"Winifred," he said, "I have bad news for his ambition and all his worldly passions were us-though good for me too."

"What is it, Louis?" said the girl, looking up from the ground where she was sitting, play-ever of that conventional honor and morality ing with the little Mary.

maturity, he made inquiries about Winifred at her old home; and learning her address there, he set off suddenly to Devonshire, to renew his acquaintance—perhaps his love, who knows?with his former friend and fiancée. But Louis made one fatal mistake. He did not realize the years that had passed since he parted with Winifred. It was always the same Winifred whom he left sitting on the ground, playing with a baby girl-her black hair falling far below her waist, and her dark eyes bright and clear-whom he expected to find again. All the world told him-and he knew without vanity, that it was true-that time had been his friend. His curly chestnut hair, a little worn about the temples, had not a silver line in it; his bearing was more manly, and his figure better developed than when Winifred saw him last; | success had given him a certain commanding manner which might easily pass for majesty; and constant intercourse with the world a profound insight into human nature. He was eminently one of the present generation-one of the men whose mind and character influence their whole circle. Handsome, noble, and capable, he was a very king and hero to the minds of most women; against whom not the most beautiful youth in the world, were he Apollo himself, would have had a chance of success; and who, like a veritable monarch, might have chosen his queen wheresoever he listed. And he thought that time, which had so beautified him, would have done the same for Winifred. It would be a matured, ennobled, glorified woman that he should meet, but still the same that he had left; it would be the nymph become the goddess. And thinking, hoping, believing this, it was with all the fervor of his old affection that he knocked at the door of the cottage where they had told him Miss James lived.

A beautiful girl came hurriedly and rather noisily into the room, almost as soon as he had entered. She did not know of his visit, and a deep blush broke over her brilliant face. Louis forgot all about baby Mary, and never remembered the possibility of this glorious creature being the butterfly from that cradled chrysalis ; he only said to himself, that dear Winifred had just as much sweetness as ever, and as little vanity, else she never would have dared the presence of such a beautiful girl as this. He asked for her, however, smiling; and Mary went out of the room to call her, glad enough to get away. Winifred came down almost immediately, bringing Mary with her. When she saw Louis, she stood for a moment-stupefied, as if she had seen a ghost from the grave before her; then uttering a low cry, she staggered, turned deadly pale, and holding out her withered hands toward him, cried, "Louis! Louis!" and "My love!" and then fell fainting to the ground.

In her fainting the last chance of illusion vanished. Oh! why had he come? Why had he not been content to live on the pleasant romance of memory and faith?

Winifred's faintness soon passed; and with it her weakness. When she recovered she held out her hand, smiling; saying, in a firm tone, "It was such a surprise to see you, Louis, that I was overcome." And then she began to talk of former days with as calm a countenance as if they had parted but last week, and had never met in love. She thus put them both into a true position, which they had nearly lost, and left the future unembarrassed by any fetters of the past. Louis could not but love the woman's delicacy and tact, and saying to himself, "I shall soon get accustomed to the loss of her beauty," believed that he would love her as of old, and that all would go smoothly and happily for them both. He was glad now that he had come. After all, what did a little prettiness signify? Winifred was just as good as, perhaps even better than, she used to be; and what did it matter if she were less beautiful? Louis was philosophical-as men are when they deceive themselves.

He remained in Devonshire for nearly a month, and at the end of that time began to grow perplexed and confused in his mind. In the first days he had made Winifred understand that he loved her still; he had told her why he had come to Devonshire; he had spoken much of the softening and beautiful influence that her memory had been to him all his life, and of how he had hoped and trusted in the future; he had called back all her former love to him, and had awakened her sleeping hopes; he had poured fresh life into her heart-he had given her back her youth. He had spoken of her to herself as a being to be worshiped for goodness, and, in speaking thus, had pressed a kiss on her withered cheek; and, when he had done all this, and had compromised his honor as well as his compassion, he found out that she was old and faded; that she was a mother, not a wife; that, considering her age, love-passages between them were ridiculous. If she had been Mary now!

Mary was much struck with Louis Blake. His grand kind of bearing, his position, the dazzling qualities of his mind, all filled her with admiration so intense, that it was almost worship. But worship tinged with awe. And, thus-she changed too. Her frank and childish manners became fitful and reserved; her causeless tears, her wild excitement, her passionate manner to Winifred, embracing her often and eagerly, as she used when as a child she wanted her forgiveness for an unconfessed, but silently recognized fault; her bashfulness when Louis spoke to her; her restless wretchedness when he passed her in silence; her eager watching for his eye and smile, and her blushes when she was rewarded; all gave the key to Winifred, so far as she was concerned; though as yet she did not know that this key opened another heart as well. But she began to feel a change, gradual, and perceptible, and sure, in Louis. He grew cold in his manner to her, and sometimes irritable; he avoided her when she was alone, and he spoke no more of the past;

own.

he was constrained, he was harsh-he no longer loved her, and this was what he was teaching her. His manner to Mary was as fitful as her Now tender and fatherly, now hard and cruel; sometimes so absorbed in watching her, or talking with her, that he forgot all the world beside, and sometimes seeming to forget her and her very existence in the room. Winifred saw it all. She was the first to give the true name to this perplexity, and factitious attempts to reconcile impossible feelings; and when once enlightened she accepted her position with dignity and grandeur. There was no middle way. Louis no longer even fancied that he loved her, and she could not hold him to the promise made when under the illusion of that fancy. She must again judge between duty and self, and again ascend to the altar of sacrifice. He loved her child; and Mary-and Winifred wept as she said it low in her own chamber, kneeling by her bed, half-sobbing and half-praying-Mary loved him. Yes, the child she had cared for as her own, and for whom she would have given her life, now demanded more than her life. And she should have it.

WH

A BASKET OF THUNDER-BOLTS. THEN it was ascertained that the orbit of Biela's comet intersects that of the earth, a few very worthy persons prepared for the destruction of the world by a collision between the two. It was shown that if the earth's progress had been hastened, or the comet delayed one month, in the year 1832, the shock would have been inevitable; and though the earth is a model of punctuality, comets, as is well known, are subject to a variety of disturbing causes which might seemingly retard or accelerate their velocity. Tradition depicted comets as agents of mischief or messengers of evil. Antiquity viewed them as awful manifestations of the Divine displeasure, and portents of disaster to man. Louis the First of France was so terrified by the comet of 837, which approached within 2,000,000 miles of the earth, that he emptied his treasury to build churches and convents. Armies have been smitten with panic at the sight of a comet, and cunning demagogues have turned their apparition to excellent account. Even so late as a couple of centuries ago, signs in the heaven-"comets with fiery streaming hair"—were regarded by the pious people of New England as symptoms of the Divine wrath, which it was proper to appease by a revival of the austerities of Puritan discipline. In the wake of such goodly examples, men of imaginative minds

It was in the gray evening when Winifred went down stairs, passing through the low French windows of the drawing-room, and on to the lawn, where Louis and Mary were standing near the cistus-tree. But not speaking. A word too tender, a look too true, had just pass-quaked as they watched for the return of Biela's ed between them, and Louis was still struggling with the impulse which bid him say all, look all, and leave the issue to fate. Mary was trembling, tears in her eyes, and a strange feeling of disappointment stealing over her; though she could not have said why, for she did not know what she had expected. Winifred walked gen-pared for eternity-were not these evidences of tly over the grass, and was by their side before they knew that she had left the house. Mary gave a heavy sob, and flung herself on her neck, saying,

comet. If philosophers had ceased to see fiery horsemen in the heavens waving two-edged swords-if Congress legislated none the more strictly because stars had fallen or auroras gleamed-if the world called them superstitious because they set their house in order and pre

blindness and obstinacy plainly foretold?

Science, meanwhile, pursuing its steady path, unrolls the map of the heavens, and, while it strips many a dreaded apparition of its hor

"Darling Winny! How glad I am you have rors, discovers in the wondrous space above new

come!"

Louis turned away, painfully agitated. "Why do you turn from me, Louis?" said Winifred. "Are you afraid of your friend? Do you fear that you can not trust her love?"

"What do you mean, Winifred?" said poor Louis, passionately. "For God's sake, no enigmas! Oh, forgive me, dearest friend, I am harsh and hard to you; but I am mad-mad!”

"Poor suffering heart, that suffers because of its unbelief," said Winifred tenderly; and taking his hand she placed it in Mary's. Clasping them both between her own, "See, dear Louis," she said, the tears falling gently over her furrowed cheeks, "my hand is no barrier between you and your love. Rather a tie the more. Love each other, dear ones, if therein lies your happiness! For me, mine rests with you, in your joy and your virtue. And when, in the future, you think of Winifred, my Mary will remember the foster-mother who loved her beyond her own life, and Louis will say he once knew one who kept her vow to the last."

beauties, it is true, but likewise new causes for apprehension and affright. Eight millions of comets, according to Arago, may revolve within our system; six hundred have been actually observed. More than one of these cross the earth's orbit in their usual journey through space; others, we know, are liable to be disturbed by the attraction of the larger planets and each other; and thus, in the language of Humboldt, "from being apparently harmless, have been rendered dangerous bodies." Was there not once a planet between Mars and Jupiter, and what mighty force shattered it into asteroids? Was it a collision with the solid nucleus of some other cosmical body-a huge comet? Did, a day dawn for the inhabitants of that orb "in the which the heavens passed away with a great noise, and the elements melted with fervent heat, their earth also and the works which were therein were burned up?"

Fifty persons, in round numbers, are killed every year in the United States by lightning. In the single month of July, 1854, thirty-seven

persons were struck dead within the limits of erected in their fields near their house afforded the Atlantic States. Ancient mythology con- protection; but the pole was of no use unless it tained nothing so terrifying as these colorless was crowned with a magic scroll. Sailors have statistics. The ancients dreaded Jove's thun- believed from time immemorial that frequent der-bolt; but their awe was mingled with a de- discharges of cannon prevent or dissipate thunvotional sentiment which could not have been der-storms. It happens that some of the heavdevoid of a certain sense of pleasure. The iest cannonades remembered-such as the bompastoral Etruscan rejoiced when the lightning bardment of Rio Janeiro, by the French, in played harmlessly over the horizon, for he knew 1711, and the bombardment of Sebastopol, by that his prayers had been heard. Even when the Allies, last September-were immediately it flashed overhead, and perhaps clove some followed by lightning, thunder, and rain. The tall tree to the earth, he was not dismayed; his ringing of church bells was long regarded as a religion told him that the gods had assembled, specitic against lightning. Wyncken de Worde, and that a decree of the divine council had an old English writer, says: "The evil spirytes gone forth to authorize Jupiter to launch his that ben in the region of th' ayre doubte moche bolts. He bowed his head, abandoned the en- when they here the belles ringen; and this is terprise on which he was engaged, and cheer- the cause why the belles ringen when it thonfully sacrificed a bullock. It was a happy day dreth, and when grete tempeste and rages of in the Greek camp when Calchas saw the light-wether happen, to the end that the feinds and ning illuminate the heavens on his right hand, wycked spirytes should ben abashed and flee, and and fearlessly did the heroes go down to battle. cease of the movynge of tempeste." In France, Nor was all hope lost when the divine token lit when the priests blessed a new set of church bells up the skies on the left. It meant that more they prayed: "Whenever they ring, may they altars must be erected, and inexorable justice drive far off the malign influences of evil spirits, meted out to the guilty: the gods were irritated, whirlwinds, thunder-bolts, and the devastations but their wrath was not unappeasable. There which they cause, the calamities of hurricanes is no terror in the soul of Job when he pro- and tempests!" And the pious peasantry, at claims that "God made a decree for the rain, the first approach of a storm, would bid the and a way for the lightning of the thunder." ringer tug at the bell-rope till the very thunder could hardly make itself heard. The Academy of Sciences denounced the practice, and a church has now and then been struck by lightning while the bell was pealing its loudest; but still, in parts of Brittany, when dark clouds gather, and swallows groundward fly, the traveler is startled by the solemn tolling of the parish bell, which sounds like a mournful appeal to Providence for mercy.

till the right man comes and appropriates it. A trifle over a century has elapsed since Franklin gave to the world the lightning-rod, and we honor him as its inventor. Yet Columella's

Faded was the prestige of the Olympic gods when the Athenians began to treat lightning as a terrestrial phenomenon. Fled was their poetic fancy when they could stand at their doors in a thunder-storm, and fill the air with hissing sounds, in the foolish belief that the flashing fire would be thus averted. And where were the augurs, when the Roman knights encased their bodies in stout seal-skins, which, according to the science of the Augustan age, the light- Curious to see how generation after generaning could not perforate? When the gods fell, tion will run its nose against an important disall was foolishness until Franklin came. Au- covery, walk round it, perhaps pick it up and gustus-like the modern Emperors of Japan-throw it down again, never dreaming of its value fled into a deep cellar at the first rumbling of the thunder, and bewailed himself that he could not, so frail was his constitution, drown his fears with his courtiers in draughts of Falernian or Cæcuban. Cowardice, conspiring with ignor-vine was nothing but a conductor, if a bad one; ance, has ascribed to fifty different substances and agencies the power of averting lightningstrokes. Feathers were long believed to be an infallible protection. Even in our day, timid girls creep into bed and draw the pillow over their faces when the thunder roars; though it is well known that several persons have been killed in bed, and that in one case at least-in New York, on the 1st of August, 1854-lightning has set fire to a mattress without visible flash or audible thunder. A whole host of trees have been honored as lightning-proof. Tiberius, conscience smitten at the approach of a storm, would crown his brow with a wreath of laurel. The Chinese flock for shelter to the mulberry-tree. Columella believed that a large vine growing over a house afforded complete security, and not with-years without being struck once. out some shadow of reason. The peasants of Of late years Franklin's conductor has had the time of Charlemagne found that tall poles to stand some criticism. There are builders

and the poles, with mystic inscriptions, which the French peasants used to set up in the fields, what were they but lightning-rods? Even these were more distant approaches to the discovery than the Temple at Jerusalem, which was provided with as complete an apparatus of conductors as could be constructed to-day. The roof, which was "overlaid with gold," bristled with gilt iron lances, and metallic pipes led from it to large cisterns in the court, in which the rain was collected. The object of the Israelites in erecting the lances was to prevent birds from settling on their holy edifice; but they served so admirably the purpose of lightning-rods that, in a country where thunder-storms were common and violent, the temple stood a thousand