fectly calm, and the sun shone, so that from the top of the hill the sea appeared all in a blaze of light, you might perceive a black speck at some distance, like a lark in the clear sky; this was the fisherman's small boat, in which Peter would spend all the hours from one tide till the next. Having anchored the boat on a sandbank, he would doze, with his hat slouched over his face, or, if he was awake, listen to the tapping of the waves against the side of the boat; and now and then halloo to make the gulls that were swimming about rise into the air. But most often, in fine weather, he would saunter along upon the beach to a neck of sand about a mile from his home. Here there was the old hulk of a ship that had been wrecked at a spring-tide, so that it lay high upon the beach; it was now half sunk in the sand, and the seaweed had gathered round it three or four feet deep. It was Peter's delight to sit upon the deck, lolling against the capstan, while his naked legs dangled down the gangway in the forecastle.

When the weather was too cold to sit still out of doors, and when his mother drove him from the chimney corner, Peter would take a large knife and an old hat, and gather mussels from the rocks. But almost the only thing of any use which he did in the whole course of the year, was to plait a straw hat for himself, and patch his jacket.

Peter always seemed dismal and discontented; he seldom more than half opened his eyes, except when he was searching the crannies of the rocks, and fumbling in the heaps of seaweed after a storm, in hope of finding something that had been thrown up by the waves. Indeed, he lived in expectation that some great good luck would one day befall him in this way; and so in fact it happened. One morning, after a gale of wind and a very high spring-tide, the sea retired so far that Peter made his way to a reef of rocks, which he had never before been able to reach. There were two hours before the tide would oblige him to return; he determined, therefore, to make the best use of the time in hunting over this new ground. He scrambled up and down, and jumped from rock to rock so nimbly, that at a little distance, no one would have guessed that it was Peter Simons. He dived his arm deep into the weedy basins in the rocks; and groped, with his hands under water, among the pebbles, shells, and oily weed with which they were filled. Nothing, however, was to be found, except now and then

a whitened bone, a piece of green sheet-copper, or some rusty iron.

Peter stayed till the sea had several times washed over the sandbank which joined the reef of rocks to the shore. It was now necessary to make speed back; and he took such long strides in returning, that he sank over his ancles in the loose sand. Just before he reached the solid ground, he set his bare foot upon a staple and ring, to which a small rope was tied; he pulled the rope pretty stoutly, supposing it to be fastened to a piece of timber from a wreck, but in doing so, he dragged from under the sand an iron box, about six inches square. It was very rusty, and he would have thought it a solid block of iron, if it had not been for the appearance of hinges on one side.

"Now," said Peter, "here's my fortune to be sure in this box: what should an iron box be for, but to keep gold and diamonds in? Nobody shall know a word of this till I see what's in it." He knocked and banged it about on the rocks for some time, to get it open; but, finding his efforts vain, he determined for the present to carry it to the old sloop, where he spent so much of his time, and lodge it safely in the sand which filled the hold. By the time he had done this, it was nearly dark.

Although he had been kept awake some part of the night, in making various guesses of what might be in the box, and in planning what he should do with his treasure, Peter rose two hours before his usual time the next morning. The rising sun shone upon the highest peak of the rocky headland, just as he climbed upon the deck of the sloop. He had brought a large knife and a hammer with him to force the box open; but he found he could not get the point of the knife in anywhere; and all his blows with the hammer only made the rusty flakes of iron peel off from the sides of the box; no trace of a keyhole could be found; and when the top of the box was cleaned, it appeared that the lid was screwed down on three sides. Peter buried the box again in the same place, and set himself to think what was to be done. He knew that the blacksmith at the village could open the box easily enough; but he would trust his secret to nobody. The only way therefore was to procure tools, and go to work upon it himself. Lazy folks, when they choose to exert themselves, are often very ingenious, and sometimes even very diligent. Peter had not a penny of his own. How was he to get money enough to buy a screwdriver? Peter Simons, as we have said before, could

plait a straw hat pretty neatly. It was a sort of employment that suited him; because he could do it as he sat lolling in the sunshine, thinking about nothing, with his eyes half shut, and his mouth half open. He thought that if he made two or three hats, he might be able to sell them at the town for as much money as would buy the screwdriver, or what other tools he might want. He procured the straw, therefore, and taking it to the cabin of the old sloop, went to work more heartily than ever he had done in his life before. Peter's father and mother concerned themselves very little with the manner in which he spent his time and when he took his dinner with him, and was absent the whole day, his mother was glad to get rid of him, and asked him no questions when he came home in the evening.

The first thing that Peter did every morning before he sat down to his straw-hat making, was to take the box out of the sand, and make some violent efforts to force it open without further ado; but after spending some time in turning it about, looking at it, banging it against the rock, and trying to wheedle in the point of the knife, he quietly buried it in its place; having convinced himself afresh that the only way was to go on steadily with the plan he had determined upon. He often wondered that he could not hear the diamonds or the guineas rattle when he shook the box; but he conIcluded that it was stuffed so full that there was no room for them to wag.

After Peter had been thus diligently employed several days, he began to feel a pleasure in work, which was quite new to him. Although he now rose two or three hours earlier than he used to do, the days seemed to him shorter, instead of longer, than they did when he spent all his time in idleness. He almost lost his habit of yawning; and when he went home in the evening, instead of squatting down sulkily in the chimney corner, he would jump about the house and do little jobs for his mother. "I don't know what's come to our Peter," said his mother; "he's not the same boy that he was." At length he finished three straw hats, which he reckoned he might sell to the boys on the quay, at the neighbouring seaport town, for a shilling at least. Off he set, therefore, early the next morning, going a roundabout way, to avoid being seen by any one who knew him; the distance was ten miles. He sold his hats in the course of the day-bought a screwdriver and an iron wedge, and got back time

enough to deposit his tools along with the box before he returned home.

Although he was very tired with his walk, he rose the next morning before daybreak, and he felt no doubt that by the time his mother had made the kettle boil for breakfast he should be a rich man; but Peter reckoned rather too hastily. He soon found that he could do nothing with the screwdriver; all his efforts only made the heads of the screws smooth and bright; he perceived he must cut off the heads of the screws by filing deep notches in the edge of the lid; for this purpose he must get two files, to procure which he must sell at least two more hats. This was a sad trial of Peter's patience. It was a whole week before he made his second journey to the town and bought the two files. But he had now a long job before him. Not being used to hard work, it was late in the evening before he had made a notch so deep as completely to cut away the head of the first screw, and there were nine screws in the lid.

His arms ached so much when he went to bed, that he could hardly sleep, and his wrists were so stiff the next morning that he made very little progress in his work during the whole day; but kept filing faintly—a little at one screw, and then a little at another. The third and fourth day, however, he seemed to have gained strength by labour; and after a week's toil, he filed away the head of the last screw. But, even now, the screws were so completely rusted into their holes, that he began to think all the force he could use would never make the lid move; at length a lucky blow drove the iron wedge a full inch under the lid, and after a great deal of twirling and hammering the box came open. And what was in it? Nothing at all! empty! quite empty!

With the hammer in one hand, and the wedge in the other, Peter stood staring into the box a long while, scarcely knowing where he was. At last he scrambled up out of the hold of the vessel, laid himself down upon the deck, and cried and sobbed for an hour or two. But he resolved he would not be laughed at for his disappointment, so he dried up his tears, slunk home when it grew dark, went to bed without taking his supper, and fretted till he fell asleep.

But Peter Simons had now learned to exert himself-his thoughts had been actively engaged for several weeks-he had felt the satisfaction of earning money by his own labour; he had broken the habit of lying in bed till breakfast-time; he had really become stronger by

LACIDLY, and at a ripe old age, the wise and gentle Michael Faraday has passed from this life: and the regret of the scientific world will be shared by all sections of the public.

Faraday was one of the few connecting links between the past and present generations of scientific men. Born in Lord Derby's "prescientific age," he was contemporary with most of the men who popularized science both by teaching it to the general public, and by apply. ing it to the uses of civilization. In his own person he represented rather the philosophical than the utilitarian aspects of science, its love of knowledge rather than its search for practical utility. A patient investigator, who pursued science for its own sake, and looked upon the investigation of nature's secrets as an almost sacred office or duty, he was one of the best examples of the truly scientific man.

His distinctions came to him, not by fortune, nor by favour, but in the right good English way of being won; won, too, by hard and constant effort, and with that resolution which is the bone and muscle of genius. Is there a young heart among us full of the eagerness and wonder which the glorious secrets of Nature evoke, burning to spend life in the study of her golden book, and extract therefrom great legacies of wisdom for mankind; yet in the meantime poor, humble, unknown, and without friends or means? Let him learn how Faraday fought his way out of such difficulties till there was no one to walk before him in all the broad road of science.

His father was a Yorkshire blacksmith, and the very schooling that Michael got outside the forge was of the horse-shoe order, rough and ready. It appeared to the smith that his son would make a pretty-fairish bookbinder; so to

bookbinding he was apprenticed. But nature will have her way, and, instead of tooling and lettering, the boy's mind was always running on the whispers of wonderful things which had caught his young ear. He made an electrical jar out of a physic-bottle, and then a complete electrical machine, which, though it was built up with the poor boy's pence, remained long afterwards the useful companion and assistant of the famous philosopher.

By this time people began to see that bookbinding was not exactly the right destiny for the thoughtful lad, and a Mr. Dance gave him tickets to the last four of a course of lectures on chemistry which Sir Humphrey Davy was delivering at the Royal Institution. Besides opening the Royal Institution to young Faraday, the tickets were his passports into the palace of science. He listened, took eager, careful notes, and went away longing to give up trade, and to be a servant and a seeker in these regions of boundless marvel. He wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, and got no answer; for blacksmiths are not the only persons, unhappily, who fail to recognize the children of genius when they see them. Then he wrote timidly to the great lecturer himself, inclosing his voluminous notes, fairly written out, and saying how he earnestly wished to be admitted to the study of philosophy, if there were any way. Sir Humphrey wrote back a stately but kind little epistle, with encouraging expressions of goodwill, signed your obedient, humble servant;" and the correspondence ended in Faraday's getting a vacant assistantship at the Royal Institution. Ay, and merely conventional as it seems that the learned Davy should thus write himself " obedient, humble servant" to little "Mike Faraday," it came to pass, nevertheless, that the words at their

fullest meaning were not inharmonious with the truth. It was President Gilbert, of the Institution, who himself said to Davy, "The greatest discovery you ever made, Sir Humphrey, was the discovery of Faraday."

For once in his right place, which was the Royal Institution, the blacksmith's son and ex-bookbinder entered earnestly on the work he was made to do. No more hankering after something else beside the thing in hand; a little child that has got back from ugly strangers to his mother's knee, was not more happy and contented than Faraday when he had escaped from trade, and found himself safe among the apparatus, diagrams, experiments, books, and lectures of the Royal Laboratory. In truth, it was his mother's knee; for that bookbinding business was really a great horrid stranger who had wanted to keep him away, when Nature smiled him to her side; and then all his life long she kept on showing him wonderful secrets, which he told to those who cannot come so close to her as did this boy of the Yorkshire blacksmith.

But he had much to learn first himself; and all that while he kept silence. It was in 1813 that he entered the Institution, and not till 1827 that he published his book on “Chemical Manipulation." After this he worked hard at the manufacture of a perfect glass for optical purposes; then he told us new truths about "Acoustical Figures;" and then he made his good old friend, Sir Humphrey Davy, terribly jealous by discovering the mode of liquefying chlorine gas; a striking discovery, which did away with the old erroneous distinction between "gases and vapours." Finally he arrived at his chief and destined ground of action, the almost infinite field of electrical science. His admirable papers in the "Philosophical Transactions" largely extended our knowledge of that force which, under the various name of

electricity, galvanism, and magnetism, Faraday proved to be one and the same wide-spread influence the life, as it were, of inorganic matter, involved in marvellous complicities with light, heat, and all the cosmic agencies.

It were vain so much as to attempt the merest catalogue of the victories achieved by Faraday's strong thought in this new region. No one can appreciate his work who does not know two things-the ignorance which prevailed on the subject of electrical science when Faraday began to labour, and the splendid, the aspiring generalizations which the lips of science are beginning to murmur, as the result, in a large degree, of what Faraday found out in regard to magnetism, diamagnetism, and the kindred laws that link light, heat, sound, and all the impalpable agencies which impress our nerves with the consciousness of sense.

Nor let anybody think that, as he thus unlocked for us chamber after chamber of the palace of science, he took upon him the airs of a major-domo in the golden entrances. Simple and modest to the last, as when he himself knocked at the outermost door, he was like Chaucer's gentle Clerke of Oxenforde, for "gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche." His lectures were chiefly famous for three characteristics: first, that nobody took more supreme pleasure in hearing the new and beautiful things he had discovered than he evidently did in telling them; secondly, that sooner than go one foot beyond the visible footmarks of truth, he would, though a theory were ever so tempting, wait for days, months, years-all his life long, in fact; and, thirdly, that he could talk and experiment together in such a perfect and natural way as to make the subtle elements slaves under his hands; as if they were looking up, like his audience, into his broad, strengthful, veracious British face, and listening and obeying.

VERY child is early admonished of the rudeness of interrupting a person while speaking. But why this caution should be confined to children we cannot imagine. Their rudeness is the least provoking of any. It is the exhibitions that we meet in genteel society that mar our comfort most and excite our surprise. Even

among adults we learn to be patient with im petuous natures, whose strong and ungoverned feelings, touched by some spark in your words, go off like bombs, past all power of restraint.

But the aggravated offenders are those who interject your conversation with comments and hints, or vexatious corrections, or meddling smartness, and so take from you all pleasure

of fluency. Just as you are coming to the nut of a story, they quietly drop a sentence which tells the whole, and leave you with only the mortifying remnants. Is it a jest that is loaded and in your band? They slily step behind you and pull the trigger, leaving you empty as an exploded gun-barrel.

Sometimes a single word, like a drop of ink in a tumbler of water, will change the colour of a whole statement. You cannot repel it, nor answer it, for it attacks nothing, says nothing positively, but only fixes in the mind certain suggestions.

There is an infliction of this evil, equally vexatious. It is when a shrewd lip comments in your ear, whisperingly or aside, upon the remarks or address to which you are listening. It may be that you are not of a retentive countenance. A ludicrous word, dropped just right, sets you into a laugh, irresistible just in proportion to its unpoliteness. You seem to mock the person speaking, while the archwhisperer sits demurely, without blame, as innocent as a dove.

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Yet less bearable are the comments of conceited persons upon some performance to which you wish to give your attention. While a symphony is performing, they interpolate it: "Sublime," "Fine, very fine, don't you think 80 ? " Rather dull, that." During a discourse they are perpetually setting their remarks upon your ears, bringing you back to consciousness, and to contempt. They sing in your ears like mosquitos, they alight upon you as flies in summer-days, only you are debarred the pleasure of aiming a good slap at them. It is seriously to be considered whether this is not a case where a hearty box on the ear

would not be entirely proper, moral, and reformatory?

But there is another rudeness which, if less frequent, is equally annoying. It is the rudeness of the talker, and not of the interrupter. Many will ask you a question and answer it themselves; they will find fault with you, and race forward with remarks so as to prevent any explanation; nay, they will aggravate the matter by putting stupid replies into your mouth, and then answering them. "Don't speak,-I know what you are going to say,but it is not so, for,”—&c., &c.

Many persons have a very cool way of seeing what you think, and insisting upon it;they saw it in your eyes, or in your face, and will permit no denial. Sometimes you are caught upon a turbulent stream of talk which sweeps you down in the most ludicrous way. You are whirled around, and overwhelmed with the rushing talk, which you cannot answer or get rid of or modify. A man of opposite politics pours at you for a half-hour, misstating your position, charging you with all manner of absurdities, exaggerating facts, and abusing you and your friends and your party, and all the world generally, while you are like a man being played on by a fire-engine,-dishevelled, soused, half-smothered, and rolled up into a ridiculous heap.

Ought not some mark to be put upon such men, to warn every one of their danger? We mark dangerous places on the highway; we put up a sign on a broken bridge; we warn people from a dangerous ford. And yet these are lesser dangers! Why should not men wear some badge significant of their propensities? Why not put signs upon dangerous people ?

B.

comes but once in a lifetime, that I cannot be much benefited by a wisdom that comes too late to mend matters. I must just do as hundreds, aye, thousands, do-take my chance in the lottery of marriage."

In this little conversation with my respected Aunt Debby, I am willing to own that I was inclined to be perverse. I had just attained to the dignity of twenty-one, and was, of course, assertive of my manhood; and I was secretly