had wintry springs more than once within the past threescore years. To cite a few instances: in London, on June 16, 1810, the thermometer sank to 37° during a prevalence of northerly winds. Four years later it went a degree lower, on June 9; and in 1816, at a date a week later, it also sank to 36°. I do not think we have been quite so badly off this year, though our gardeners may have told us there has been frost during one or two of the past June nights. But these good men are authorities hardly to be trusted upon a nice point, and I put my faith in more accurate observers. It must be borne in mind that thermometer readings, under some circumstances, are liable to very false interpretations. Lay one such instrument on the grass on a fine night, and suspend another a few feet— five or six-above it; the first may read 10° or 15° below the second. Which is to be taken as correct? Meteorologists know that the higher one shows the real temperature of the air; the lower one gives a conditional reading, which will depend upon the state of the sky and the nature of the soil. I mention this to show that the indication of a thermometer is not always to be taken as the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere.

MR. MURRAY has just issued one of the most expensive and at the same time one of the most interesting books of the season.* The illustrations have occupied a large portion of the author's time during the last six years. The subjects have been engraved in the best possible manner; and in order that justice might be done to the plates, the paper has been made expressly by an eminent house. As an example of the printer's art, the work is a book that deserves to be bound in gold. I have read the leading chapters at a sitting. They have carried me through marvellous mountain paths, over glaciers of snow and ice; they have perched me on strange platforms, thousands of feet above the level of the sea; they have shown me all the wonders and dangers, all the delights and sorrows, of mountain climbing, and left me at last with an aching heart rehearsing that terrible revenge which the Matterhorn took upon the brave men who first set foot upon the mountain's virgin snow. Mr. Whymper has told the story of the various campaigns against the Alps with the modest gracefulness of a brave and earnest man. He was the first mountaineer on the summit of the Matterhorn-the first of that courageous party who paid so dearly for their triumph in 1865. Mr. Whymper, with two guides, father and son, it will be remembered, were the only survivors. The coolest and most undaunted guide perhaps in the history of mountaineering, Michel Croz, fell with Mr. Hudson, Mr. Hadow, and Lord F. Douglas, a distance of some 4,000 feet. The bodies of Messrs. Hudson and Hadow and that of Croz were recovered; but Sir F. Douglas has never been seen since that moment of supreme anguish when his companion, Mr. Whymper, saw him disappear between the summit of the Matterhorn and the Matterhorngletscher. The body of Sir Francis Douglas lies, it is • "Scrambles Among the Alps in the Years 1860-69." By Edward Whymper. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street.)

supposed, upon some jutting piece of rock, a more impressive warning in the imagination than the graves at the Zermatt Church of the perils of mountain climbing. Mr. Whymper's book is a remarkable narrative from beginning to end. It culminates in a detailed account of the Matterhorn accident, which is carefully illustrated in certain new and essential points. For example, Mr. Whymper gives his readers diagrams of the ropes, which clearly exonerate old Peter Tugwalder from the atrocious charge which some persons made against him; namely, that he cut the rope between himself and Sir Francis Douglas. There still, however, remains the mystery of the weaker rope being used to connect Tugwalder and Sir Francis. This is a sufficiently grave matter for the guide, without the false accusation of cutting the rope. I commend this book to my readers who are mountaineers, and I more particularly commend it to those who are not. The general reader will find it more entertaining than ninetynine novels out of every hundred that crowd the catalogues of Mudie's and Smith's.

RESTORING lost noses is a worthy department of practical nosology. You and I have heard before to-day of skilful surgeons supplying this most important of facial features, where illness or accident has made it conspicuously absent. But these curious feats pass in time out of mind, and out of belief; so that when a fresh and well-authenticated case occurs it is worth noting. Know, therefore, that a few weeks back the surgeon of one of our London hospitals, Dr. Mason, undertook and successfully accomplished the formation of a new nasal organ upon the face of a man who had been bereft of this ornament six years ago. The operation consisted in carefully dissecting and turning up two shapely pieces from each of the patient's cheeks, and a third piece from the region between the eyes, and then bringing down a piece of skin including an artery from the forehead, to cover the whole. The joints were seamed up with silver wire, and the result was a capital substitute for the lost member. As the operation was a matter of luxury rather than necessity, there is nothing distressing in the thought of it. It would pain me more to hear of a false nose being furnished by a "beautifier" out of putty or wax.

OUR Legislature is going to show a light at the mast-head. While Parliament is sitting, an electric lamp will shine on the great clock-tower at Westminster : when the House breaks up, the light will be extinguished. What is the idea of this exhibition? Is it to symbolise the intellectual lights that are assembled beneath, or to typify the light of liberty and freedom which illuminates the deliberations thereunder? All sorts of reasons offer themselves, all of which may be futile, for the beacon may be hoisted for no specific reason at all. But why should it not serve a purpose? Let it be a signal to telegraph to all who can read its indications what is going on in the council chamber. The means are simple enough. Do you know the Morse telegraphic code? It consists of dots

and dashes on a strip of paper, and it is worked by the telegraphic operator pressing a key instantaneously for a dot, and lengthily-say during a second-for a dash. A dot and a dash represent A; a dot and three dashes stand for B; dash, dot, dash, dot for C; and so on; and a gap or pause is made between each letter. Now, let an instantaneous flash of the light on the Parliament Houses stand for a dot; let its shining for a second or less represent a dash, and its extinction for a second separate the letters; then you will have a system of telegraphing which can be understood wherever the light is seen by any one who knows or will learn the Morse alphabet. Thus, by a very simple apparatus, a Morse operator in the House can keep the world of London au courant with the House's doings, giving digests of each speaker's speech during delivery, and the results of each division as it occurs. So may the public have to thank the light for something more than its mere brilliancy.

TALKING of electricity, to what humble--not to say base-uses may it not be called! If yours should be the luxury of ordering a brougham of a first-class maker, you will discover during your first drive that he has provided you with an electric check-string of a high order of development. Three knobs, respectively labelled "turn to right," "turn to left," and "stop," are ready to your hand. You touch either, and the corresponding order appears upon the splash-board under your Jehu's eye, a bell being rung simultaneously with the exhibition of the signal, in order that his attention may be called to your command. The battery is stowed in the boot. If these sort of applications extend, we shall have all our servants becoming electricians, and then what wages will they demand?

RAILWAYS are often accused of parting friends, destroying fellowships, and breaking up associations; but it occurs to me that there is much to be said on their opposite influences. Railways, especially those which unite large towns with their suburbs, are in fact great socialisers. They are the original sources of more than half the cliques and friendly communities that make out-of-town life endurable. A man takes a villa a few miles from the city of his vocation; he thinks, wishingly or ruefully, that he has isolated himself from his circle of acquaintances; but soon he finds that the train he travels by always carries the same people backwards and forwards with himself. By and by he finds he often sees the same faces in the carriage he steps into. He gets to know who's who, and presently an opportunity for speaking occurs; he falls into conversations and discussions, and if he is human, and not ursine, he very soon tumbles into a friendship that he has at once the power of extending to his heart's desire; for those with whom he associates have already their little cliques into which they have been carried by the same railway route. And a curious phase of this socialisation is that particular trains form and sustain particular cliques, and it is often by merest chance that a 9.50 passenger knows anything of any member of the 10.40 cliques. How

far this process goes in forming true and fast friendships, it is not my purpose to consider; probably as far as any other process, except that whereas the men thus thrown together are of all ages, it is only among the younger of them that the conditions for close friendship are to be found. We may make friends up to forty, but we only make acquaintances after.

THAT which comes from a high quarter is sure of a good reception; that which has a lowly origin is lowly esteemed. A fireman's respirator conceived and perfected by Professor Tyndall and Captain Shaw is pretty sure of extensive use, though I fancy such things have often been produced before by lesser dignitaries, or by no dignitaries at all. This new smoke filter which the magician of Albemarle Street has evolved from the depths of his scientific consciousness consists of a layer of cotton wool moistened with glycerine, and a layer of pulverised charcoal. The glycerined wool, which keeps moist, arrests and captivates (the right word here, I think, whatever its common significance) the solid smoky particles, while the charcoal robs the inhaled air of noxious vapours. Thus protectingly muzzled, a fireman can remain in a suffocating atmosphere for half an hour. Whether the firemen will accept the boon is a question : men of their class do not like impedimenta, whatever their virtues ; though in this case a persuasion very like something else may, if needful, be resorted to. At least the invention will not share the reception of the kindred one for protecting needle grinders from the deadly steel dust that is their bane. When the Society of Arts took up the magnetic gauze respirators, and sent a commission among the grinders to advocate their use, not only was the innovation scouted, but the members of the commission were actually threatened with violence for introducing a safeguard which, by lessening danger and lengthening workmen's lives, would diminish the rate of wages!

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

SEPTEMBER, 1871.

THE VALLEY OF POPPIES. BY THE AUTHOR OF "CHRISTOPHER KENRICK" AND "THE TALLANTS OF BARTON."

CHAPTER XIV.

IN THE FIRELIGHT.

T is autumn in the valley. I sit at my desk in the firelight. The river is hurrying by, with great bubbles of foam on its brown bosom. The trees are bare. A dark mist hangs over the valley. I sit at my desk in the firelight. I am familiar with death. I fear it not. There is nothing to fear in a change which perfects our hopes and aspirations. This is autumn. I am in the sere and yellow leaf. Next comes winter-quiet, and still, and white, and withered. Then spring-fresh, and pure, and full of sweet breath. There are those who find terror in oblivion. They say death is not so sad a thing in itself, but that it is ruthless in blotting out the memory of us. To many persons it is painful-the feeling which Homer expresses in likening the generations of mankind to leaves. They are born, they wither, they die, and are succeeded by others. The simile does not hold good. The soul cannot be likened unto a leaf. The soul only sojourns on earth. It is a prisoner

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