’

Printed and Published by W. & R. Chambers, 47 Paternoster Row, London, and 339 High Street, Edinburgh.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The readers of Chambers’s Journal are not without the means of knowing something of cipher-writing. Vol. XX. (1853), page 161, and Vol. IV. (1855), page 134, contain much curious information on the subject, applicable equally to the present time.

CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

CONTENTS

QUEEN’S MESSENGERS.

HELENA, LADY HARROGATE

CHAPTER V.‒IN THE WASTE.

CHAPTER VI.‒SIR SYKES MAKES AN ANNOUNCEMENT.

STORY OF CAPTAIN GLASS.

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE.

THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.

THE INTELLIGENT MOUSE.

THE AFFECTION OF MICE.

MORAL.

CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

CONTENTS

QUEEN’S MESSENGERS.

HELENA, LADY HARROGATE

CHAPTER V.‒IN THE WASTE.

CHAPTER VI.‒SIR SYKES MAKES AN ANNOUNCEMENT.

STORY OF CAPTAIN GLASS.

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE.

THE MONTH: SCIENCE AND ARTS.

THE INTELLIGENT MOUSE.

THE AFFECTION OF MICE.

MORAL.

CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.