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Mrs. Talbot on my way, and arrange the whole with her. I know she will be reasonable, and a few words with her will settle the whole business."

That was indeed like She could not, as he

A sparkle came into the Beauty's eye. business. That would compose matters. expected, resist that aristocratic influence. Later, he met Mrs. Labouchere; but she said not a word, looking at him with a sort of amused glance, which made him feel quite uncomfortable. Perhaps he had fallen low in her estimation. When he met her again, he said:

"You have heard how happily everything has been arranged." "No," she said, indifferently, "I hear so much."

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I mean about Lord Bindley's going to town."

"O, and see your people, and get you leave. Well, it sounds strangely."

"Not that, you always say that; no, just to speak to them."

There was a look of contempt on her face. "I would rather anything than that. It is too humiliating. But of course it sounds. strange, my interfering. Still, I am sorry for the whole thing. If you had been advised by me-even if you felt bound to be so nice about staying a day or two-there was a different plan of going about it, which even my poor wits could have helped you to."

The Beauty looked at her eagerly. "O tell me, tell me," he said. "Would you follow it, if I told you?" she said. "No. Besides, really it would sound strange, supplying you with a plan against your wife, in the face of all law and morals."

"Yes," he said; "but when they turn against me-and so many years as I have

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“Ah, there it is ; so many years you have been good and obedient and docile, and here, at the eleventh hour, or rather, at five minutes to twelve, you wish to throw off the yoke. It is only reasonable they should be astonished. No, no; you have put yourself into Lord Bindley's hands, and we had best leave you there."

(To be continued.)

NOTES & INCIDENTS.

IN our youth we used to ask what became of all the old moons which were dethroned to make way for the new ones that the almanacs continually announced. Sometimes we were told that they were chopped up to make stars. This childish notion nearly resembles a theory put forth by an assiduous student of meteoric phenomena, M. Stanislas Meunier, in answer to the question-Whence come aërolites? The masses of iron and stone that are continually falling upon us from the skies, he says, are scraps of an exploded satellite, fragments of a shattered moon, perhaps of several little moons—that once revolved round the earth, or, possibly, round our existing moon, and that was, or were, split up by some such internal force as that which has fissured and furrowed the lunar crust as we now behold it. Right or wrong about their origin, M. Meunier's researches on meteorolites reveal some curious points. He tells us that they are never found but in the earth's superficial strata: this argues their comparatively modern arrival in our system, or the recent breaking up of the mass of which they are the disjecta membra, if the above theory be correct. Secondly, the meteorites which fall now are not of the same mineralogical nature as those which fell in past ages. Old visitors were of iron, new ones are stony. Thirdly, it is presumable that an entirely new class is beginning to appear, for several carbonaceous masses of meteoric matter have fallen since the year 1803, before which date no such things were known. M. Meunier makes a theory to fit these facts; but it requires keeping to ascertain its soundness. He goes so far as to anticipate the arrival of meteorites analogous to our crystallized formations, and even to our stratified beds. Organisms ought to follow.

No forgery so rife as that of antiquities. Supply follows demand in this branch of business dealing, as in all others. Do you want a museum stocked with old curiosities? You can have it in a week-cases and closets beautifully filled, without a genuine article in the collection. The trade done in the world by archæological counterfeiters must be enormous. A newspaper paragraph lately told us that Flint Jack-real name Edward Simpson-had lately disposed of some sixty flint arrow-heads and a dozen stone hatchets, all of his own make, to green connoisseurs in York; and that another ingenious individual-name not cited-had been driving a large trade in the same fictitious goods at Melton. Was this second worthy the famous William Smith, alias Skin and Grief or Snake Willy

who had an extensive flint weapon factory in Yorkshire some dozen years ago, and who so successfully gulled the students that some of his specimens got engraved as genuine in archæological publications? Or did he make his fortune and retire? But these two items are bagatelles compared with the artificial specimen trade that is done without the world's knowledge. Lately there was an advertisement in a London paper to the effect that stone and bronze implements from Denmark, Sweden, the South Sea Islands, America, and elsewhere, were always on hand in a certain warehouse. Was the warehouse the manufactory? English ingenuity is often invoked to aid dishonesty in far-off lands. The traveller in Egypt sees a sepulchral figure in glazed porcelain dug from the ground, and eagerly buys it, only to find when he gets home that it was made in England and sent out to be buried, that he, or someone else, and it might be sold together. This is a favourite trick with Belgian guides on Waterloo. The plough tears up a sword hilt that is competed for by the visitors, and bought dearly because of its obvious genuineness. Bless the innocent buyer's heart, it was made at Nismes a month before. Did you ever know earthworks to go on in London without a find of weapons, or pottery, or coins, or something kindred? The next time you see such works in progress ask an excavator if he has got any curiosities: ten to one he will show some: if not, he will tell you some will surely turn up by to-morrow. Go the next day, and if the articles produced do not exactly accord with your knowledge of England's ancient history, be not surprised. The lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the gravel beds of Suffolk, Amiens, and Abbeville have been Tom Tiddler's grounds in their time, and will be again.

MAN is a marvel, physically no less than mentally. Put the vital principle out of sight, and look upon him only as a piece of mechanism, and what a beautiful combination of powers and appliances his little frame exhibits. Every part of a well-devised engine has its counterpart in the human body; and now that mechanical subjects come to be analysed mathematically, all the forces of a man's body submit to exact calculation. Lately an American physician has been computing the "horse-power" of human hearts-the pumping engines, for such they are, that we all carry in our bosoms. There is nothing in the figuring that a mere tyro in arithmetic cannot master, though the data to work upon are not accessible to ordinary folk. Blood has very nearly the same specific gravity as water: its pressure at the mouth of the aorta, as measured by gauges, is about equal to a column of water six feet high. The average discharge at each pulsation may be estimated at an ounce and a half, and the number of pulsations at seventy-five per minute, making an aggregate of seven pounds discharged per minute. As the engineer would say, then, seven pounds of water are raised six feet high each minute, or what is the same thing, forty-two pounds are raised one foot high in the same time. The power of your heart, then, is forty-two foot-pounds per minute. A horse-power is thirty-three thousand foot-pounds per minute: therefore

your heart does something more than one eight-hundredth part of the work of a horse. This may not seem much, but reckon what it amounts to in a lifetime: calculate what the united heart-pumpings of a city represents. London hearts altogether do the work of some four thousand horses. According to the best estimates of the population of the whole world, the heart-work done over the globe comes out equal to the engine-work that would be required to propel a fleet of over one hundred Great Easterns. An engineer would tell you that to generate steam for this, you would have to burn four thousand six hundred tons of coal per hour. This refers to men alone: could we include animals, we should get a prodigious idea of the energy of the world's heart-beatings.

ONE day a shoe-black, unnoticed and unknown; the next, an artist, admired and sought for. Such was the lot of one Charles Knubel, orphan son of a German musician settled in New York-a waif on the human sea, an outcast in the world; with a genius for music, that had been fostered by the parent, and developed into a talent. But talent without patronage is seed without soil. This boy at fourteen years old was thrown upon the world, without a solitary chance to hang an effort on. To live honestly he took to boot-blacking, and his brush led him to fame by a lucky accident. A few weeks since there was a sort of Industrial Exhibition in New York-the Fair of the American Institute it was called; and Knubel stationed himself near one of its entrances to catch muddyfooted customers. There came a patron, an urbane man, who turned out to be the Secretary of the Exhibition Managing Board. After his pedals had been operated upon, he asked the boy if he would like to see the show, and told him that if he would present himself next day with a clean face he should be admitted. On the morrow, with shining countenance, the lad called at the secretary's office and duly received the promised pass. By-and-by the official, strolling through the musical department, found a crowd of people listening to a masterly performance on the pianoforte. He elbowed his way to the instrument, there to find the claviers twittering beneath the hands that had polished his boots the day before. Fortune followed up the good work she had begun. The makers upon whose instrument the boy had done such good execution took him into their service. He was clad in new attire; and every day during the rest of the Exhibition period he was to be heard performing upon the piano and electric organ. If ever Knubel becomes a famous name, this little story may be recollected.

CURING should be as important as killing in the arts of war: extracting your enemy's bullets from your own flesh is the next duty after putting your bullets into his flesh. Now, bullet probing is a tiresome and painful operation; one that ought to be reduced to the perfection of simple certainty. So humane philosophers have thought; and they have done

their best to give their thinkings tangibility. But we are bounded by our means; and while there were none known whereby a lump of buried lead could be told from a fragment of shattered bone, probing was slow work. However, the next time-far be it-that wholesale bullet extraction has to be performed, it is to be expected that the army surgeons' labours will be lightened by the help that electricity will afford; for two inventors have independently proposed methods of searching for and drawing out metallic missiles from the wounds they have inflicted. Both men told their ideas to the French Institute at one and the same meeting during the past month. M. Trouvé was one; he who made the electrical jewels that delighted fashionable Paris for a few months two years ago. His new bullet probe is a double-pointed needle, each point being connected by a wire with a little electric battery and a bell, which rings whenever the two needle points are united electrically; that is to say, whenever they both touch a piece of metal. With this divining rod, bullet searching is a simple business. The suspected part of the body is probed with it, and the instant the points touch lead the bell announces the fact. The bullet found, the worst half of the extractor's task is over. This plan was suggested by an Englishman, I fancy, some two years ago, but not put to trial till M. Trouvé made an instrument. The other proposal is of more limited application. M. Melsens is its author, and he promises to draw fragments of iron or steel from a flesh wound by the help of powerful magnets. He can do nothing with lead, though, because it does not follow the loadstone. Trouve's is the best idea. There is quaintness in the notion of a bullet telegraphing its whereabouts.

POETS have written pretty things about the needle that directs the mariner in safety o'er the trackless sea, and so forth. But between poetry and reality there are wide differences. The fact is, that nowadays many a ship goes to sea with a compass to steer by that is worse than useless if it be trustworthy one day, it may be a false guide the next. As everybody knows, a large proportion of our mercantile fleet consists of iron vessels, and a compass in an iron ship is subject to ever-changing deviations, complicated and unpredictable. No longer, as in the case of a wooden ship, directed by the earth's magnetic force alone, the needle becomes subjected to directive influences from earth and ship at the same time. The consequences are errors in the instrument, which change with the direction of the ship's head, alter with her geographical position, and are affected as she heels before the wind. There are methods of correction which have been mastered by scientific men at great pains to themselves. But these require outlay for additional compasses, and for adjustments; while, for maintaining efficiency under varying circumstances, knowledge of the principles of magnetism is essential to those who have charge of iron ships. The second matter has the highest importance. Seeing that lives in vast numbers and property of immense value are at the mercy of the little needle, is it not paramount that shipmasters should

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