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Then again, gazing on the walls and the ceiling, with wandering thoughts, through which reason returned.

"Where art thou? Where am I?"

And in this chamber, his cage, he recommenced his walk, like a wild beast in captivity.

"Where am I? At Windsor; and you? in Southwark. Ah! Heavens! this is the first time that there has been distance between Who has dug this gulf? I here, thou there. Oh! it cannot be ; it shall not be! What is this that they have done with me?"

us.

He stopped.

"Who talked to me of the queen? What do I know of such things? I changed! Why! Because I am a lord. Do you know what has happened, Dea? You are a lady. What has come to pass is astounding. My business now is to get back into my right road. Who is this who led me astray? There is a man who spoke to me in a mysterious manner. I remember the words in which he addressed me. 'My lord, when one door opens another is shut. That which you have left behind is no longer for you.' In other words, you are a coward; that man, a miserable wretch. He said that to me when I was not yet awake. He took advantage of my first moment of astonishment. I was as it were a prey to him. Where is he, that I may insult him! He spoke to me with the evil smile of a demon. But see, I am become myself again. That is well. They deceive themselves if they think that they can make what they like of Lord Clancharlie, a Peer of England. Yes, with a peeress, who is Dea! Conditions! Shall I accept them! The queen. What is the queen to me, I never saw her. I am not a lord to be made a slave. I enter my position unfettered. Did they think they had unchained me for nothing. They have unmuzzled me. That is all. Dea! Ursus, we are together. That which you were I was. That which I am you are. Come. No. I will go to you directly-directly. I have already waited too long. What can they think not seeing me return! That money. When I think I sent them that money! It was me whom they required. I remember the man said that I could not leave this place. We shall see that. Come! a carriage, a carriage! put to the horses. I am going to look for them. Where are the servants? There ought to be servants here since I am a lord. I am master here. This is my house. I will twist off the bolts, I will break the locks, I will kick down the doors, I will run my sword through the body of any one who bars my passage. I should like to see who could stop me. I have a wife, who is Dea. I have a father, who is Ursus. My house is a palace, and I give it

to Ursus. My name is a diadem, and I give it to Dea. Quick, directly, Dea, I come-ah! I shall soon stride across the intervening space-away!"

And raising the first piece of tapestry he came to, he rushed from the chamber impetuously.

He found himself in a corridor.

He went straight forward.

A second corridor opened out before him.

All the doors were open.

He began to walk at random, from chamber to chamber, from passage to passage, seeking an exit.

(To be continued.)

NOTES & INCIDENTS.

WHAT is the precious jewel that the toad wears in his head? A chorus of voices will reply, his eye. But the toad has two eyes, and if Shakspeare had alluded to the reptile's beauteous visuals, would he not in his exactness have spoken of more than one jewel, especially as he puts the uses of adversity in the plural? Since, however, the singular only is used, it would appear as if the poet meant something else than the toad's eye. May not the allusion be to the toadstone-not the geologist's trap-rock that bears the name, but that hard lump of osseous or stony matter which naturalists say is to be found in the heads of old toads? Lately, a student of these burly batracians exhumed a statement concerning the virtues of this pebble, or bone, whichever it be. It was to the effect that, "There is to be found in the heads of old and great toads a stone they call borax or stelon. This, worn in a ring, gives a forewarning against venom." One Fenton wrote this in 1569, thirty years before Shakspeare wrote "As You Like It," in which play (Act II. Scene 1) the sweet uses of adversity are insisted upon. The stone, you see, was to be worn like a jewel. Were such rings common in the poet's time, and had he one in his mind's eye when he penned the oft-quoted passage?

UPON two nights during the past few weeks the learned Academicians of France fell to discussing the periods at which the horse and the ass became domesticated animals. Professor Owen, after a late study of the tablets and inscriptions illustrating Egyptian life and usages some six thousand years ago, had stated that horses and asses are absent from these careful and no doubt reliable--representations; and his inference had been, that the founders of Egyptian civilisation immigrated at an epoch anterior to the subjugation and impressment of these animals. To this statement a later Egyptologist, M. Lenormant, demurred, in so far as the ass is concerned: for he had accumulated a fund of evidence, from pictorial records, to prove that the meek beast was a bearer of men's burdens as far back as the most antique mural paintings carry us—some six thousand years, at least; an age that ought to make us revere the donkey. Not so the horse: there is no evidence of his service to men before the days of the shepherd kings, or some sixteen centuries before our era. This was M. Lenormant's case; whereupon M. Faye-whose reputation, by-the-way, is astronomical, and not archæological-uprose, and stated that, inasmuch as mules are mentioned in Genesis xxxvi. 24,

there must have been horses in Canaan long before M. Lenormant's assigned period. This brought a caution from M. Milne-Edwards against accepting the scriptural translation, inasmuch as the translators were not naturalists, and the mules, by them so called, were a distinct species. The biblical mule must remain a doubtful animal: there is more confusion about its history than it would become us to plunge into. A Hebrew scholar who is also a naturalist might unravel the mystery; but the combination is not probable

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APPARENT extremes that sometimes meet, are the dreams of the poet and the realisations of the philosopher. The stars, says the former, are diamonds in the sky: diamonds, says one who in 1870 may claim the latter title, are stars upon the earth. Who will deny that they have too many virtues to be of worldly origin? And to no mundane process within our knowledge can their birth be assigned. None can do more than speculate upon their source, and suggest what it might have been. The theorist who claims a celestial origin for them deserves praise for his boldness at all events; and his deserts for the validity of his suggestion are perhaps as great as those of the many who have sought to explain their formation by suppositional terrestrial actions. The sky-birth of the diamond is suggested by a Continental experimentalist, who, upon the strength of some preliminary researches, declares that intense cold dissociates chemical elements in combination. The "pure carbon" of the diamond, he holds to have once been mingled with other matters, in masses of meteoric nature coursing through space; and he argues that the intense cold which reigns in stellar space (something like 200° below zero) has been the means of isolating and crystallizing the carbon, and that diamonds have fallen from the sky, like the aërolites whose celestial source is well known. Laugh who will; disprove who can! We are but chroniclers and offer no opinion; but we can tell this much, that the location of diamonds upon the earth will agree much better with the hypothesis of a sky-source than an earth-source. Those Cape specimens that are now attracting attention are found on the surface of the ground only: it is of no use to dig for them: this looks as though they came down rather than up.

WHAT a thing it is to be a popular lecturer! Never mind what you say, the whole world listens. I wonder where, upon the civilized areas of the globe, that discourse of Professor Tyndall's upon haze and dust has not been, or will not be read. But, divested of its show, it was a poor affair; never, perhaps, did the Professor tell so little that was new to such an audience as that which assembled on the occasion; and never did the daily press so echo and extol him. Yet when Dr. Angus Smith, of

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Manchester, a week or so after, told a select gathering in that city, of his all but exhaustive labours on the organic particles of the air, the public prints, except the technical journals, echoed not a word. Dr. Smith has been, for a quarter of a century, an air and breath analyser. He has not merely shown in gross the "atoms" which Daniel Culverwell says the sun "makes dance naked in his beams," but he has examined them in detail; studied their forms, and determined their characters. He has told us what we take into our lungs qualitatively and quantitatively: how the air is charged with tiny scraps of whatever material is being knocked about in the working places of our neighbourhood-coal in the mining districts, cotton in the spinning districts, hay and straw in the agricultural districts, stone and horse refuse in the busy streets, iron in the railway carriage. In these, he says, we breathe rolled plates of metallic iron, which are large enough to be seen by the naked eye." And mingled with all are those mysterious dormant germs of plant and animal life, which, after a few days' steeping in water, throw off their torpor and appear as living plants and animalcules! Then he has shown us what we cast out from our lungs-the sewage of the atmosphere-and told of the wonderful scene of life which is developed in a drop of condensed breath from the wall of a crowded room. More than all, he has examined the very bearing-points of these pervading atoms upon plagues and pestilences. Twenty-five years of research like this ought not to be put in the background, while a popular lecturer comes to the front and dazzles his listeners with the inevitable "electric lamp" into the belief that it is casting light upon things unknown till it shone.

MR. BELLEW has started an entertainment which the critics one and all declare to be new. But novelty is the last feature it can lay claim to. The ex-preacher reads a play, and upon a stage behind him occasional scenes are set, and dumb actors twitter their lips, and move in illustration of the reading. When we were boys we read plays, and upon little stages we set cardboard scenes, and put in motion paper actors. Where is the difference? Our principle is but extended to magnificence in St. George's Hall. Our little pastime was full of incongruities, which, as they cannot be diminished by increasing the scale of the scene, must appear in the grander entertainment. For instance, all our characters had the same voice; the females had a man's tongue; the words evidently did not come from the supposed speakers' mouths; the attitudes of our actors did not always tally with the gestures with which we spontaneously accompanied the reading, although the designers of our characters gave them to us in several positions. Sometimes, unless we were vain, we screened ourselves from our audience, to make the illusion as complete as possible. But it was poor play, after all, because it was dishonest-our actors were not actors; they were puppets, pretending to be actors. The paper mimes were, theoretically considered, identical with Mr. Bellew's, notwithstanding that these move and breathe. The anomalies of the

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