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fancy we should be getting colder, the countries near the north get their long days and store up more heat in the daytime than they lose at night, so that we are blessed with summer. I think you will see, too, that in passing from winter to summer, the gradual change gives us the more equal days and nights and the more moderate temperature of spring; while something similar takes place again in autumn, when we are passing from the long days of summer to the short ones of winter. How wonderful is the winter with its frost and snow! How wonderful is the summer with its sunshine and flowers, with its thunders and its lightnings! Very likely your notion is, that the most wonderful things are to be found abroad: in Iceland-where the boiling springs shoot up into columns sixty feet high; in Italy, where the red-hot cinders are thrown up from Mount Vesuvius, and the burning lava flows down its sides; in America, where the rivers are thousands of miles in length, and the plains almost without bound; or in the Pacific, where the insects build up islands of beautiful coral. Oh! I should like to travel, you say, to see the wonders of God's creation in foreign lands. I am sure I hope you may be gratified; but please don't be blind to the wonders near at hand. Many things in England are counted very wonderful by foreigners-too wonderful sometimes to be believed. A Dutch ambassador was once entertaining the King of Siam with an account of things in Holland, about which his majesty was very inquisitive. Amongst other things, he told him that the water in his country would sometimes in cold weather be so hard that men walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant if he were there. To this the king replied-" Hitherto, I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober, fair man; but now I am sure you speak lies." The fact is, that everything is wonderful if we will but attend to it, and we should count it wonderful if made acquainted with it for the first time; but familiarity with things-the every day sight of them from our infancydeadens our feeling and prevents our surprise. The people of Calabria are never surprised at the shock of an earthquake-earthquakes are so frequent there; the Icelanders never wonder at the rumblings of Mount Heclathey have heard them so many times; and the English boy smells the flower, gazes at the lightning, hears the thunder, skates upon the ice, without thinking of the mysteries and wonders of the land of his birth.

In winter, "when the stormy north sends driving forth the blinding sleet and snow," the earth seems dead, the trees look like skeletons not likely to revive, the rivers are locked up by the frost. In our own land the weather may be easily and successfully battled against, but nearer the pole winter is a terrible king. In Quebec, North America, dogs become mad with cold just as they do with heat in our dog-days in England. Voyagers in the Arctic Seas have to use every precaution to avoid being frozen to death: remaining still, they fall asleep and never wake again; if they touch anything metallic they feel their hands burned, for intense cold performs the effect of fire; if

they attempt to wash their hands the water and the basin may cling to them, and need to be chopped away; and if they pull off their stockings they may find several of their toes have come off with them. In a voyage made to the north by Captain Scoresby, a Shetland boy had well-nigh fallen a sacrifice. He expressed a strong desire whilst abroad in one of the boats for sleep, and earnestly entreated the men to allow him to compose himself for one hour. After a few minutes' repose he was awakened with difficulty, and only with great care was he prevented from falling again into a sleep which would have ended in death. Again, on the 29th May, 1809, it was blowing a fresh gale from the north-east, with strong frost. The men were absent from the ship pursuing whales, from 14 to 16 hours, without food or shelter from the gale, sometimes lying on their oars waiting for the rising of the harpooned whales, and sometimes engaged in hauling in lines or towing the dead fish to the ship. By the time they got on board they were in a state of exhaustion, and painfully suffering from cold and hunger. The captain, however, had prudently provided for their return. Instead of distributing spirits-the usual plan in such cases-with a view of cheering and restoring the long-exposed adventurers, he had provided a huge kettle of coffee, which was boiling on the fire, and supplies of bread and beef, which proved very grateful, and had the happy effect of restoring warmth of body and energy of limb. Thus is man, when he thinks proper to venture so far into the regions of snow and frost, still able by prudent management to guard against their worst effects. deserves to be mentioned here, that man's body must be kept warm if his blood is to circulate and his life to be preserved, and that man's body does keep warm most marvellously, in spite of changes outside of him. You may surround him with frost and snow, but his blood is as warm as ever; and a thermometer, if you place one under his tongue, will stand at about 96 degrees as it did before. (A thermometer, let me explain, is a glass tube with mercury in it, and lines marking off equal spaces or degrees on the glass; and when the mercury is made warmer it rises higher in the tube.) You may put man in an oven hot enough to make your bread brown and he will be able to bear it, for his blood will not become much warmer for it. Man has a sort of furnace inside of him, supplying just enough heat in the coldest air, and no more than enough in the hottest. Ás to other animals, they are provided for in various ways; the reindeer and moose-deer on land, the snow-flecks among the birds of the air, and the seals swimming about among the ice-islands with their young ones on their backs; all seem to enjoy the cold, and feel quite at home. The bears, hares, and other animals are provided in winter with warm coats as white as the snow itself, by which means they defy the frost and most other enemies, for it is difficult to detect white animals when everything around is white. In countries like our own, where the cold is but of a few months' duration, the swallows, martins, and other birds spend their warm season with us, but when the winter is coming on start off in great companies for a

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warmer land more southward. Insects and other creatures who are obliged to stay at home, and would be likely to suffer from insufficiency of food or exercise, when the fields are no longer in flower, the trees and plants stripped of their fruits, and the air chilled with frost, go into a long sleep called hybernation, waking up again when the fine spring weather comes. Some are taught to store up food in the ground against the season of scarcity. The squirrel, you know, stores up acorns, and so does the little field-mouse, scratching a hole in the ground in which to bury them

gales, and have called England a land of sweet song. The American birds, though not much given to song, yet in the summer nights fill the woods with expressive and passionate sounds. The largest goat-sucker in Demerara, beginning with a high note, and gradual lowering till he is scarcely heard, pronounces ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, har: another species cries, who are you? who-who-who-are-you? another says, work away! work-work-work away! and im the Northern States, a fourth commands you to whip-poor-Will, whip-whip-whip-poorWill But the birds have not the summer all to themselves: beautiful butterflies with gorgeous wings, thousands of beetles with shiny armour of green and black, are called forth by the delightful weather. Tem thousand kinds of summer insects have been counted in Britain alone. The flowers are now more abundant and of sweeter scent; the air is loaded with their perfume. The merry haymaking season begins im the south; oats and barley and wheat give promise of harvest, and the trees are loaded with fruits only waiting to be ripened.

Bidding good-bye to winter, who, according to the poets, reigns like a grim tyrant in his palace of ice, through the halls of which the loud misrule of driving tempest iss for over heard, and who treasures up his hail and snow for the purpose of oppressing half the globe, let us attend to beautiful spring, "with the honey for the bee, with the blossom for the tree, with the flower, and with the leaf," making the land into a garden, and gladdening the little hearts of the little birds. Every land is blessed with its beautiful spring flowers, and England "flower-loved England"-has her snowdrops, And then comes the season of corn-gathering primroses, daisies, and small bell-flowers. The and golden fruits, when, after a continuance of birds who went away in October come swarm-dry weather, the inhabitantsof Britain are someing back again, and find out their own districts times favoured with glimpses of the aurora and the very nests they left behind. The borealis,, or the merry dancers, as the Shetland snows on the mountains begin to melt, and people call them. In Sweden, Lapland, and the flow down in streams which meet one another polar regions, they are so constant as someand make rivers; and the rivers flow on to times to serve the traveller instead of the light the sea, fertilizing the land as they go, and of the moon.. Gruelin says that in Siberia bearing ships upon their bosom. In Switzer- these northern lights are observed to begin land, Dr. Cheever tells us, some of the largest with single bright pillars rising in the north, and rivers of Europe take their rise from the gla- almostat the same time in the north-east, which, ciers, and give the Swiss valleys their most gradually increasing, comprehend a large space abundant supply of water in the season when in the heavens, rush about from place to ordinary streams are dried up. A great ocean place with incredible swiftness, and finally of ice fills up the Alps, always freezing, almost cover the whole sky up to the zenith, melting, and moving down. Some of these and produce an appearance as if a large tent ice-oceans are six or eight hundred feet deep was spread in the heavens, glittering with gold, it is thought. They approach the precipices, rubies, and sapphire. Perhaps the most they plunge over into the vales, they split in splendid aurora ever seen in this country was all directions, and are heaved up into waves, that described by Dr. Dalton. Attention was peaks, pinnacles, and minarets. Underneath first excited by a remarkable red appearance they are traversed by so many galleries and of the clouds to the south, which afforded caverns, through which run rills and torrents, sufficient light to read by at eight o'clock in which, gathering in one as they approach the the evening, though there was no moon or termination of the glacier, rush out from be-light in the north. From half-past nine to ten neath it under a great vault of ice, and thus are born into the breathing world full-grown, roaring rivers. The winds which blow, often so fiercely, in the spring-time, serve to stir up the air, scatter the noxious vapours, and prevent disease; the rains refresh the grass and bring up the flowers; the sunshine wakens and brightens and gladdens flowers and flocks and men. The hybernating animals revive from their torpor, and thousands of new creatures come into existence.

Then comes the glory of the summer months; the clear, bright days, the beautiful nights; the flowers of every form and colour crowding into existence, the charming chorus of the songsters of the wood. The woods and valleys of our own land are not the least favoured: travellers have often been struck on their arrival by the matchless strains of our nightin

there was a large luminous horizontal arch to the southward, and one or two concentric arches northward. At half-past ten streamers appeared, running to and fro; they increased in number and began to approach the zenith, when, all of a sudden, the whole heaven was covered with them, and exhibited an appearance past all description. Every one gazed with astonishment; but the uncommon grandeur of the scene lasted only one minute. The aurora arises from a flow of electricity toward the earth's poles, and may be easily imitated by our scientific men. Autumn is the season of grapes, and apples, and pears; it is also the season of rain and mists-the season when the leaves turn brown and fall, when the wind howls, and when the birds of passage go off again to the south.

G. STUART S.

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HIGH

the

I.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE MINER AND THE PIXIES."

IN TWO PARTS.

TIGH up in the poetic Ardennes, many lies the little town of Saint Hubert. Fired with thoughts of Shakespeare and of Walter Scott, we English travellers reached it one sunny day in August, to gaze on the bare prospect around in dismay, and exclaim dolefully:

"Is this the forest of the Ardennes? Is it here Celia and Rosalind told their loves; and the melancholy Jacques soliloquised, likening the world to a stage?"

"Why, there are no trees!" cried another, "not even a bush big enough for the enamoured swains in As You Like It' to hang their love

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! "This is a melancholy forest, truly," sighed the ladies.

We were right and yet wrong. Immediately around St. Hubert stretches a bare and bleak country, where the fruits of the earth seem scarce enough, refusing even to grow on the

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barren soil, and a tree would be almost a miracle; but, at no great distance, green woods of vast extent slope the hills, or fill the deep valleys with their refreshing beauty. Here we found roads lined gloriously by ten thousand stately pillars, whose waving branches arch and roof the way with a fluttering ceiling of soft green, ever changing overhead, and flinging fragrance and varying shadows across the traveller's feet. The summer stillness, the deep shadows, the quiet beauty of these ancient forests fill the heart with awe. Here we felt as Jacques felt. Before their antiquity, their mysterious loneliness, and cold calm, our hearts like his are bowed down, and we moralize like him on the mutability of earthly things, the vain disquietudes of life, and the fleeting span through which we strut an hour on the stage.

These deep glens, these dark, solemn aisles have seen nations rise and fall! Why, even the shadows lying on the ground are older than the cities of Europe! Yes, these still, grey, unsubstantial images of the forest's strength have lain here in sunlight or in moonlight, ever silent and passionless as now, while the tread of centuries rustled by. Armies have passed over them, and died away, leaving scarcely an echo of their footfall. Memory may people the green glades with their warlike faces and swift stride, but not a tree or a leaf bears an impress of their presence. glancing helmet of Roman warrior, and on shining cuirass of Christian knight, these stately forests unmoved have fluttered down the flickering shadows of their summer leaves, and the rugged shades of their bare branches have rested grey, dim, and calm as now on the snows of a thousand winters.

On

"Have you finished?" asked the dandy of our party, in a drawling voice, putting up his eye-glass, and regarding the moralizer with meek wonder, as he stood in deep thought.

"What was it he was lookn g at ?" demanded young lady coming forward. "Dear

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"I did not see them, I assure you," replied the poet, hastily.

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No; he was looking for 'the wild boar of the Ardennes' and 'Quentin Durward,'" said a little widow, laughing.

"Wild boar!" cried honest Will Funnel, the sportsman of the party; "yes, I've heard there are lots in these woods. And, Durward, is that the butcher fellow at St. Hubert, who they say has killed so many of them with only a knife?"

"No," answered a Belgian baron, who was our escort and host. "Kontang Durvazzade is of Valtère Scott, but de vilt boar is of me-mine, and dat boucher haf no right to kill dem."

"However, he has done it, hasn't he?" asked the sportsman.

Here another of the party explained how the doughty butcher waited the onslaught of the boar, knife in hand, and killed him at one stroke cunningly.

"If he missed, par exemple," said the baron, shrugging his shoulders, "I vould not be in his-vat you say ?-boots for anyting."

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'Why, what would the boar do?" asked the poet, whom we had christened Jacques, in honour of his soliloquizing mood.

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Rip him up, my dear fellow, with his tusks," said Will Funnel. "They are frightful beasts to deal with, those boars. I'd much rather be attacked by a wolf."

"We haf kill six wolves last winter," said the baron, "and one of dem had eat up a child -a leetle child,-it went for beer for its fader, but never came home."

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And they found the child's hands, the mug, and six sous change on the snow," said the sportsman.

The ladies screamed in horror, while Jacques looked disgusted at the manner in which the story was told.

"All de village watch for dat wolf," said the baron, "and I kill him wis my dogs."

Every one being apparently satisfied to hear justice was done on this particular wolf, anecdotes of wolves in general became popular.

"They are great cowards," said an English gentleman, long resident in the country. "I remember once losing a little dog in one of these woods. I searched for him, and whistled in vain till nearly night-fall, when, of course, I was obliged to leave him to his fate. Two days afterwards I was out shooting with a couple of men, through Ardennais, and up to every trick and turn of the forest, for, let me tell you, there is nothing so treacherous as a wood, when they declared they heard the bark of a dog. Well, we worked our way up to the spot, and there was my little spaniel safe and sound, with his long hair completely and tightly entangled in a curious spiteful thorn that grows here, while all around were the tracts of wolves who had quite worn a path around the bush as they had walked round and round him for two nights, without daring to touch him."

"They feared a trap," said the sportsman: "they are cautious as foxes, and doubtless fancied the dog was a snare."

"You speak of a dog being tied up to a bush and escaping," remarked the widow; "but I knew of an instance in Brittany where a poor little boy was tied up to a tree and did not escape. A farmer found the child stealing his apples, and to punish him tied him up to the tree. "Now I shall leave you there till sunset," he said, "then I'll send you home, and I don't think you'll like that tree well enough ever to come near it again.'

"The farmer finished his afternoon's work, took his supper, and went to bed, forgetting the poor little prisoner entirely. At five in the morning, turning out of his wonderful Noah's ark of a bed-all the poor people's beds in Brittany are like Noah's ark, and how it is they don't get suffocated in them is a marvel to me," said the lady, in a long parenthesis.

"Never mind the Brittany beds," cried Will Funnel, "tell us about them another time. How about the boy?"

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'Well, while getting into his extraordinary garments-I suppose you know all about their long coats and girdles and knives ? " Yes, yes," we exclaimed.

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Rather a severe punishment for stealing a few apples," said the melancholy Jacques, "to have one's bones cracked up by wolves."

"And under the very tree, too, and perhaps with some of the forbidden fruit in his pockets," observed the Exquisite in his slowest voice. "Isn't that, now, what good people call a judgment? Really it's like reading a bit out of an old spelling-book, 'pon my word it is."

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A judgment indeed!" cried the young lady indignantly. 'I think the farmer ought to have been tied up there himself for a night, with the wolves howling around him, that he might understand the horror and anguish that poor little creature must have undergone."

"And yet the farmer's crime was only forgetfulness," remarked the philosopher.

"But forgetfulness," drawled our young swell, looking sentimentally at the pretty English girl, whom we shall call Rosalind, in honour of the Ardennes, "is really a dreadful sin, and fearful, don't you see, in its consequences. 'Pon my word, you might take all my apples, if I had any, and my watches-I believe I've got three-but don't forget me, I couldn't stand that."

"Ah," said Will Funnel, "what are apples, or even watches compared to forgetfulness? Suppose one's wife or one's lady-love forgot one, for instance ? ”

A consummation most devoutly to be wished at times," quoted the wicked Jacques.

"You haf talk much good deal," said the Baron, "of one bad boy who stole apples, and was too big punished. Will you like see five hundred bad boys, who I think hafe not too big punishment?

Five hundred boys!" exclaimed the young lady. Are they big boys?"

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Are they all tied up somewhere?" asked the swell anxiously; "because five hundred boys loose would be rather formidable, especially bad boys."

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They are tied up tightly enough," replied the sportsman sadly. "They are all little prisoners at the Penitentiary at St. Hubert."

"O let us go, by all means!" cried the ladies.

The softer sex, I observe, thrusts itself into painful scenes more eagerly than our rough one of the beard. However, the visit was agreed on, and we broke up our encampment in the green forest, and strolled back leisurely towards St. Hubert.

This little town is insignificant in itself, possessing only two objects of interest,-the church and the penitentiary. The latter is a large pile of buildings, being the remains of an ancient monastery now adapted for the accommodation of about five hundred boys, the criminal youth of Belgium. Here the unfortunate street outcast, the wretched victim of vile teachers, the miserable sufferers from destitution, find a refuge. They are attended and instructed by an order of lay brothers known as petits frères, to whose kindness, tact, and gentleness every visitor willingly testifies. They accompanied our party in their walk round the building, explaining everything with an evident anxiety that all should be perfectly understood by the English strangers.

"The prisoners are all very young," we remarked.

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"It is only the very young who are admitted here," answered the lay brother. There is a penitentiary for older boys in the north of Belgium."

Young as they are, they have the look of old wizards, or of imps who have revelled preternaturally in mischief for a thousand years," said Jacques. "I never saw such heads. Phrenologists would despair of teaching them anything."

In very truth, they were the most hideous set of un-child-like, supernaturally aged children that ever eyes beheld. There was an old man of ten years, with low receding forehead and hardened look of crime; here, another sunk into the very dulness and heaviness of age, with thick brows, beneath which peered eyes of a boiled and fishy look; here, another beardless man of nine, of sharp and greedy aspect, who regarded us furtively with cold, keen, glittering eyes like those of a snake. From every face childhood was clean gone. Vice, misery, and shame had wiped out the impress of infancy and scarred the young features with a look of age. Snub and pug noses of every possible ugly size and colour; big, low heads-heavy behind, with a thick mass of flesh at the back-these were the chief types which humanity took, shaped out by

crime.

"Swedenborg says," remarked the moralizer, "that the angels look us in the face while the devils regard us at the back of our heads, through which they influence us."

"Well, looking at these young gentlemen here, I believe him. Put it down in your note-book, my dear fellow, that you have

found somebody in their rational wits, who believes in Swedenborg."

"I've booked you," I answered. "But if the devils have indeed been gazing at the misshapen heads of these unhappy little culprits, let us remember that no angel ever looked them in the face, till they found themselves fed, clothed, and kindly treated in the merciful penitentiary. Doubtless their history is the usual one of childish vagabondism-drunken, ruffian, or thievish parents, or else total orphanage and an early apprenticeship into the crimes and miseries of the hard world. It is such things as these that make the devils look into the back of our heads."

"In spite of their appalling ugliness, I cannot help pitying these little creatures," said one of the ladies-a young widow-softly. They have such a motherless look about them."

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We were standing in the vast dormitory when she spoke, and we all assented to the womanly remark, as we gazed at the small beds, each one being separated from its neighbour by a cunning contrivance of iron net-work, making each sleeping place appear like a cage -where the miserable bird never sang-and we wondered whether the solitary child, when resting there, ever dreamt of other children far away, with mothers sitting at their pillows singing them to sleep.

Who can say? They may have such thoughts dimly whispering at their hearts, unfeeling and dull as they look.

"They have no beauty, no intellect, no childish frankness wherewith to win to them one human heart. All the more should we pity and tend them," said the lay-brother-a kind man, with a calm face that had seen sorrow, and pitying him we acquiesced in his remark.

The beds in the three enormous dormitories were arranged in lines, with sufficient space between to allow of walking comfortably, but no communication could take place between the occupants, each bed, as I have mentioned, being completely covered with a net-work of iron, boarded to a certain height, by which means, with a moderate space around, it was made to answer the purpose of a separate room. Every little cage, contained besides the bed, a bench, a washing basin, and two or three pegs on which to hang the clothes and towel. The grated door is locked when the small prisoner goes to rest, and is opened again in the morning at five, the hour of rising. Some of the brothers sleep in the dormitories to be within call in case of sudden sickness or accident.

Everything required in the establishment is made in the building by the boys. They spin and weave, they brew and bake, they wash and cook. They make their own shoes, their own clothes, their bed and table linen, everything, in fact, except earthenware. Each trade worked apart in its separate room, or rather, I might say, hall, so vast were its dimensions.

"How unlike a prison!" we all said, as we visited each department, and examined the busy occupants. In one hall the young

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