was the reply. "My mind is made up; I will marry you, and make you Marquise de Moranges."

The Sphinx turned deadly pale, and shrinking from the arms opened to receive her,— "Marry me?" she repeated, in a tone of dismay.

"It is my firm resolve," said M. de Moranges; "do not be alarmed, my dear child, or fancy I am trifling with you. I know my own mind, and have well reflected upon what I am doing. The world may cavil at my conduct, but you will in three weeks hence be Madame de Moranges, and soon get used to your new position, which naturally overpowers you at first."

She had slipped from the embrace in which he meant to fold her, and bending down low, with her old submissive air, brought her lips to bear upon his hand, and meekly kissed it.

The Marquis's first impulse towards the crouching form before him was one of compassionate superiority; he patted her head as he would have patted a pet spaniel. But it was evident that his way of divulging his intentions with regard to the Sphinx must have been too sudden. He had perfectly crushed her.

She might be annihilated by the honour done to her; but somehow M. de Moranges did not feel at all that he had played the part of Pygmalion to his own satisfaction, still less that of Jupiter.

THE

NAVAL SIGNALS.

HE use of maritime signals might no doubt be traced to the distant time when first a fleet put out to sea. It stands to reason that ships belonging to one country, sailing perhaps under the same orders, and ploughing the waves in company, must have early sought some means of communicating with each other when scudding too far apart to exchange sounds. The hoisting of pennons, the waving of flags, and by night the burning of fires would at once occur under such circumstances, even to the least imaginative of nautical tribes, as a simple and natural method of holding converse when afloat; and it is highly probable that the Carthaginians, who in their day held the sceptre of the seas which England boasts now, had as regular a system of signals as we have.

But however that may be, we hear nothing of an official code of naval signals until that prepared, soon after the restoration of the

Stuarts, by the order of James II., then Duke of York and Lord High Admiral. It is this same code which has continued in use ever since. It served us during all the stormy days when we were fighting against the world for the empire of the ocean. It was the dumb interpreter of Rooke, Rodney, Howe, Jervis, Duncan, and all those heroes who ordered their fleets to victory, when arrayed against Holland, France, or Spain. It was in Nelson's hand at the Nile, and it announced the great captain's last message to his sailors on the famous morning of Trafalgar.* Such a code was naturally a favourite with British sailors; but it was also the envy of other maritime Powers, for it was generally allowed to be as perfect and neat a one as it was possible to devise.

"Why then did not the Powers adopt it?" will be the question asked; but the other Powers were not free agents in the matter. Each nation in the good old days kept its code of signals to itself. There was but one code on board each ship, and that was in the keeping of the captain. When a vessel fell into the hands of the enemy, the precious book, which might have betrayed the signals, was usually thrown overboard or otherwise destroyed; and although it must necessarily have happened that in the course of long naval wars English captains occasionally let their code slip into the foeman's grasp, just as the French on their side must have sometimes been compelled to do the same by theirs, yet such occurrences were by no means frequent, and whatever ill effects the accident might have had were usually counteracted by the effecting of some slight modifications in the code. Every six months, or every year, according as it was judged necessary, the different governments would issue secret instructions to their admirals, and acquaint them with the changes to be made in their signals. Secrecy was the word. A sailor's code was expected to be as great a mystery to his foes as his private despatches or plan of attack.

But, satisfactory as this may have been in time of war, it was deplorably inconvenient in time of peace. The existence of as many separate codes as there were nations, made all intercourse on the high seas impossible.

It is not, perhaps, generally known that the signal, as dictated by Nelson was "England confides that every man will do his duty." The lieutenant to whom the order was given, remarked that the word confide was not in the code, and suggested in its stead the term expect-which was at once assented to. Napoleon so much admired this last order of Nelson's, that he caused it to be printed; and commanded that a copy should be given to each of the officers of his navy. "It is the best of lessons," he said.

When an English ship met a French one, the two were obliged to lower their boats and send alongside of each other if they wished to speak. This necessitated tacking, a great deal of time was wasted, and if the weather were at❘ all rough, even this became impossible. All that the two stranger vessels could then do was to bob their respective flags up and down for a few minutes as a token of courtesy. This formality was like the taking off one's hat; it meant, "God speed you; a pleasant journey," and was the only signal universally understood.

Complaints as to such a state of things were loud and bitter in the different navies; but more especially so in the mercantile fleets. Scarcely had the Peace of 1815 been concluded than the proposition of a common international code, which had already been mooted so far back as 1801, was again discussed by great shipowners. Nautical reformers took the matter up and advocated it warmly. A great many specimen codes were published, and amongst the men whose schemes attracted most notice, Marryat in England, Rogers in America, and Reynold in France, stand preeminent. But the time had not yet come. Every attempt at improvement, under any shape or form, and in no matter what department, is sure to be resisted at first as a dangerous innovation. The worthy men who talked of reform were howled at; naval bigwigs pooh-poohed their projects with all the solemnity desirable; and it became a patent fact that nothing at all would be done until the Government themselves chose to take the initiative; the task of propagating a universal code was too arduous a one for private enterprise.

Certain men tried however. Happily for human dignity there are always courageous spirits whom neither difficulties, nor snubs, nor official frowns can daunt. A few of these drew up a code and prevailed upon some English and foreign merchant captains to adopt it. This was a first step. But the success of it could only be partial. To begin with, the code was a sort of compilation of the principal national maritime codes then known. It was voluminous, and lacked the simplicity which should be the very essence of such a work. In the second place the fact of its not being issued under government control and with government patronage made a great many people think light of it. On the whole, things continued pretty much as before. The large majority of trading vessels crossed each other on the seas without being able to

exchange any communications save those of the most elementary nature; for instance, place of destination, nature of cargo, or number of passengers. And such few ships as were happily possessed of the signal book were by no means convinced of its excellence.

Towards the end of the Crimean War the complaints had burst out afresh, and the evil had, by this time, been recognized as one so crying that the attention of Governments was turned to it. The subject had already been once or twice introduced before the House of Commons by private members; but it was not from England that the reform was destined to come. In this good work of nautical progress we allowed our old rivals the French to lead the van. In the year 1864, the Minister of the Navy in France, the Marquis de Chasseloup Laubat, suggested that all the maritime Powers should be invited to form an international commission for the purpose of drawing up a new universal code of naval signals. M. Drouyn de Lhuys communicated with Lord Russell on the matter, and the acquiescence of the British Government was at once obtained. The Commission soon after set to work. Its labours lasted eighteen months; but in the autumn of 1866 the long-wished-for code at length made its appearance. It was published simultaneously in England and France, and it has since been adopted by the United States, Italy, Prussia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Mecklenburgh, Russia, Belgium, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Sweden, and the Brazils, that is, by well nigh all the civilized world. But does it follow that henceforth, should England be plunged in more naval wars,— which God forbid !-her captains will have no means of hiding their private signals from the foe? Not in the least. In time of war, things will remain as they were in the olden days. Each navy will have its own code, and do its very best to keep the enemy from peeping at it. But in time of peace no two vessels will meet on the great high-roads of the ocean without exchanging friendly questions as they go. Briton and Yankee, Frenchman and Turk will all have the means of conversing well, though they be sailing miles apart and far beyond the reach of each other's speaking trumpets. Neither will there be any need to tack, to slacken speed, or to cast anchor for the holding of their conversations. So long as the two ships remain within telescopic view of one another, that is all that is required.

Truly, then, this is a good reform. It is in part the realization of the dream long cherished by philosophers-the establishment of a

universal language. And the new code may aptly be called the dictionary of this new tongue. Let us take a brief glance at it.

If one combines two by two, three by three, or four by four, eighteen signs of some kind, for instance, the first eighteen consonants of the alphabet, without ever making use twice of the same sign within one group, one can obtain a series of no less than seventy-eight thousand, six hundred and forty-two combinations. And if one give to each of these combinations a fixed meaning, such as name of port, tonnage of ship, nature of cargo, &c., one can at once make up a language intelligible to the eye. The next thing to do is to arrange in alphabetical order, on the one hand, the combinations together with their conventional signification (the latter always invariable), and on the other the different colours of the flags that are to represent the eighteen letters. By this means a perfect and simple vocabulary is obtained.

Now, if two ships meet and desire to exchange signals, all that has to be done is to take out the flags and hoist them to the mizen top, two, three, or four at a time, according as may be required. If the letter c be needed, it will be a red flag; if B, a blue one; if R, a white one, with red horizontal bars; if H, a white one, with a blue cross; and so on. If, however, the vessels be too far apart for the colours of the flags to be easily distinguishable, another system is had recourse to. Instead of flags, globes, drums, cones, spheres, or triangles are hoisted. A drum then stands for B; a triangle for S, &c. And the system is so complete and practical that it has been made to adapt itself not only to the intercourse between ships afloat, but also to conversations between men ashore. The code contains a sort of deaf and dumb appendix, to enable sailors of different nations to converse without the aid of interpreters. Let a ship be wrecked, for example, on a strange coast, where no one speaks the language of the crew, and a dialogue may at once be established between the sufferers and the coastguard-men. One of the latter will pull out his maritime code and open it before one of the shipwrecked mariners, who, having likewise opened his code, will at once commence gesticulating. One hand held up will mean R ; two hands, B; the forefinger, C; the arms folded, D; and so on. And the meaning of R B C being set down in the book as the equivalent of "We come from," X M "Amsterdam," P Q F "with a cargo," N D "of herrings," it will be very easy to compare notes and strike up a chat. But this method

is especially useful in the case of coastguardmen or others ashore wishing to signal messages to sailors on board, or vice versa, for of course if a shipwrecked crew were cast aground without having a code between them, as might very well happen if they were washed too abruptly into the sea, it would be impossible to correspond in the way just described.

With regard to the signals to be employed by night or in foggy weather; in the first instance, coloured lights are to be used, and in the second, firing of cannon and ringing of bells.

Of the 78,000 combinations obtained by the assortment of the eighteen letters, as many as 53,000 are devoted in the code to the sole subject of the nomenclature, port, tonnage and cargo of ships. The remaining 25,000 comprise all the other communications which may be usefully exchanged at sea. We select two examples drawn from the code itself, that which we have cited above relating to shipwrecked mariners being a fancy one.

HNJ S, The Borysthenes; B D G, has been wrecked near; B J W P, Oran; D M C, the passengers are saved; N I R, the cargo is lost; BDT, the ship is too much damaged for repairing. And again,

J N, War between; B G V T, Spain; B N S Q, Chili; C L P Q, you will be stopped by the blockade; M Q B, you had better steer for; BNR M, Callao; N R Q, good freight to be had there.

The most varied messages can be exchanged by this means, and the interests of commerce will be very considerably benefited if all governments follow the example just set by France, of multiplying the number of signal towers along the coasts, and connecting each of them by the medium of the telegraph with a central office in the capital. By this arrangement the mercantile houses of Paris are made aware of the arrival of all important foreign ships at the very moment when they appear in sight of port, that is often several hours before they cast anchor. And in case of an accident out at sea it will no longer be necessary for a ship to meet a homeward-bound vessel of its own nation in order to carry the tidings to the owners. The first craft, of no matter what country, will receive the message by the silent voice of the signals, and the news will as surely be carried to its destination as though it were sent per post in a registered letter.

These, and countless other advantages, which it would need a nautical pen to expatiate on, make the new code an invaluable boon to the

sea-faring world.