the night in question, with Miss Woods and Ellen; that they went to bed in half an hour after the rest of the family, and did not mend any clothes; that she and they were all undressed, and at their prayers, when her master gave the alarm of fire; and that all they had stated of his conduct was untrue from beginning to end.

There must certainly have been a great deal of false swearing somewhere.

The jury remained closeted during that night, and until the afternoon of the next day, when, not having agreed on any verdict, they were conveyed to the verge of the county, and there discharged in the usual

way.

ECHO.

THE advancing sunray of science has dispelled many legends which had shadowy yet beautiful existence in the twilight of poetic ages. Man, in the infancy of his education, gave the rein to his luxuriant fancy whenever he wished to account for effects of which the cause was not visible. Thus were produced most of those enchanting myths to which the genius of Ovid gave permanence in verse; among others, the plaintive tale of the love and grief of Echo, that gentle shade, who ever dwelt in woods and caves, mourning for lost Narcissus. The power of this legend has passed away, but the fact remains-Echo has still a voice, and nothing more. Let us see how this voice arises.

To understand an echo, we must understand the nature of sound, which may be explained as follows: No material in nature is really solid, but all are composed of a number of atoms, cohering together more or less closely, according to the density or hardness of the material. Now, when we strike any substance, we drive its constituent atoms one against the other, and occasion a commotion among them, caused by the conflict between the force of the blow disarranging them and their natural tendency to resume their original position. This commotion, commonly called vibration, displaces the air around, driving it away in waves, and the effect of the striking of these waves upon the ear is the sensation of sound. All differences of sound arise from differences in the form and quickness of these sound-waves, the regularity of their succession, or the way in which they strike the ear. If they break upon the ear at equal intervals, a musical note is produced; if fitfully and without order, the result is a noise. Strange as this doctrine of sound-waves in the air may appear, it admits of an easy proof, by placing a bell in the receiver of an airpump: when the air is exhausted, the bell will cease to ring, and the clapper will strike the sides on being shaken without any sound ensuing. Further proof is afforded by the fact, that sound takes time to travel; we see the flash of a gun before we hear the report.

Now, when these advancing waves of sound meet with an obstacle which throws them back to the point from which they started, an echo is heard. But it is necessary that the ear of the person listening for it be in the path of the returning sound, and also at some distance from the reflecting surface, as otherwise the advancing and retreating sounds become mixed together, and indistinguishable. No perfect echo can be heard unless the obstacle which drives back the sound is about sixty-five feet from the place where the sound originally arose. It is because of this that the walls of ordinary rooms do not produce echoes; they are so near, that there is not time for the soundwaves they drive back to get separated from those that follow them. Sound travels at the rate of about 1130 feet in a second, consequently, a person standing that distance from a wall capable of producing an echo, would hear the echo just two seconds after he spoke, as the sound would take a second to go to the wall, and a second to come back to him.

Caverns are among the best places for the produc

tion of echoes, because they not only drive back the sound from their sides, but collect it together, and so make the echo louder. For the same reason, passages and cathedral aisles are noted for giving back the voice; mountains, icebergs, and tall trees will do the same What is required is, that the opposing surface should be of such a shape as to utterly prevent sound from passing beyond it, or from becoming dissipated among the surrounding air. Obviously, a concave surface is the best adapted to this result, but any which is large enough to accumulate the tide of sound sufficiently, and roll it back, will cause an echo. If there be a number of surfaces equally distant from one another, and receding from the ear, the echoes from them will be musical in character, however unmusical may have been the noise which has produced them: this occurs because they fall upon the ear in regular succession, from the regularity of the reflecting sur faces. An instance in point is the musical ringing sound which will be heard by a person who stamps on the ground at the end of a long row of railings or pales.

Echoes sometimes multiply the sound by reproducing it many times; or, to express it in another way, there is sometimes such a configuration of surrounding objects, that the echo thrown from one surface is itself driven back by another, and so becomes re-echoed over and over again. This may happen between par allel walls, for example. At Roseneath, near Glasgow, there is an echo which will repeat a tune played on a trumpet, three times with great accuracy, though, of course, with diminished strength each time, because the sound becomes dissipated. At the Simonetta Palace, near Milan, an echo is said to exist capable repeating the report of a pistol sixty times. By the Lake of Killarney is one which supplies a second part to any easy tune performed by a bugler. In Wood stock Park is another, which repeats seventeen syllables by day, and twenty by night; the reason for the difference being, that air is of more uniform density by night, owing to the absence of the rays of the sun, which create breezes; and the more uniform the density of the air, the better sound-waves are transmitted.

Thus, we have seen Echo to be neither a nymph, a fairy, nor any other supernatural visitant, but a simple minister in Nature's temple. Yet we are far from knowing all that requires to be known of the phenomenon. Not any branch of science is less perfectly understood at present than that which relates to the laws of sound; and the works of the ablest writers on the subject are confessions of at least a lack certainty. Still, what is known has been turned to good account; and the astonishing harmonies of music, whether rolled forth from the mighty orchestra, or breathed by a concert of voices soft and clear, attest the power which this knowledge confers.

A LESSON FROM THE LARK. THE mists of winter scarcely die away, Ere the bold lark salutes the feeble sun; Up from the watery marsh or windy down, He springs, through morn's low-hanging clouds of gray, With dew-gemmed wing and heart serenely gay; High lost in heaven, ere the matin chime Booms from the abbey tower, he chants his hymn, Nor ends his praise till Night infolds the Day. Oh, if ere yet the fragrant breath of Spring Rocks softly to and fro the half-formed leaf, This wild, impassioned minstrel thus can sing, Shall we, the wisdom-dowered, hug our grief? No! Let us, like the lark, anticipate Bright morns to come, and warble while we wait.

Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Pater noster Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH. Also sold by all Booksellers.

MISSING.

THERE is something in human affairs even more terrible than Death itself-namely, Disappearance: the sudden snatching away of a man, from amidst his fellow-creatures, who either know not what to think of the matter, or who have a score of elucidations to offer, not one of which is in the least degree satisfactory. Compared with death, indeed, such things are uncommon, yet, probably, there are few of my elder readers within whose personal knowledge something of this nature has not occurred. At all events, we have all read of such things, and been affected by them more than by any other species of narration, with the exception, perhaps, of ghost-stories, which are scarcely more mysterious, and are open to objections on the score of credibility. How strangely that episode strikes us, in the Life of Grimaldi, where his brother, after the lapse of many years, comes to the stage-door of the theatre to see him, and after a promise of meeting him that night at supper, disappears thenceforth and for ever. I remember little of the book besides that incident, which stands out with strange distinctness among the Clown's reverses and successes, and the poor tinsel of theatrical life.

Even about inanimate objects that have been suddenly removed from human ken, there hangs some interest, as, for instance, about the Great Seal of England, filched from Lord Thurlow's house in Ormond Street, and cast into nobody knows what melting-potmade 'gold-soup' of for nobody knows whose benefit! I don't feel nearly so interested about that Chancellor's Seal which foolish James II. cast into the Thames, in the malicious hope of interrupting public business, because that was fished up and found.

What a terrible thing, again, is a Lost Ship; how much worse than any shipwreck, which tells its own tale in spars, and fragments, and drowned men cast on shore! A ship that leaves its port, and is perhaps 'spoken with' once or twice, and then is no more seen or heard of; one, that not only never reaches its haven, but meets with we know not what fate. We cannot even say of her as of that great ship, which, lying on a calm day in front of a populous town, suddenly heeled over and went to the bottom: Down went the Royal George, with all her crew complete.' She may have been blown up, for all that we know. She may have been borne northward by some hitherto unknown

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current, and imprisoned in adamantine icebergs, and all her crew have petrified. She may have been carried to the tropics, and been becalmed for months, and rotted, men and timbers; or in some island in those dark purple spheres of sea, her people and their progeny may still exist, cut off for ever from old associations, familiar faces, and home, with her planks laid in the coral caves, never more to bear human freight. What a shudder still comes over us when we remember the President! What a weird and awful mystery lies still about those explorers of the North, although we know that they be dead, and may see at any time in Greenwich Hospital their last tokens. There is scarce a ghastlier sight, to my thinking, than that little heap of tarnished silver-forks, abandoned in those far-away icy solitudes. What despair must have been in the hearts of those who left them there, and pushed on, God alone knows whither!

Of all the evil things that were permitted in the Bad Old Times, it seems to me the Press-gang must have been the worst. Conceive the misery that it must needs have caused in humble homes: the breadwinner suddenly carried off, and the wife and children not only made destitute, but harrowed with the thought that he was dead. There was no alacrity in consolation among the officers of his majesty's tenders; the kidnapped wretch might be able to communicate his position, or he might not. A state of things less endurable than even the recruiting in Poland, in as far as the horror of what may be exceeds the pang of the misfortune that is.

The imagination magnifies the unknown evil. I well remember the state into which the public school where I was educated was thrown, one fine morning, by the intelligence that Bilkins major had been sent away in the night; had been carried off home, or elsewhere, and was never more to return to pursue his classical studies. The previous day, he had construed his Greek with his usual infelicity; had distinguished himself at football as much as ever; had added the ordinary amount to his tick at the pastry-cook's-and yet, behold he was Gone! What had he done? What had he done, to be withdrawn with such excessive suddenness from the midst of his fellow-sinners? Not even Bilkins minor, his brother, could tell us that. We lingered about in knots all day, discussing his possible crime; and if it was the object of our head-master to hush matters up by this secret method of ejection, that object was certainly

not attained. Even now, after the lapse of I dare not say how long, a certain weird and appalling mystery clings to Bilkins, with whom I have no acquaintance, but whom I meet going about Lincoln's Inn, to outward appearance a very ordinary barrister. The particular offence that caused his abrupt departure from school was never known, although it must surely have been one of those which we imputed to him. If not, it must have been Original Sin indeed -pure Bilkinsism.

-

In 1723, a gentleman named Annesley was expected by his friends from Rotterdam, to arrive in London by a certain vessel, in which, he wrote, he had already secured a berth. On his non-appearance, a search was instituted among the shipping in the Thames; the craft which he had described was boarded, and the captain-one Philip Roche-and crew examined. They denied all knowledge of such a person. There was nothing to disprove this except Mr Annesley's letter, which gave, however, such details as it was impossible to mistake. Upon a representation to the Secretary of State, the vessel was placed under surveillance, and the letters sent by the suspected persons were opened on their passage through the post. A communication from Roche to his wife furnished the clue to quite a labyrinth of nautical crime. In his early career, this wretch had driven a tolerable trade by sinking ships which he had previously insured beyond their value; but having been appointed mate to a trader bound for Cape Breton, he had mutinied with others of the crew, and thrown the captain and half-adozen sailors overboard. It had then been his intention to turn pirate in the western seas; but finding his provisions getting short, he had been obliged to put back to Portsmouth, where he painted the vessel afresh, and gave her a fictitious name. Then he traded-commencing with the stolen cargo --but with this hideous addition to his commercial gains, that he was ready to take passengers, with valuable property, to any port they pleased; only when he got a little way out to sea, he drowned them; and thus he had murdered the unsuspecting Mr Annesley. For this, Roche was hanged at Execution Dock; but before that righteous punishment overtook him, what unimaginable misery must such a monster have caused! what mysterious woe! what fruitless and heart-sickening hope!

A still more curious case, but without its tragic horror, was that of Mr Duplex, which occurred in 1787. This gentleman, having arrived from Margate by the hoy one day, had taken a boat in the Thames, to be set on shore at Tower Stairs; this was boarded, however, by some persons calling themselves revenueofficers, who carried him and his portmanteau, on pretence of examining the latter, on board a sloop lying at anchor. Mr Duplex followed his property down to the cabin, when presently, upon looking out of the window, he found himself opposite Greenwich Hospital. He was calmly informed that he was going out to sea, and as he could not be put on shore, had better make himself comfortable. Nobody did him any injury, nor even robbed him of his money; but the crew wore his best shirts and other fashionable garments as though they were their own. For three months he was constantly confined in the cabin, noralthough he could frequently hear the sailors leave and return to the ship, and in the latter case, always bringing hampers and boxes with them-had he the least idea at what port it was touching, or even on what coast he was cruising. He was fed, like his captors, upon salt beef and grog, and never made to work, or do anything unpleasant. At length, being permitted to come on deck, he found the sloop to be in the Bay of Beaumaris, North Wales; and the man at the helm telling him he might go on board a fishingsmack that lay alongside, he did so, and was safely landed; and so ended his extraordinary adventure.

The friends of Mr Duplex, who was a young man of considerable property, had offered a large reward for him, dead or alive; and the Thames had been dragged for his body, again and again.

Mysterious as is the sudden disappearance of our fellow-creatures, the interest is considerably intensified when they take a horse and cart with them. Yet that such a startling phenomenon must once at least have occurred, rests upon no less grave an authority than the Encyclopædia Britannica. In the beginning of the last century, as the curate of Slogarp, in the Swedish province of Schonen, was engaged with some of his parishioners in digging turf in a drained marshy soil, they came upon an entire wagon and the skeletons of a man and horses several feet below the surface of the ground! If the place had been always a morass, such a disappearance would not have been so inexplicable as it doubtless was at the period of its occurrence. There was once, how ever, a lake upon the spot, and it is presumed that, in attempting to cross the ice, the unfortunate carter with his steeds and vehicle fell suddenly through, and were swallowed up. If, as was likely, it was on the way home at the conclusion of the day's work, the whole would have frozen over before the morning, and absolutely no trace have been left to account for their disappearance. The explanation was doubtless supplied by Superstition, for whom a finer opportunity can surely never have occurred.

Another instance of the total disappearance of a horse has happened within very modern times. No less celebrated an animal than a certain winner of the Derby was, immediately after that great victory, lost for ever to the admiring eyes of men. There was some talk of his having entered a Veterinary Collegeto complete his education, I suppose; but such a course could only be paralleled by a Senior Wrangler being sent to a preparatory school to learn arithmetic. A darker story is afloat, that the noble animal was basely murdered on account of his teeth; not, indeed, for the sake of depriving him of those ornaments, but to prevent their revealing the fact, that he was over three years old-past the legal age at which an animal is permitted to run for the Blue Ribbon of the Turf, and therefore not entitled to the honoursand emoluments he had carried off. The favourite for the Derby of this very year had 'pitfalls' dug for him, so that he might break his legs in his morning gallop;' but even that atrocity seems less tremendous than the secret assassination to which the finger of Suspicion points in this case. There has been nothing like it since the murder of the Duke d'Enghien.

To quit horses, and return to humanity, however, the saddest disappearance of which I remember ever to have read was that of a Captain Routh of the Indian army, who came home on leave from Calcutta, to be married to a Miss Ling in Hertfordshire. The better known case of Mr Gordier in Guernsey affords a very close parallel to it in many respects; but the fate of that latter gentleman was discovered for certain, while that of the Indian officer was never cleared up, although open to the darkest suspicion. Captain Routh arrived at Southampton, and was identified as having been a passenger by the coach from that place to London. But after having safely accomplished so many hundred miles, he never attained that place such a little way off, where his bride awaited him He neither came nor wrote. She read his name in the list of passengers by the Europa, and looked for him hour by hour, in vain. What excuses must not her love have made for him! How she must have clung to one frail chance after another, until her last hope left her! How infinitely more terrible must such vague wretchedness have been to bear, than if she ha known him to have been struck down by the fatal sun-ray of Bengal, or drowned in Indian seas. Where

was he? What could have become of him?

This young lady had a cousin of the name of Penrhyn, about her own age, who had been brought up in the same family, and, although much attached to her, had not been hitherto considered to entertain towards her warmer feelings than those of kinship. But as month after month, and year after year, went by without tidings of the missing bridegroom, he began to court her as a lover. She, for her part, refused to listen to his addresses, but her mother favoured them; and plunged in melancholy, the girl did not take the pains to repulse him which probably she would otherwise have done. She accepted, or at least she did not reject, a ring of his, which she even wore on her finger; but whenever he spoke to her, or tendered her any service, she turned from him with something like loathing. Whether this was remarked upon so much before the following circumstances occurred, it would be interesting to learn; but all who knew them now testify, that whereas in earlier days she had taken pleasure in her cousin's society, it seemed to become absolutely hateful to her, subsequent to her calamity.

About three years after Captain Routh's disappearance, a brother-officer and friend of his, one Major Brooks, having business in England, was invited into Hertfordshire by Mrs Ling, at the urgent request of her daughter. So far, however, from being overcome by the association of the major's presence with her lost lover, Miss Ling seemed to take pleasure in nothing so much as in hearing him talk of his missing friend. Mr Penrhyn appears to have taken this in some dudgeon; perhaps he grew apprehensive that a present rival might be even more fatal to his hopes than the memory of an absent one; but, at all events, the two gentlemen quarrelled. Mr Penrhyn -who lived in the neighbourhood-protested that he would not enter the house during the major's stay, and remained at his own residence. During this estrangement, the conversation between Brooks and Miss Ling had Captain Routh for its topic more than In speaking of the absence of all clue to what had become of him, the major observed: There is one thing that puzzles me almost as much as the loss of my poor friend himself. You say that his luggage was found at the inn where the coach stopped in London ?'

ever.

'It was,' said the lady. I am thankful to say that I have numberless tokens of his dear self.'

"There is one thing, though, which I wonder that he parted with,' pursued the major, and did not always carry about with him, as he promised to do. I was with him in the bazaar at Calcutta when he bought for you that twisted ring'

That ring,' cried the poor girl-that ring?' and with a frightful shriek, she instantly swooned away. Her mother came running in to know what was the matter; Brooks made some evasive explanation, but, while she was applying restoratives, inquired, as carelessly as he could, who had given to her daughter that beautiful ring?

'Oh, Willy Penrhyn,' said she. That is the only present, poor fellow, he could ever get Rachel to accept.'

Upon this Major Brooks went straight to Penrhyn's house, but was denied admittance; whereupon he wrote to him the following letter:

'SIR-I have just seen a ring upon the hand of the betrothed wife of my murdered friend, Herbert Routh; he bought it for that purpose himself, but you have presented it. I know that he always wore it on his little finger, and never parted with it by any chance. I demand, therefore, to know by what means you became possessed of it. I shall require to see you in person at five o'clock this afternoon, and shall take no denial. JAMES BROOKS.'

The major arrived at Mr Penrhyn's house at the time specified, but found him a dead man. He had taken poison upon the receipt of the above letter;

and so, as is supposed, departed the only human being that could have unravelled the mystery of the missing Captain Routh. Still, it is barely possible that he may not have been his murderer after all; if he were, it was surely the height of imprudence to have given away a thing so easily identified, and that to the very person of all others from whom he should have concealed it. It is curious, that directly we begin to suspect the commission of a particular crime, however dreadful, and seem to recognise the offender, as in this case, the horror of the matter subsides. But, as we said at the beginning of this paper, Disappearance is, in truth, more terrible than Death; nor should this fact be overlooked by the opponents of public executions. There should, of course, be enough of official spectators to set the carrying-out of the sentence beyond all cavil; but it is worthy of consideration, whether the sudden withdrawal of a wretch from the living world-his disappearance at the jail-gate for ever-would not strike a greater terror into the criminal population, than the present brutal exhibitions outside of Newgate.

enlighten them 'as to the jawbone.'

Probably most of them have been made aware that, since 1859, the English geologists have accepted as genuine certain findings of flint weapons in the drift of the valley of the Somme in Picardy, which had for twenty years before been knocking at their doors in vain. It is now a piece of fully-sanctioned scientific doctrine that, in certain beds of ancient gravel, lying over chalk, containing remains of extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, hyena, bear, &c., and so proved to be of vast, though unprecise age, there are found proofs of the contemporaneity of man, in the form of implements, such as hatchets, spear-heads, and knives, fashioned by his hands out of the rough flints which the subjacent strata supply. These relics occur in great numbers at various gravel-pits along the valley of the Somme within a space of about twenty-five miles, particularly at St Acheul, near Amiens, and at Menchecourt and Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville. Local antiquaries-M. Boucher de Perthes of Abbeville, a Dr Rigollot, and others have been in the custom of gathering and storing them up for many years; and there is not now the least doubt entertained on any hand that they are really the work of man's hands, and that they are actually, and not by any imposture, found imbedded in the ancient gravel along with remains of extinct species of mammalia, so as to demonstrate a greater antiquity than any yet surmised for the human race.

So far well; yet it was remarked with some surprise, and even as a justification for some lingering shade of scepticism, that no relic of humanity itself, not a single bone, had been found in these ancient beds. Accordingly, it was a matter of no small gratification to many when an announcement appeared at the end of March, to the effect that a human jawbone had been taken out of the toolbearing drift at Moulin-Quignon. The history of this discovery was stated as follows by a writer in the local journal (L'Abbevillois) of April 9. Towards the end of last month, a workman in the gravel-pit of Moulin-Quignon (on the outskirts of Abbeville) brought to M. Boucher de Perthes, along with a worked flint, a small fragment of bone, which he had found close by it. Having divested