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pay; at the end of the time, if he is not ready with his money, there is a seizure of his property and a public sale." "The chances are that Jules will appear then," I remarked. "Trust him for that," growled Alphonse, and thereupon he departed to make his toilet.

TRUST.

By that strange shadow on your brow
And in your darkened eyes,
I know that you are angry now-—
Nay show not such surprise-
Do you suppose that waltzing there,
I saw not how you frowned?

I watched your discontented air

Each time the dance came round.
I would not break your gloomy mood,
But let you frown your fill-
For watchfulness in love is good,
But trust is better still.

Have I confessed my love to you,
And hearkened all you said,
For you to doubt me, (as you do,

Although you shake your head,)
Because of each slight foppish thing
That gives me tender looks,
And turns the pages when I sing,
Or finds my music-books?
In your too great solicitude,

I say you treat me ill

For watchfulness in love is good,
But trust is better still.

Nay, sir; your brows must not be bent;
Don't try to frown me down.

Ah! now I see that you relent;
I will not let you frown.
Have you forgotten that spring day
When in the lanes we strolled,
And how the twilight passed away
Before your tale was told?

Then trust me, as you said you would-
Ah, yes, I know you will-
For watchfulness in love is good,

But trust is better still.

ROUGH DEALING WITH THE JEWS IN POLAND. -The Imperial ukase prescribing a change of costume to the Jews in Poland has not met with a ready obedience. The long coats have indeed been easily disposed of. Whenever the owners refused to shorten them, the police obligingly took the task off their hands. The curls have undergone similar treatment. But as the myrmidons of the law are not as skillful in handling the needle as the shears, the trousers have for the most part remained as short as before. The provision exciting most resistance is that of ordering the chin to be shaved. Barbers' work seems a ticklish matter for policemen to undertake; the Jews on the other hand venerate their beards almost as a sacred thing. They would as soon think of cutting their throats as their beards. The Warsaw police still allow the latter, shunning an application of

force as likely to produce a disturbance, but in provincial towns a crusade has been opened against them. At Goica, the police began the campaign by an experiment on an old man of about eighty years of age, who was perforce spoiled of his beard in the public market-place. The old man's cries speedily attracted numbers of fellow-creedsmen anxious to rescue their Nestor. No better opportunity could have been desired. As fast as the men arrived they were seized, forc. ed into chairs, and shaved in rather too hurried a manner to be pleasant. The lamentations of the helpless victims are described as most touching.

THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS OF GERMANY.-The statistics of the religious orders of North Germany have just been published in the North German Gazette-Bismarck's official organ. In Prussia, according to these figures, there are ninety-seven orders of men and congregations, numbering in the aggregate 1069 members. The Jesuits and the Redemptorists are the strongest orders, the former having eleven convents with 160 members, and the latter five convents with sixty-nine mem. bers. Bavaria has seventy-one convents containing 1045 members, while the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt has four convents with twentynine members. The female orders of Prussia number 626, with 5586 members. This is an increase of about 1800 since 1865. The Bavarian nunneries are 188 in number, containing 2533 members. The superiors of the various male convents are mainly Italians, though a few are French.

BROWN WINDSOR SOAP.-The ordinary brown Windsor soap of commerce is not, it is stated, the purified soap, colored with caramel, which made the title famous, but brown and imperfectly defæcated bone-grease, which retains its dark color and of which the bad odor is concealed by perfume. A gentleman, writing, says the British Medical Journal, under the initials "W. W." gives the following account of its effects: "I have, while using such shaving-soap, thrice suffered from eczema of the face. On the first occasion, I derived no benefit from treatment by the two most celebrated dermal surgeons in London; and at last the disease went away of itself, after giving up shaving for a time. I had by me a quantity of this brown soap, and, through inad. vertence, took to using again, for a time without effect; but when dry and hot weather came, with it came a recurrence of the skin disease, which also again, after some months of discomfort, went away. Curious to make sure whether or not the soap were the real cause, I a third time employed the soap deliberately to see if the eczema were due to it. I was in excellent health, and in about three weeks I found the disease reestablished, so that I think the soap must be viewed as found guilty. Good white unscented curd-soap is now my resource, and with no ill effects."

AT DAYBREAK.

ONE little gray bird and a sunbeam
Rocked on a leafless spray;

The winds piped eerily up and down,
And it was the break o' day;
And out of my narrow window
I looked with a hopeless sigh,
"Oh, wide is the world and desolate,
And the heavens are far and high !”

The gray bird twittered and chirped and sang,
Keeping her small heart warm,
While wild and shrill the wind over hill
Went whistling up the storm;
And ever the landscape darkened

As the wan clouds skurried past,
Slipping the silver leash of the rain,
At the shout of the summoning blast.
The Morning hid her haggard face

Low under an ashen hood,

And the little gray bird, with a frightened cry,
Fled into the tossing wood;

But the sunbeam clung like a tender hand
That is loth to lose its hold,
When fate o'ershadows some well beloved,
And the summer is sere and old.

And clinging fast in gloom and blast,

The glory grew and grew,

Till the gaunt tree flashed in a robe of gold,
And the Morn laughed out anew:

And a glad thought brightened the weary face
Behind the lattice pane-

From the sunbeam's lesson a doubting heart Drew courage and hope again. E. A. B. COMETS.-But there are comets and comets, and it may be urged that we can not conclude they are all alike small and gravitationally powerless. Lexell's, however, was, to say the least, a fair sample. When it came nearest to us the measured diameter of its sphere of nebulosity (for it had no tail) was 59,000 miles, or five times the size of the moon. Its nucleus, which was very bright, had a tenth of this diameter, or nearly 6000 miles. The memorable comet of 1858, known as Donati's, vast and brilliant as was its vaporous surrounding, was corporeally smaller than Lexell's. Its solid (?) portion—its nucleuswas measured, and found to be at most only 500 miles in diameter, or about one-sixteenth that of the earth. Its volume would thus comprise sixtyfive millions of cubic miles of matter, about oneeightieth of the volume of the moon; and if the comet was not composed of denser or heavier matter than our satellite, its mass or weight would be one-eightieth of the moon's, and its gravitational effect, at the same distance, as small in

proportion. Had either this comet or Lexell's come as close to us as the moon it would scarcely have exercised any appreciable influence on the tides or any other phenomenon or condition which can be affected merely by the mass or gravitational power of a proximate body. Certainly the comet in either case could not have made us its prisoner and carried us away into infinite space, or led us inwards to make fuel for the sun, or to be cindered by close contiguity to the luminary; and this was of old one of the dreaded consequences of a cometary approach. But may not a comet itself be such a fiery furnace as to affect us scorchingly, if it should but pass near us? We are hardly prepared to answer the question, in the present state of our knowledge. If only a good comet would make its appearance, no doubt some information would be speedily acquired concerning its thermal conditions, for in recent years an instrument has been used for measuring the radiant heat of the moon and stars, which no one had thought of applying when last a bearded star visited us. We allude to the thermo-electric pile, the thermometer, for such it is, so wonderfully sensitive that it will detect differences of temperature amounting only to a few millionths of a Fahrenheit degree. If another Donati would but exhibit itself we should doubtless soon have grounds for fairly judging whether a comet be an accumulation of hot combusting matter, or merely a body of cool substance glowing by some such property as phosphorescence. This, however, we have learnt within the past four years, thanks to the revelations of the spectroscope, that the light of several small comets which have appeared within this period has been identical with that emitted by the highly heated vapor of carbon. This shows cometary matter, so far, to be largely carbonaceous. But how comes the carbon into a state of apparently hot vapor? Some comets, it is true, have been known to approach the sun sufficiently near to acquire the fervent heat requisite to vaporize carbon; but this could hardly have been the case with the comets in question. The difficulty is removed if we assume that the carbon exists in combination with some decomposing element, such as oxygen or hydrogen; in this condition it is supposable that a moderate amount of solar heat would set up a combustion and satisfy the observed conditions. In the observations by Dr. Huggins, which revealed this carbon-vapor source of cometary light, the actual identity was established between it and the light of an electric spark passing through olefiant gas. It is open to conjecture whether electricity is in any way concerned in producing the light in the case of the comet.-The Gentleman's Magazine.

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