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discovered is explained by the unexpected dimensions which the trick assumed. I imagine that when Hetty first began to play tricks on her sisters, she contemplated having a hearty laugh, with them and at them, when all was over. But when her parents came to be included in the mystification; when her mother began to inquire whether it was her husband's, or her son's, or her brother's death that was intimated; when her father exorcised Jeffery as a devil, and her sister rejoiced at having her tendencies to infidelity corrected, and at having such an "opportunity of convincing herself, past doubt or scruple, of the existence of some beings besides those we see," then to confess that all had been imposture, would have drawn upon Hetty such a storm of indignation from the whole family as few would have had moral courage to face.

I think I have proved that if Hetty was able to produce Jeffery's noises, there is nothing violently improbable in the supposition that she might have chosen to do so. I must now say something as to the physical difficulty, which is no doubt formidable. In fact, to give a complete explanation of all the phenomena is impossible at this distance of time, when we are without any accurate information as to the plan of the house, and when we do not know exactly what allowance to make for some natural exaggerations in the wonders related. But I have intimated in the title of this paper that, making some little deduction for such exaggerations (and a careful comparison of John Wesley's narrative with the original documents will show the tendency of such stories to improve on repetition), I consider Jeffery's disturbances to be identical in kind with those produced by modern spirit-rappers, and that they are to be accounted for in whatever way we choose to account for the latter phenomena. It certainly does seem surprising that a young girl should discover the art for herself, and should carry it to as high a degree of perfection as has been attained by professional artists in modern times. But it is certain that she was a girl of no ordinary abilities; and that she had many advantages which are not enjoyed by modern exhibitors. In the first place, no one knew that she was the exhibitor, and she had an audience who soon came to think it Sadduceeism to doubt of the supernatural character of the performance. If the idea of imposture was ever entertained, and any attempt made to detect it, she was completely in the secret, and could make her own arrangements accordingly. And she never was bound to perform at any particular time or place, and if at any moment knocking seemed dangerous, she might postpone it to the next more convenient opportunity. I have already noticed how her being often up when every one in the house had gone to bed, would make it easy for her to take measures which would lead to the occurrence of some noise which would have a startling effect when heard in the dead silence of night.

It requires no common amount of courage to be unaffected by an unaccountable noise heard in the dark at the dead of night. Thus when the worthy Wesley couple, resolved on discovering the ghost, were with a whimsical mixture of bravery and terror groping their way down stairs, holding each other by the hand, at one o'clock in the morning, how their hearts must have jumped to hear a crash which sounded on Mrs. Wesley's side as if a large pot of money had been emptied at her feet, and on Mr. Wesley's as if a stone had been thrown among a heap of bottles which lay under the stairs. It would

be easy to make theories as to how this and other such sounds may have been produced, but it would be impossible now to prove that any such theory is the right one. But comparing this story with others that have appeared in print, and with one nearly parallel case of which I have been told privately, I believe in the possibility of Hetty, without the assistance of any confederate, having produced all the sounds that were heard.

One other circumstance it may be necessary to explain. Adam Clarke lays considerable stress on the fact that in a letter written about thirty years after the events of which we have been speaking, Emilia Wesley (then Mrs. Harper) states that she has still heard Jeffery on more occasions than one. Clarke, therefore, thinks himself justified in rejecting any explanation of the disturbances at Epworth Parsonage, which will not also explain these appearances thirty years afterwards and in a different place. But it does not appear that on these later occasions there were more than isolated noises, and we have no trace of such a connected series of sounds, heard by more people than one, as that on which we have been commenting. It has often occurred to people in old houses, and surrounded by old furniture, to hear noises at night, of which they have not been able to assign the cause. Mrs. Harper hearing such sounds would naturally think of the spirit whose pranks had made such an impression on her youth; but there is no reason to believe that disturbances resembling those which took place at Epworth troubled any of the family again.

If it were the case that Hetty Wesley was guilty of all that my hypothesis imputes to her, the severest censor could not wish her fault to have been followed by heavier punishment than the unhappiness which befell her in after life. Her story, which is a very sad one, is too long to be told here. The reader will find it in Clarke's "History of the Wesley Family," already referred to.

ON FORMING OPINIONS OF BOOKS.

SINCE we are so made that we can never do an injustice either to a person or a thing without harming ourselves in the act, it were to be wished that we could deal justly with, among other matters, our books. Books may be called intermediate between persons and things. When we have paid for them, we may, if we please, do as we will with our own; but it is at our peril that we do them wrong. The friend who has dined off our mutton and our wine probably costs us as much as our book did; but though we are at liberty, or, at all events, take the liberty, to criticise our friends after they are gone home, we do not feel entitled to be unjust or undiscriminating in what we say of them. And we rarely approve each other in judging hastily. "Perhaps we had better see him again, my dear; we might like him better next time," are not these household words? Then, besides the rashness of short acquaintance, there are errors of inaptitude, of inexperience, of rude indocility, of misplaced reliance, and so forth, which could never be exhaustively classified or described. A few hints may, however, be useful.

1. I am not at all afraid of urging overmuch the propriety of frequent, very frequent, reading of the same book. The book remains the same, but the reader changes, and the value of reading lies in the collision of minds. It may be taken for granted that no conceivable amount of reading could

ever put me into the position with respect to his book I mean as to intelligence only in which the author strove to place me. I may read him a hundred times, and not catch the precise right point of view; and may read him a hundred and one times, and hit it the hundred and first. The driest and hardest book that ever was contains an interest over and above what can be picked out of it, and laid, so to speak, on the table. It is interesting as my friend is interesting; it is a problem which invites me to closer knowledge, and that usually means closer love. He must be a poor friend that we only care to see once or twice, and then forget.

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is what most human beings can enter into with ease; but suppose it were not so, how would the excepted people relish the poem? Obviously they would lack the very first requisite for the enjoyment of it. Now, in proportion as a writer, poet or not, addresses himself to compound sensibilities, which may not have shaped themselves yet in average minds, he takes rank, no doubt, below the first order of his craft, but we need not be unjust to him. He has his own burden to bear; and, since writers of this kind must arise in times of rapid and complicated intellectual transition, we should be on our guard in forming opinions of books. For the reasons just pointed out, we may not fully understand or like such writers, but they are, perhaps, fighting a battle for which our children will be the better.

It is obvious to apply the same kind of remark to our own imperfections of experience, or our peculiarities of experience. We are all very fond of telling the young who are about us that they will one day understand the wise saws in which they now see nothing; but among our peers, do we lay the same thing to heart? What flashes of light do experiences of fresh emotion, such as meet us suddenly upon turning corners in our lives, often throw upon all our past store of facts! It may very well be that the book we slight, or the particular page we slight, is written by some fellow-creature who has happened to receive from events a quickening touch which has not yet fallen to our own lot. Poor indeed must our experience be as readers of books if we have never found a page, which once we thought empty, now full of life and light and meaning. True, it is the business of the artist to make us feel with him and see with him; some fault may be his,

2. It never seems to occur to some people, who deliver upon the books they read very unhesitating judgments, that they may be wanting, either by congenital defect, or defect of experience, or defect of reproductive memory, in the qualifications which are necessary for judging fairly of any particular book. Yet the first question a practised and conscientious reader asks himself is, whether he has any natural or accidental disability for the task of criticism in any given case. It may surprise many persons to hear of the possibility of such a thing; but perhaps it may be made clear by examples. As to congenital defect. We all admit that some individuals are born with better "ears for music, and better "eyes" for color, and more "taste" for drawing than others, and we willingly defer, other things being equal, to the decisions upon the points in question of those who are by nature the best gifted. It is quite a common thing to meet people who, in spite of culture, continue unmusical all their lives long, or unable to catch perspective, or draw a wheel round or a chimney straight, or discriminate fine shades of color at all. What is the value of and yet not all the fault. At least, he may claim the opinions of such persons upon questions of the that we should bring to him a tolerably patient and fine arts? Scarcely anything, of course. Now a receptive mind, not a repelling, refusing mind; in a book is in no wise distinguished, for our present pur-word, that we should treat him with decency, if we pose, from a picture or a sonata. It is sure, if it be profess to attend to him at all. a good book, to appeal, in some of its parts, to spe- Akin to defect of experience is defect of reprocial aptitudes of sensibility on the part of its read-ductive memory. It is very common for a man to ers; but if the reader lacks the aptitudes, where is take up a book which he once admired with passion, the poor author? And cases in point are not so and to find scarcely anything in it. What, then, is rare as might be supposed. the natural thought, the one that he is most likely to There are thousands of people who are wanting make? That his judgment is more mature, I supin sensibility to beauty in general; in the feeling of pose. Well, it may be, and it ought to be; but cerpersonal attachment; in the feelings of the hearth; tainly the author of the work may claim that his the feelings of the forum; the feelings of the altar. reader should ask himself another question, namely, It is not at all uncommon to come across characters Have I lost anything in general or specific sensibilin which the ordinary natural susceptibility to de-ity since I first read this book? I have myself had votional ideas, nay to fervid ideas in general, seems to ask this question, and to answer it against myself. wholly left out. It is as if they had come into the Lapse of time must alter us; and we are, perhaps, world with a sense short. Again, you may meet too apt to fancy ourselves wiser when we are only people who have no idea of humor. Allow any lat- something more hard, and something more dull. Ít itude you please for taste in this matter.— and, of has happened to me, indeed, to agree with a writer course, taste differs, - it still remains true that a to- upon first reading; to disagree with him upon sectal absence of the sense of fun is occasionally seen ond reading, after an interval of a year or two; and in society. Now, we must remember that in speak- then again, upon third reading, after another intering of qualities we, after all, draw arbitrary bound-val, to have to come back to my first opinion. ary lines. There are many deficiencies, as many as there are human beings, which cannot be labelled, - compound deficiencies, so to speak, which affect the total appreciativeness of our minds to a degree which we ourselves cannot measure, though a healthy self-consciousness may keep us on our guard; and, of course, our estimates of literature, as of other forms of art, must be affected by such shortcomings in our natural make. The staple of the In Memoriam is the tender regret of faithful friendship for the friend lost, this, I say, is the staple, much as the poem contains in addition. Fortunately this

3. We do not sufficiently discriminate, when we speak of the reception of books, in our use of the word public. Which public? There are a hundred. A square book will no more suit a round public than a square thing will go into a round hole; but if a square man shuns to read a square book because a round public has rejected it, he is clearly a loser. Again, there are small, peculiar publics, which are, notwithstanding their smallness, well worth considering. The currents of feeling, opinion, and culture are enormous, with a thousand eddies in them; creeks and bays and little inlets where strange pleas

ant barks find shelter, which would be cracked or | purely imitative as any copy that ever was done by run down if they took the start in the main stream. a school-boy, and in which almost every bad quality It is a peculiar and special public which welcomes, that can exist in a man without hanging or transfor example, the poetry of Mr. Matthew Arnold. It porting him is visible upon the very surface,-merwould never have found a welcome from a wide, cenariness, delight in superiority, the desire to cause rough-and-ready magazine audience; but the books suffering, utter incapacity to conceive the existence once afloat, they find their public and their public of any but the lowest motives. The same descripgrows. Thus the experience of bookmakers is uni- tion applies to large numbers of the books that are form upon one point, they can rarely get anybody published, it must of necessity do so. When all to see anything in their best efforts till they are sorts of people have acquired the literary knack, we printed, probably by a fluke, or a half-fluke. Then must expect all sorts of writing. But then there is, the square people fall into the square holes, and we all know, a prestige hanging around literature. what the author knew to be good is found out to be There is something about a book which suggests good by a "public" which never saw anything in it superiority, and commands, to start with, a certain before. So much for the effect of a little sympa- degree of respect. In truth, to be able to write, as thetic excitement: if one sheep goes over the hedge things go, no more makes a man worthy of regard the rest follow. But when an author has digested, or attention than a certain other species of benefit as he may, the bitter reflections which occur to him of clergy did in olden days. But if most people at such a pass as this, he has probably to swallow forget this, as they unluckily do in the case of books, something bitterer still: the round public who are they forget it still more disastrously in submitting to mere sheep, following the rest over a hedge, and be guided, without any independent effort of their who do not at all see the subtle adaptations and tit- own understandings, by casual reviewers. The renesses which made the success of the square article viewer is not only a man who can write, he is a man with the square public - come upon the square au- whose office is judicial; he is supposed to be able to thor, and want him to do something like what he did tell you what is good and what is bad. Yet that a before. The utter, utter, fathom-deep blindness man is no more a critic because he writes reviews which prompts this kind of want is, in recompense, than a man is a soldier because he carries a sword, one of the most amusing things in the world. If the may every day be seen. There is a large amount square writer can afford to throw away an opportu- of real critical capacity and real good feeling extant nity, he declines to kill his golden goose for the among the people who write criticisms, and it is round people; if not, he submits to the temptation, able, in a considerable degree, to make itself atand his poor little productive bird is gone forever. tended to; but it not only is, it must be the case, It has been over and over again pointed out, that that the greater part of the criticism which passes to do the same kind of thing over again is a purely under our eye should be incompetent and pernicommercial idea (and it never pays); the artist-idea cious. The persons who write it are of the ruck; is to do something fresh, never to do the same thing and the qualities which go to make a Hallam, a over again, to offer up not dead things, but things Coleridge, a Schlegel, a Lessing, are not to be in which the life is young and glowing. But what picked up like stones in the street. Is every reis the use of pointing things out? When an author viewer, then, to be a Hallam? No, but every has made us admire some of his works, we imme- reviewer should possess in degree, and in similar diately proceed to make him the victim of his own order of combination, the very highest qualities. success; we sacrifice him to a habit of admiration 5. Reviewers are generally a hard-worked and which our own weakness has allowed to grow up in much-irritated class of men. Their power is overour minds; we make over again the very mistake rated; they cannot be said to have much share in we have just repented of- till another sheep hap-forming our permanent opinions of books; and even pens to go over the hedge. the share which the higher criticism has in that work is not what might at first glance be supposed. It is a fact that the general reception of books is like the general reception of a play; in other words, what is best falls flat, what is bad or at all events far short of best is received with applause. Nobody will deny that it is invariably the worst and the most threadbare jokes which are taken up at a play. It is the same with books; a man's best must be greatly alloyed, or it is not accepted by the majority of readers. This is so strictly true, that persons who have to write for certain publics know perfectly well their cue, and act upon it, unless they can afford to disregard money profit. And the cue is this: write for intelligent people, but always write what used to interest you several years ago. Then again, the highest qualities of all kinds of art, those which yield the most enduring delight, are those which depend upon unity of conception, upon the proportionate development of parts with strict reference to a certain general effect. The best humor and the best pathos are precisely of this kind, and so of other qualities. Now the characteristic of quite average minds is, that they do not care for permanence of effect, and will not, cannot, let us say, dwell patiently upon works of art till the deeper fountains of enjoyment wake up for them. They

4. The relation of the critic of a book, standing, as he so often does, between the author and the reader, is not always a well-considered one. The critic is, by rights, a reader with a trained mind. He is supposed to have disciplined himself to avoid the partialities of the careless or unconscious reading mind. If he has really done this, he must be a man of strong and sensitive conscience, of just that breadth and variety of culture which give a large outlook upon things in general; and if conditions like these are to be combined in one man, that man can scarcely be youthful. Unless, however, our critic be a person who in some high degree answers to this description, he is only a man like the ordinary general reader, and his opinion of a book is a mere pack of partialities. But of necessity the number of critics who do answer to this description must be comparatively small. And in fact there must be a very large number of persons engaged in pronouncing opinions on books who have just no qualifications for the task. At the present time, literature, in its more transient forms, is very much what school-keeping used to be, a resource for hundreds of people who have no other at hand, and the net takes up fish of all kinds. Thus we constantly see reviews and essays in which the writing is as

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UNDER THE SNOW.

When autumn days grew pale, there came a troop
Of childlike forms from that cold mountain-top;
With trailing garments through the air they came,
Or walked the ground with girded loins, and threw
Spangles of silvery frost upon the grass,
And edged the brook with glistening parapets,
And built it crystal bridges, touched the pool,
And turned its face to glass, or rising thence,
They shook, from their full laps, the soft, light snow,
And buried the great earth, as autumn winds
Bury the forest floor in heaps of leaves.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

THE Snowflake, arrested in its descent and trans

world. How they began, and where they will end, let us leave for speculators to dream, and confine our business to the world as it is.

feel the first attraction, they think that is all, and then they are off to something new. That is their idea of reading. Hence it may truly be said, not only that unity is thrown away upon them, but that it is a positive offence and stumbling-block. Let the artist make a whole as carefully as he will, the public will break it up; as the manager tells the poor theatre-poet in the prelude to Faust, each will pick out his own, just like the little child that I once saw in raptures at one of Turner's pictures, "O pa, there's a rabbit!". as indeed there was and is, in the very corner. Now, to speak in parables, almost every good thing does contain a rabbit, and the chil-ferred to the microscope, is an object of beauty, and dren are welcome to admire it; but it is not cheering teeming with matter for reflection. The landscape to reflect that, though a good writer is usually ad- which the frost traces during the night with delicate mired for what is really good in him, he is not crystals on the window-pane is a mystery to the child always admired -never by the general reader- and a marvel to the man. Here is exhibited beauty for his best "good." He is liked for "points" which in combination with power. Great agents have been "take." Now here it is that critics do us an impor-"frost and fire" in the physical revolutions of the tant service. It is they who, honestly studying books, and desiring above all things to grasp them as wholes, have the keenest and most enduring delight in them; and the delight is so keen that their utterance of it is sufficient to lift up the best books over the heads of the multitude to a true level of appreciation. It is not enough to make the best things popular, but it is sufficient to overawe the stupid, and to penetrate the outskirts of popular feeling, with a blind sense of a great sacred sort of merit that must not be meddled with. In this way a book is perhaps said to be "more praised than read," as the phrase is; the presumption in such a case is that it is both read and praised by good judges, and read without praise by a large class besides, class which, if it were so indiscreet as to praise, would be found to have raised the cry of "Stop thief!" against itself. Thus, then, critics have a most important function to exercise in maintaining those higher levels of appreciation which are again kept up from age to age by the traditions of literature. For the least competent judges of all are ever ready to accept a tradition.

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There is not room at this opportunity to deal with that delightful subject, the traditions of book criticism, nor with that of the importance to a critical reading of books of one peculiar, unusual form of memory, and its equally unusual counterpart, the anticipative apprehensiveness. But these topics can

wait.

There are some of my readers who could say much wiser and better things than any I have here said upon forming opinions of books, and there is perhaps not one of them who could not and will not correct and supplement me as he goes along. By all means; there is only room in so many pages for so many things, and each must contribute his own threads of color towards the white light. Above all things, I rejoice to think that there are readers in whom simplicity and nobility of soul take the place of faculty and culture, who choose the good without knowing why, whose libraries are a profound lesson to the keenest and most patient of critics. But these bright exceptional instances must not be used to prove too much, and it may be safely said that not one of us who really belongs to the exceptional category has any suspicion of the fact.

* Taking up by accident, while reading this proof, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters, I find she says of Bolingbroke (19th December, 1754): "I am much mistaken if he is not obliged to Mr. Bayle for the generality of his criticisms; for which reason he affects to despise him, that he may steal from him with the less suspicion."

After a night's downfall, as far as the eye can scan, everywhere lies the snow. It makes the leafless_trees look elegant, hides the smoke-dried city garden, and buries all evidence of the scavenger's neglect. The town is as trim and clean as a chimney-sweep in his Sunday shirt, and the country one vast table-cloth to which birds are the only guests. But under the snow lies, fearful to contemplate, all the unpleasant experiences of mud and slop. So "frost and fire" conduce alternately to our pleasure and pain.

The small experiences of snow which fall to our lot are sufficient to remind us of the glaciers and avalanches of mountainous districts. The snow which during the whole year falls upon the mountains does not melt, but maintains its solid state, where their elevations exceed the height of 9,000 feet or thereabouts. Where these snows accumulate to great thickness, in the valleys, or in the deep mazy fractures of the soil, they harden under the influence of pressure resulting from their incumbent weight. But it always happens that a certain quantity of water, the result of momentary fusion of the superficial beds, traverses its substance, and this forms a crystalline mass of ice, granulated in structure, which the Swiss naturalists designate névé From the successive melting and freezing, provoked by the heat by day and the cold by night, the infiltration of air and water in its interstices, the neve is slowly transformed into a homogeneous and skycolored block of ice, filled with an infinity of airbubbles; this is what is called glace bulleuse, bubbled ice. Finally, these masses are completely frozen; the water replaces the air bubbles; then the transformation is complete; the ice is homogeneous, and presents those fine azure tints so much admired by the tourist who traverses the magnificent glaciers of Switzerland and Savoy."

Such are the glaciers which fill the gorges of the Alps, and by a gradual progress move onwards to the valleys, where they continually melt, whilst at their sources they are being as continually replenished. Such the means by which great and impor tant changes have been wrought on the surface of the globe, and such the material for many a castle in The parallel roads of Glen Roy indicate the action the air more fragile and evanescent than snow. of the glaciers of Scotland in ancient times, and other evidences may be traced amongst the mountains of Wales.

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Every Saturday,
March 10, 1866]

THE OLD YEOMANRY WEEKS.

At one time a notion prevailed in the vicinity of snow-capped mountains that an avalanche might be brought down by the firing of a gun or the tinkling of a bell; that a trifling sound might cause a small fragment of snow to move, and in its motion downwards to accumulate until it became an avalanche, which, like that of Val Calanca in 1806, might transport a forest from one side of the valley to the other, or bring destruction like that of the valley of Tawich in 1794, which buried the whole village of Bueras "under the snow."

THE OLD YEOMANRY WEEKS.

I.

TIME changes both employments and amusements. Now we have volunteer reviews in place of old yeomanry weeks. But it is worth while looking back on what was so hearty, quaint, and stirring in times bygone.

Beasts, as well as men, had their day in the past. flourish of their long tails added to the general The tramp of horses, their brisk neigh, and the attraction. The coats of the yeomen, too, were of the most sanguinary red. And there were other involved a muster from all the county for twelve or charms. The calling out of the troop for ten days fifteen miles round. There was thus an inroad of country friends upon the townsfolks. The genial system of billeting was in vogue, too, so that every bed was full. And allies and satellites called, in happy succession, to share the bustle and glee. A company of respectable theatrical stars, patronized both by officers and privates, visited the town; and a wonderfully brilliant yeomanry ball, attended alike by gentle and simple, wound up the successful interlude in ordinary life.

The little town of Priorton spruced itself up for its yeomanry weeks, and was all agog, as it never was at any other time. The campaign commenced by the arrival on horseback of a host of country gentlemen and farmers, in plain clothes as yet. But they carried at their saddle-bows packages containing their cherished ensigns and symbols, their case the very glory of the affair. Along with them in many cases came judicious presents of poultry and game.

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Ice has recently been made the subject of a very interesting communication to a contemporary, in "Here which the process of crystallization during liquefaction has been thus graphically described. is a block of clear ice, such as any fishmonger can supply. Rows of air-bubbles can be seen running parallel to each other throughout the mass, and in some irregular places there is a fine gauze-like appearance produced by a web of minute bubbles. This is but the poetical way in which ice expresses a split; for this beautiful netting is the result of nothing more than some accidental blow. Cutting a slice from the block across the bubbles, let us hold it close to a naked gas-flame, and now let us observe it. The lamp of Aladdin could not have wrought a more wondrous change. The part before clear and unmarked is now studded all over with lustrous stars, whose centres shine like burnished silver. A fairy seems to have breathed upon the ice, and caused transparent flowers of exquisite beauty suddenly to blossom in myriads within the ice, and all with a charming regularity of position. It is the intangible fairy-heat that has worked this spell, There were such hand-shakings in the usually The ice was laid down according to the same laws that shape the snow into these beautiful and wellknown crystalline forms so often to be seen in snow-quiet streets, such groomings of horses at stables storms here and elsewhere. Ice is indeed only an behind old-fashioned little taverns, such pipe-clayaggregate of crystals similar to those of snow, which, ing of belts, and polishing of helmets, and, above lying together in perfect contact, render each other all, such joyous anticipatory parties in private The season was always the height of the summer: invisible and the block transparent. When the heat houses! of the gas-flame entered the slab, it set to work to Stout yeomen had even been known to pick the ice to pieces, by giving it, in certain places, not, perhaps, in every respect the best for such a a rapid molecular shaking, and the fairy flowers muster. which appear in the warmed ice are the result of faint while at drill; the combined influences of the this agitation. On a priori grounds, we should fatigue, the heat, and the preceding night's hilarity therefore infer that the shape of these liquid crys-being too much for them. But farmers and farming tals-for they are merely water-would be the lairds could not well quit their lands unless in the same as the solid crystals which originally built up beginning of July, when the June hoeing of turnips The two are and beans had been got through, the first grass cut, the ice. This is found to be the case. seen to be identical, each has six rays, and the ser- and while there was still a good three weeks before rations in both follow the angle of 60°; just as the barley harvest. Trees were then dusky in their ice freezes, so, under suitable conditions, it liquefies; green, and gooseberries and currants tinted the the ice-flowers, or negative crystals, appearing in the Priorton gardens with rich amber and crimson. same plane as that in which they were formed. The Roses, redder than the yeomen's coats, were in full air-bubbles in ice show this direction. The bubbles flower for every waistcoat and waistband. The collect in widely distant layers, marking the succes- streets and roads were dusty under blue skies or sive stages of freezing; between the layers there is black thunder-clouds; but the meadows were comeither a clear intervening space, or those perpendic-paratively cool and fresh, and white with the sumular rows of bubbles already noticed. Accordingly the ice freezes parallel with the former and at right angles with the direction of the latter bubbles."

mer snow of daisies. The bustle of the yeomen, like ly in the brooding heat of summer afternoons, or the the trillings of wandering musicians, was heard onrosy flush of summer sunset, the prime of the year lending a crowning charm to their advent.

It was delightful to be roused by the first reveille of the bugle at five of the clock on a July morning. Youngsters whom naught else could have tempted out of bed so early started up at the summons. They envied papas and uncles, brothers and cousins in the ranks of the yeomen. Comely blooming young loosely cast about rounded shoulders, and caps were faces joined the watch at the windows. Cloaks were

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