with its rhythm. Then a lonesome watchman came and talked to us, and left a lantern, which sputtered, smoked, and went out. After a long interval a big miner came and sat with us. He told gruesome tales of the explosion. "Them doctors they had were to blame for many a good man's death. They looked at the boys as they hoisted them from the pit, and said Dead,' when they war n't no more dead than we be this night. They did n't know what they was talkin' about. Some of us took a young fellow they said was dead, and we covered him over with dust and let him lie till the damp was drawn out of him, and he's walkin' round with the best of us to-day. The damp was in them,— that was all, — and the doctors did not know how to draw it out."

where the tide rises only a few inches, to the head of the Bay of Fundy, where it rises thirty feet, made us feel as though something must be wrong with us or the moon. The wharves reared themselves upon a forest of slimy piles, and far below them, reclining in all kinds of postures upon the mud, were sailing-vessels of various sizes. A schooner, ready for launching at two P. M., was perched upon such a height that it was easier to believe that it was to be launched into space than into water which was to come from some unknown point, and in a few hours fill this empty harbor to its brim. However, the tide came in, not like a tidal wave, with a solid front, a hiss, a roar and rush, as I had always imagined Fundy tides to appear, but little by little, as though it were trying to catch us unawares in its horrid depths. Of course we saw the launch, and felt a thrill as the clumsy little tub darted down the greased track, and became rather a graceful creature when fairly afloat. The tub's first step in the world was not wholly dignified. When the last prop had been knocked from under her, and she still sat motionless in her bed of cold grease, the master workman cried out, "Shake her up, boys!" And forthwith the five-and-twenty urchins on her decks rushed up the rigging, and swayed and yelled, until their kicking gave the desired start to her career.

The man's deep voice was full of mournful feeling, the darkness added pathos to his story, and the pump with its never-ending beat seemed to bear witness to all he said. More than an hour had passed, and still we sat and waited; but the end was near. The engineer passed, and gave a word of cheer. Then the conductor climbed in beside us, and we were off. It might have been down the bottomless pit's own mouth that we were tearing, for all that eye or ear could tell. Forest hemmed us in, and intense darkness hung over us. Occasionally, when coal was hurled into the fire, a spasm of red light passed over the whizzing gloom outside; but it only made our eyeballs weary, for we could distinguish nothing. Perhaps we went a mile a minute; perhaps not. Freight cars have no tender springs, yet the motion was not especially uncomfortable until we began to slow up on nearing Parrsboro. Then dislocation was threat ened; but a moment later we were using our trunk as a step to dismount on, and saying a cheerful good-night to our companions.

Parrsboro harbor at low tide is a sight to behold. Coming from the Bras d'Or,

The launch was on August 15, and it was on the following morning, immediately after breakfast, that we resumed our journey by driving across the neck of land which leads from Parrsboro to Parrsboro Pier and Partridge Island. We wished to reach the shore of the Minas Channel at a point where we could look directly down the Bay of Fundy be tween Cape Split and Cape Sharp. The mingling of sea and land in this region affords endless temptation for sketching. If it were a part of the United States instead of being, nationally, neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, it would be

one of the favorite resorts of our amateur artists and summer tourists. As matters stand, Blomidon on the one shore, with its forest-crowned palisades reaching down to Cape Split, and on the other Partridge Island, with sculptured rocks around which the tides of Fundy surge and eddy; Cape Sharp, red-walled and spruce-capped; and even Parrsboro itself, where one must eat and sleep, are places hard to reach promptly and comfortably. We had been forced to storm Parrsboro by night in a rain-soaked freight car. We escaped from it by a steamer so tiny and primitive in form that I wondered whether it had not in years past seen service as a towboat in New York harbor.

From the hillside above Minas Channel we saw several large ships lying at anchor in the protected water between Cape Sharp on our right, westward, and Partridge Island on our left, eastward. The tide was coming in beyond them, and even at a distance the channel seemed like a river flowing from Fundy into Minas Basin. To gain a nearer view of it, and a slightly different outlook, we drove along the shore until we reached Parrsboro Pier, which is in a sheltered nook under the lee of Partridge Island. The tiny tub which was to take us across to the Blomidon side lay at the foot of the pier, waiting for the tide to lift it high enough for passengers to find it. From the pier a ridge of pebbles runs across to Partridge Island, and on this natural causeway we strolled over to nature's Mont St. Michel, with its grottoed cliffs rising on high from the raging waters, and its dark pinnacles of spruce piercing the sky. A winding avenue leads through moss-bearded trees to the island's summit, ending upon a grassy shelf where the rocks overhang the channel, and where either folly or courage is needed to induce the visitor to stand upon the dizzy brink and look down, down, into the hurrying, eddying tide below. My childish imaginings of Fundy tides were all satisfied here, if they had been

disappointed in Parrsboro harbor. The eager rush, whirl, and hiss of that vast mass of water, as it surged past, told of the limitless strength of old ocean, far away at Fundy's mouth, heaving and pushing its way into bay and channel, basin and cove, with woe and destruction for anything opposing its mad progress.

Cape Split and Cape Sharp seemed monuments to the passion and cruelty of this tide. Sharp, on the northern side of the channel, rears its mangled face, and tells of ages of horrid contest with tides and storms, grinding ice below, and cleaving, wedging ice above. Split, on the southern side, is a perpetual reminder of the Micmac legends of the deeds of Glooscap. A huge fragment of the palisades - cliffs which reach from Blomidon seven miles along the Minas Channel to Split appears at a distance to have broken from the projecting end of the cape, and to lean outward over the bay, its sharp sides rising to a toothlike point. A broad section of cliff next to it is also separated from the mass of the palisades by a deep cleft. The Micmac story runs that Glooscap, angry with the monster beaver for building a dam from Blomidon across the Minas Channel, freed the end of the dam on the northern or Parrsboro shore, so that the released waters, rushing towards Fundy, swung the dam round violently, thus forming the palisades, and leaving the broken end showing at Cape Split.

A shrill whistle summoned us from Partridge Island to the deck of the Evangeline, as the steam tub is called which sails from Parrsboro Pier, across the mouth of Minas Basin, under Blomidon, past the Pereaux shore, and into Kingsport, whence a branch railway runs to Kentville. When a series of whistles had gathered together upon the Evangeline's deck all the floating population within hearing of the pier, amounting in all to seven souls, we puffed out past Mont St. Michel into the

alone, for two houses stand upon it, and the laughter of children rings cheerily among the evergreen groves. Much of it is pasture land, and not for cows alone, as I discovered when a huge sow came charging down upon me with hungry gruntings. The view, taken as a whole, was much like that from the Lookoff, so we spent only a few moments on the summit, and then hastened to the beach below.

The road led directly down to the edge of the sea; so, defying Fundy tides, knowing this one to be still falling, we drove along the beach, until our horse's feet became balls of red mud, and the wagon wheels threatened to turn no more. Then we left the horse tethered to a stone, and picked our way beneath the sculptured cliffs, searching for amethyst, jasper, agates, and salmon-colored masses of fibrous gypsum. The cliffs were soft red sandstone with many layers of gray

intermingled, and erosion had worn their faces into columnar forms of singular grace and beauty. At intervals, hundreds of pounds' weight of gypsum had dropped upon the shore, and been beaten into fragments by the sea. The beach was about half red mud, and half small stones and pebbles. Of pretty stones we could have carried home a ton, but of crystals or minerals of real interest we found few. The shore is as carefully gleaned for amethyst as Musketaquid meadows are for arrowheads.

Dewy twilight surrounded us before we could tear ourselves away from the fascination of the towering cliffs, red beach, purple shallows, and lapping waves. When we climbed back into the wagon, it was with the feeling that the spell of Blomidon and Smoky, of Minas Basin and the Bras d'Or, was broken at last, and that our faces were set in earnest towards Chocorua.

Frank Bolles.

EPICUREANISM is no longer a hypothesis or a doctrine. It is a name given to a man's character, not to his beliefs. It is an elegant malady of the soul, a laziness and self-indulgence glorified by culture and refinement, a term devised to mitigate the word "selfish" when applied to the well-to-do, a euphemism for incapacity when it is not too ungraceful, just as kleptomania is a euphemism for dishonesty when dishonesty has plainly no motive. Epicureanism now awakens no enthusiasm and seeks to make no proselytes.

But though Epicureanism is dead, it by no means follows that the poem of Lucretius is only a baseless fabric of errors, possessing an interest merely as an example of a certain brilliant and highly fascinating vagary of a very finely

touched spirit. The part of the book that is dead is the system. The inner impulse which "rends the veil of the old husk," and comes forth as a living flash of light, is the enthusiasm of the poet, his genuine pride in the "train of flowery clauses" in which he sets forth "the sober majesties

Of settled sweet Epicurean life," and his abiding awe for the unchangeable laws of Nature. But above all things else, that which keeps the work instinct with life is the fine frenzy which clothes every argument, however dry or abstruse, with the varied hues of fancy, and which makes the poem like nothing else in literature, if we except our own Tennyson's Two Voices, which, though on a very minute scale compared with the six books On the Constitution of

Nature, shows unmistakably this rare aptitude for "shutting reasons up in rhyme."

Lucretius has exercised a powerful attraction, on the one hand, on students of language, who meet in his poem Latin at a most interesting epoch, before it has lost the insouciance of childhood, but after it has outgrown the helplessness of infancy. On the other hand, freethinkers have congratulated themselves that they have found in Lucretius an ally, and have eagerly welcomed him into their camp. The philologists, lost in admiration of the vase, have hardly tasted the strong wine which it holds. The philosophers have clutched the fruit because they thought it was forbidden, and have not paused to admire the stately branches or the lustrous leaves of the tree on which it grows. But beside these there is room for a greater interest, both literary and psychological, in this High Priest of atheism, this Apostle of irreligion, who thunders against inspiration like one inspired, and who shows all the rapt devotion of a Stephen in his denial of immortality, all the fervor of a Bossuet while he scatters to the winds the last perished leaves of human hope. We must, therefore, on the very threshold of our inquiry into the mind of Lucretius, investigate his relation towards God and religion. I have called Lucretius an atheist. I am aware that, technically, this is a misnomer; for Lucretius provided in his system for the existence of the gods. But why did he recognize gods? What were his gods? And what was the religion which he so bitterly assailed?

Epicureanism, which explained the origin of our ideas by the theory that material images of things (simulacra), disengaged from external objects, struck our senses, and thus became cognizable by us, was forced to rise from the idea of God which we find within us to the 1 In the absence of any really worthy metrical version of the poem, I have used nearly

existence of gods themselves. Thus, Lucretius was compelled, by his physical theories adopted from Democritus and Leucippus, to recognize gods. But nothing is more formidable to the mind than the conception of a power which is outside and beyond ourselves, which is malevolent to us, and which we cannot resist. Such a power were the ancient gods to Lucretius; and the eagerness with which he goes out of his way to rail against their conventional attributes, and to protest against their supposed providence, suggests to us not so much a philosophic inquirer into the truth of a dogma, or even a fervid preacher demolishing a heresy, as some mediæval enthusiast who believes himself to be possessed by a devil, or to be in perpetual struggle with a devil for the life of his soul; whose reason is convinced that he is saved, but whose whole spirit shudders at the thought of damnation; a St. Simeon Stylites who strives and wrestles till he dies, or one of those whose curse it is to suffer

"half the devils' lot, Trembling, but believing not." For Lucretius is ever and anon haunted by "the fear that we may haply find the power of the gods to be unlimited." 1

The religion against which Lucretius protested was grotesque beyond belief. Without going back so far as the Iliad, where we find that human affairs are going all awry, and that this is because Zeus and the other gods have gone to spend a couple of weeks with the Ethiopians, and there is no one to look after the affairs of the world; without trespassing beyond the bounds of serious and unquestioned history, we see the Roman and the Carthaginian fleets facing each other, ready for the most critical struggle in which Rome has yet been involved. We find the whole Roman armament intent on the question whether the sacred chickens will feed. Can always the vigorous and literal prose translation of Munro.