Chapter THE SIXTH (2)

'Oh, in that case,' answered the relieved gentleman, 'I shall be only too happy.'

Ladies should eschew ambiguous expressions, and ambiguous actions for that matter. A lady visiting a great public library for the first time, grateful for the assistance rendered her by an assistant-librarian, slipped half-a-crown into his hand; of course the gentleman immediately returned it whence it came; and by-and-by had the pleasure of overhearing one of his fellows say to another: 'Well, I saw it all, but can't make out whether he was making love to the lady or the lady to him: but they were squeezing each other's hands!'

Mr Sayre of Lexington was troubled with a lisp. One day the overseer of one of his farms came to headquarters to say he wanted some porkers. 'Very well,' said Mr Sayre. 'Go and buy four or five thowth and pigth, and put them on the farm.'

The man inquired if he should take the money with him to pay for them.

'No,' said Sayre; 'they all know me. Thend them here, and I'll pay.'

In a fortnight's time the overseer reappeared with the information that he had been all over the country, but could not get more than nine hundred pigs.

'Nine hundred pigth!' exclaimed his employer. 'Who told you to buy nine hundred pigth?'

'Why, you did, sir,' said the overseer. 'You told me to buy four or five thousand pigs; and I tried to do it.'

'I did no thuth thing,' said Sayre; 'I told you to buy four or five thowth and their little pigth; a pretty meth you've made of it!'

Among the many good stories told by Colonel Stuart in his _Reminiscences of a Soldier_, are the two following. A sentry at Chatham, when the captain of the guard questioned him as to his orders, replied: 'My orders are, sir, if a fire broke out, I'm to take my musket and shoot the nearest policeman.' The officer suggested he had made some mistake, but the soldier stuck to his text; and with 'I pity the policeman,' the captain of the guard walked on without giving the correct instruction: 'If a fire breaks out, fire your musket, and alarm the nearest policeman.'--A Scotch subaltern at Gibraltar was one day on guard with another officer, who falling down a precipice, was killed. He made no mention of the accident in his guard report, leaving the addendum, 'N.B. Nothing extraordinary since guard-mounting,' standing without qualification. Some hours after the brigade-major came to demand an explanation, saying: 'You say, sir, in your report, "Nothing extraordinary since guard-mounting," when your brother-officer, on duty with you, has fallen down a precipice four hundred feet and been killed.' 'Weel, sir,' replied he, 'I dinna think there's onything extraordinary in it: if he'd faun doon a precipice four hundred feet and _no_ been killed, I should hae thought it vary extraordinary indeed, and wad hae put it doon in my report.'

Taking things too literally is a fertile cause of amusing blunders. Two costermongers claiming proprietorship of one donkey, went to the Westminster county court to get the dispute decided. After hearing a part of the evidence, the judge said they had better settle the case out of court during the adjournment for luncheon. Upon the court reopening the defendant told His Honour it was all right; the donkey was his. Turning to the plaintiff, the judge saw his personal appearance was altered for the worse; but before he could put any questions, the defendant went on to say that they had found a quiet yard to settle it in, as His Honour had suggested. He had been rather rough on the plaintiff, but couldn't help it; they had only half an hour to pull it off in, and plaintiff was a much tougher customer than he looked to be. The explanation was conclusive, if not quite satisfactory to the court, and the donkey became the prize of the victor in the fight.

'Come up to the Capitol while we are in session, and I'll give you a seat on the floor of the House,' said a member of Congress to one of his supporters, who called upon him in Washington.

'Wall, no; I thank you,' said the West Virginian; 'poor as I am, I always manage to have a cheer to sit on at home, and I ha'n't come here to sit on the floor.'

A doctor, called in for the second time just in time to save the life of a man who during fits of intoxication was given to dosing himself with laudanum, rated his patient roundly for a good-for-nothing scoundrel, who, if he really intended to kill himself, should cut his throat and have done with it. One night the doctor's bell was pulled. Putting his head out of window, he saw the self-poisoner's wife, and heard her call out: 'He has done it, doctor.' 'Done what?' asked he. 'John has taken your sensible advice,' replied the woman; 'he has cut his throat, and will save you further trouble!'

The American poet must have been either very angry or very much amused, when his note to a friend, 'Come and see me; I am at Barnum's'--meaning the hotel of that name in New York, elicited the answer: 'I am sorry you are going to exhibit yourself. If you had stuck to literature you would have made your mark and fortune. Whereabouts is the show now?' Ill-natured people might suspect the mistake was wilfully made. We should be sorry to suppose anybody capable of thinking the same respecting the extraordinary misconception under which an eminent divine laboured at a dinner-party. He was so dull and silent, that the lady next him expressed her fear that he was unwell. 'To tell the truth,' said he, 'I am not quite the thing; I have a presentiment that a serious illness is hanging over me--a peculiar numbness all down my right side seems to forebode paralysis; for I have been pinching my right leg all dinner-time, and can elicit no responsive feeling whatever; the limb seems dead.' 'If that is all,' said his fair neighbour, with a good-natured smile, 'you need not alarm yourself: the leg you have been pinching all the evening belongs to me!'--Honi soit qui mal y pense.

A FEW FRENCH NOTES.

Our lively neighbours, as journalists still sometimes delight to designate the practical, money-getting French of post-imperial days, have learned much in the stern school of adversity. Saddled with a weight of taxation that might crush the spirit and cripple the energies of a more robust race, they shew wonderful elasticity in developing new and unexpected sources of national wealth, and leave no stone unturned the turning of which may yield a profit.

If there was one branch of industry the revival of which seemed hopeless, it was the home manufacture of kelp, virtually driven out of the market by South American barilla. At its best the kelp trade had but helped the inhabitants of the Hebrides, the western Highlands, and other barren shores, to eke out a scanty livelihood by burning the sea-weed that the waves washed to their feet; while the preparation was primitive enough to have dated from the days of Ossian's shadowy heroes. Science, however, embodied in the form of M. Emile Moride of Nantes, has seriously taken in hand the task of utilising the heaps of wreck-weed that strew the bleak Breton coast, so as to derive the highest return for labour and capital invested. With the aid of a portable furnace, a ventilator or set of bellows for continuous blast, and two wheelbarrows, M. Moride provides for the cooking of his raw material. The furnace is built of dry stones, wrapped round in fresh wet weed, and is supplied with apertures which promote the rapid cooling of the 'sea-weed charcoal,' so called. The ventilator insures quick combustion; but the beauty of the process is that the bromium and iodine, apt, in the old-fashioned method, to be lost through over-roasting, are now preserved. There are at Noirmoutier alone two hundred of these furnaces at work, producing two million gallons of carbonised weed. Each furnace earns its annual fifteen or twenty pounds sterling, supplying as it does soda, potash, and other chemicals to the wholesale druggist, along with phosphates and salts of lime invaluable to the farmer. The pecuniary advantage over the ancient system is roughly estimated at sixty per cent.

France, which exports so enormous a number of eggs, is naturally desirous to content her chief customers, ourselves, by sending over the fragile freight in good preservation. Rubbing the shells with butter, lard, or moistened gum is the mode hitherto practised, but the grocer's stores have never quite rivalled the fresh products of the hen-yard. They may do so now, if we are careful to follow the advice of M. Durand, the Blois chemist. He coats over the shells of his new-laid eggs with silicate of soda, lays them separately to dry, being heedful that no speck of surface remains accessible to air, and consequently to decay, and stows them, for a year if required, in a cupboard. M. Sace of Neufchâtel, a Swiss chemist, not a French one, is reported to achieve as much by the help of paraffine.

Should we have the ill-fortune to be half-drowned, suffocated by unwholesome gases or vitiated air, or to fall down in a fit, Dr Woillez is ready with his new apparatus for artificial respiration. The patient's person, all but the head, is placed in a cylinder of iron, from which one stroke of a powerful pump extracts the air; the lungs and chest of the sufferer expanding as the vacuum is formed. Eighteen such mechanical breathings can be produced in the minute, and at each of these a quart of air--double the quantity inspired in normal health--rushes in to oxygenate the blood. The _spirosphore_ is beyond all doubt a potent agent in serious cases, but some cautious surgeons have expressed fears as to the secondary results which might attend its use.

Nothing but praise can be bestowed upon the successful efforts of M. Lenoir to construct a looking-glass which should neither grow yellow, and give us back a bilious presentment of ourselves as silvered mirrors do, nor destroy the health of the workmen, as was the case in the old process of mercurial amalgamation. The new glasses are backed with silver, washed with quicksilver certainly, but in solution not in vapour, and therefore innocuous to those who handle it.

Alcohol, as we know, can be distilled from almost anything; but Apothecary-Major Ballard, of the Cherchell Hospital, in Algeria, deserves some notice for finding out that Barbary figs, so called, will yield it in profusion and of excellent quality. The stoniest tracts of North Africa are indeed dappled with the flaming red blossoms of the prickly pear or cactus, and the fruit, guarded by its thorny envelope, can be had for the gathering. One ton and a half of these wild figs will give about sixteen gallons of colourless alcohol, at eighty-five degrees, and with a _kirschwasser_ flavour. The same weight of beetroot yields but fifteen gallons of the far weaker spirit in common commercial demand; while beetroot, an exhausting crop, can only be grown on the best and most highly cultivated land.

The most enthusiastic advocates of ballooning would have hesitated to declare that submarine surveys were within the province of the aëronaut. Such, however, seems to be the case, since M. Duruof and his companion going up in a balloon, on the twenty-fifth of last August, at Cherbourg, and being at an altitude of five thousand feet, were amazed to see beneath them, with startling distinctness, every rock, fissure, and depression at the bottom of the sea. And yet the sea opposite Cape Lévy, where the aërial voyagers obtained this bird's-eye-view, has an average depth of above two hundred feet. So limpid did the water appear that the under-currents were perceptible, whilst nothing would have been easier than to sketch or map the bottom of the sea.

A novel and perhaps a practically useful property of madder, hitherto only known as the active principle of a red dye, has been found out by M. de Rostaing. Meat covered with a layer of dry madder powder defies decomposition. It dries, however, slowly, wasting by desiccation so much that in the course of months it is reduced to less than half its weight. A more economical means of preserving meat is that employed at Buenos Ayres, whence beef, mutton, and even entire animals are constantly forwarded, in a state of perfect conservation, to Antwerp and Havre. The solution in which the meat is steeped contains borax and boric acid, saltpetre and a little salt, borax being the prime agent. The experiments of M. Dumas prove that borax destroys the soluble atmospheric leavens which would otherwise promote decay; and so far so good. But another _savant_, M. Peligot, who has dosed the plants in his garden with borax and killed them very promptly by so doing, suggests an ugly doubt as to the perfect wholesomeness of meat steeped in borax as an article of diet.

In spite of all the progress that has been made in electric science since first Volta put together his 'crown of cups,' a perfect galvanic battery is yet to seek. M. Onimus has done something towards this in availing himself of the virtues of the new, tough, and supple material which bears the name of parchment-paper. Every electrician knows that the great theoretical merits of Professor Daniell's 'constant' battery are counterbalanced by the trouble, care, and annoyance which it entails. All double liquid batteries have hitherto proved bulky, vexatious, and expensive; but M. Onimus simplifies matters by using parchment-paper instead of a porous cell, the copper spiral encircling the parchment, which is wrapped around the cylinder of zinc, and the pair of elements being simply plunged into a solution of sulphate of copper.

M. Leclanché, whose battery has for years past set in motion half the electric bells of Europe, has put what he considers the finishing touches to his well-known invention. He now, to compose his negative element, adds to his mixture of peroxide of manganese resin and hard gas-charcoal finely powdered, about four per cent. of the bisulphate of potassium, wedges the mass in a steel mould capable of enduring enormous pressure, and brings it first to a dull red-heat, and then under the action of the hydraulic press. We are assured that one cell of the improved Leclanché battery can heat a platinum wire to redness. A single element of Grove's or Bunsen's arrangement can do no more than this; and the result is the more creditable to the ingenious Frenchman that his is a 'constant' battery, excited by one fluid (the muriate of ammonia), and in which the consumption of zinc, always an important item, has been reduced to a minimum.

What we call vegetable isinglass, and the Chinese by the name of _thao_, and which has hitherto been derived from Eastern Asia, is now extracted from French sea-weed, and made useful in French factories. It is in its crude state a yellowish gelatine, which the Industrial Society of Rouen has, after repeated experiments, succeeded in converting into what bids fair to be the best sizing for cotton cloths ever known. Macerated in water for twelve hours, boiled for fifteen minutes, strained, and stirred till it is cold, the thao gives a clear solution, which does not again become a jelly, and which can be laid cold upon any textile fabric, and left to dry. One invaluable property it has, since it defies, at common temperatures, damp and mildew; and is therefore already being applied to give lustre, not only to Rouen prints and Mulhouse muslins, but to the woollens of Puteaux and the silks of Lyons.

Ozone, the newest and the least stable of the gases, has recently been made to do good service in the sick-room. It makes short work with those miasmata and organic impurities of vitiated air which the Italians describe by the expressive name of malaria, and which every physician knows to be among the most baneful influences with which the convalescent patient, whose tenure of life is not yet quite assured, has to contend. A mixture should be made of permanganate of potash, peroxide of manganese, and oxalic acid, in equal parts, and two large spoonfuls with some water put into a plate and placed on the floor of the sick-chamber. Care should be taken, however, to remove steel fenders and fire-irons, and to cover up brass door-handles, since ozone will rust all metals meaner than gold and silver.

AUTUMN IN THE WOODS.

Every hollow full of ferns,
Turning yellow in their turns;
Straggling brambles fierce and wild,
Yielding berries to the child;
Oakballs tumbling from the tree,
Beech-nuts dropping silently.
Hosts of leaves come down to die,
Leaving openings to the sky;
Bluebells, foxgloves, gone to seed,
Everything to death decreed;
Nothing left of flowers or buds:
Such is Autumn in the woods.

And so is there an Autumn known
To the heart. It feels alone,
Fearing its best days are past;
Sees the future overcast;
Fond acquaintance broken through,
Friends departed, friends untrue;
Human flowers cold and dead
Covered by a grassy bed;
Hopes, late blossoms putting out,
Withering soon, and flung about
By cruel winds; dread doubts and fears
Finding vent in sudden tears;
Yes, there is an Autumn known
To some hearts thus left, alone.

Yet, there's this thought after all--
Ferns may fade and leaves may fall,
Hearts may change or prove untrue,
All may look as these woods do--
Though sad Autumn here is given,
Spring-time awaits the just in heaven.

A. B.

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Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.

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