Sometimes three or four years would pass | deep-she would go out and see after the comover without her hearing Michael Hurst's name mentioned. She used to wonder at such times whether he were dead or alive. She would sit for hours by the dying embers of her fire on a winter's evening, trying to recall the scenes of her youth; trying to bring up living pictures of the faces she had then known-Michael's most especially. She thought that it was possible, so long had been the lapse of years, that she might now pass by him in the street unknowing and unknown. His outward form she might not recognize, but himself she should feel in the thrill of her whole being. He could not pass her unawares.

fort of her beasts. She took a lantern, and tied a shawl over her head, and went out into the open air. She cared tenderly for all her animals, and was returning, when borne on the blast as if some spirit-cry-for it seemed to come rather down from the skies than from any creature standing on earth's level-she heard a voice of agony; she could not distinguish words; it seemed rather as if some bird of prey was being caught in the whirl of the icy wind, and torn and tortured by its violence. Again! up high above! Susan put down her lantern, and shouted loud in return; it was an instinct, for if the creature were not human, which she had doubted but a moment before, what good could her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous wind, and borne farther

What little she did hear about him all testified a downward tendency. He drank-not at stated times when there was no other work to be done, but continually, whether it was seed-away in the opposite direction to that from time or harvest. His children were ill at one time; then one died, while the others recovered, but were poor sickly things. No one dared to give Susan any direct intelligence of her former lover; many avoided all mention of his name in her presence; but a few spoke out either in indifference to, or ignorance of, those by-gone days. Susan heard every word, every whisper, every sound that related to him. But her eye never changed, nor did a muscle of her face move.

Late one November night she sate over her fire; not a human being besides herself in the house; none but she had ever slept there since Willie's death. The farm-laborers had foddered the cattle and gone home hours before. There were crickets chirping all round the warm hearth-stones, there was the clock ticking with the peculiar beat Susan had known ever since childhood, and which then and ever since she had oddly associated with the idea of a mother and child talking together, one loud tick, and quick-a feeble sharp one following.

which that call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound: then again it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was human. She turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the fire, which, careless of her own sensations, she had allowed to fade and almost die out. She put a new candle in her lantern; she changed her shawl for a maud, and leaving the door on latch, she sallied out. Just at the moment when her ear first encountered the weird noises of the storm, on issuing forth into the open air, she thought she heard the words, "O God! Oh, help!" They were a guide to her, if words they were, for they came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from Yew Nook, but only to be reached, on account of its precipitous character, by a round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind and snow; guided by here a thorntree, there an old doddered oak, which had not quite lost their identity under the whelming mask of snow. Now and then she stopped to listen; but never a word or sound heard she, The day had been keen, and piercingly cold. till right from where the copse-wood grew thick The whole lift of heaven seemed a dome of iron. and tangled at the base of the rock, round which Black and frost-bound was the earth under the she was winding, she heard a moan. In to the cruel east wind. Now the wind had dropped, brake—all snow in appearance, almost a plain and as the darkness had gathered in, the weath- of snow looked on from the little eminence er-wise old laborers prophesied snow. The where she stood-she plunged, breaking down sounds in the air arose again, as Susan sate the bush, stumbling, bruising herself, fighting still and silent. They were of a different char- her way; her lantern held between her teeth, acter to what they had been during the preva- and she herself using head as well as hands to lence of the east wind. Then they had been butt away a passage, at whatever cost of bodily shrill and piping; now they were like low dis- injury. As she climbed or staggered, owing to tant growling; not unmusical, but strangely the unevenness of the snow-covered ground, threatening. Susan went to the window, and where the briars and weeds of years were tandrew aside the little curtain. The whole world gled and matted together, her foot felt somewas white, the air was blinded with the swift thing strangely soft and yielding. She lowered and heavy downfall of snow. At present it her lantern; there lay a man, prone on his face, came down straight, but Susan knew those dis- nearly covered by the fast-falling flakes; he tant sounds in the hollows and gullies of the must have fallen from the rock above, as not hills portended a driving wind and a more cruel knowing of the circuitous path, he had tried to storm. She thought of her sheep; were they all descend its steep, slippery face. Who could folded? the new-born calf, was it bedded well? tell? it was no time for thinking. Susan lifted Before the drifts were formed too deep for her him up with her wiry strength; he gave no help to pass in and out-and by the morning she-no sign of life; but for all that he might be judged that they would be six or seven feet alive: he was still warm; she tied her maud

The laborers coming in the dawn of the winter's day were surprised to see the fire-light through the low kitchen window. They knocked, and hearing a moaning answer, they entered, fearing that something had befallen their mistress. For all explanation they got these words: He was belated, and Where does Elea

"It is Michael Hurst. fell down the Raven's Crag. nor, his wife, live?"

round him; she fastened the lantern to her | Susan learnt the force of Peggy's words. Life apron-string; she held him tight: half-drag- was short, looking back upon it. It seemed but ging, half-carrying-what did a few bruises sig- yesterday since all the love of her being had nify to him, compared to dear life, to precious been poured out, and run to waste. The interlife! She got him through the brake, and down vening years—the long monotonous years that the path. There for an instant she stopped to had turned her into an old woman before her take breath; but as if stung by the Furies, time-were but a dream. she pushed on again with almost superhuman strength. Clasping him round the waist and leaning his dead weight against the lintel of the door, she tried to undo the latch; but now, just at this moment, a trembling faintness came over her, and a fearful dread took possession of her-that here, on the very threshold of her home, she might be found dead, and buried under the snow, when the farm-servants came in the morning. This terror stirred her up to one more effort. She and her companion were in the warmth of the quiet haven of that kitchen; she laid him on the settle, and sank on the floor by his side. How long she remained in swoon she could not tell; not very long she judged by the fire, which was still red and sullenly glowing when she came to herself. She lighted the candle, and bent over her late burden to ascertain if indeed he were dead. She stood long gazing. The man lay dead. There could be no doubt about it. His filmy eyes glared at her, unshut. But Susan was not one to be affrighted by the stony aspect of death. It was not that; it was the bitter, woeful recog-in deep, with fierce energy, the pain at her heart nition of Michael Hurst.

How Michael Hurst got to Yew Nook no one but Susan ever knew. They thought he had dragged himself there with some sore internal bruise sapping away his minuted life. could not have believed the superhuman exertion which had first sought him out, and then dragged him hither. Only Susan knew of that.

They

She gave him into the charge of her servants, and went out and saddled her horse. Where the wind had drifted the snow on one side, and the road was clear and bare, she rode, and rode fast; where the soft, deceitful heaps were massed up, she dismounted and led her steed, plunging

urging her onward with a sharp, digging spur.

The gray, solemn, winter's noon was more night-like than the depth of summer's night; dim purple brooded the low skies over the white earth, as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst's abode while living. It was a small

She was convinced he was dead; but after a while she refused to believe in her conviction. She stripped off his wet outer-garments with trembling, hurried hands. She brought a blanket down from her own bed; she made up the fire. She swathed him up in fresh, warm wrap-farm-house, carelessly kept outside, slatternly pings, and laid him on the flags before the fire, sitting herself at his head, and holding it in her lap, while she tenderly wiped his loose, wet hair, curly still, although its color had changed from nut-brown to iron-gray since she had seen it last. From time to time she bent over the face afresh, sick and fain to believe that the flicker of the fire-light was some slight convulsive motion. But the dim, staring eyes struck chill to her heart. At last she ceased her delicate busy cares, but she still held the head softly, as if caressing it. She thought over all the possibilities and chances in the mingled yarn of their lives that might, by so slight a turn, have ended far otherwise. If her mother's cold had been early tended so that the responsibility as to her brother's weal or woe had not fallen upon her; if the fever had not taken such rough, cruel hold on Will; nay, if Mrs. Gale, that hard, worldly sister, had not accompanied him on his last visit to Yew Nook-his very last before this fatal stormy night; if she had heard his crycry uttered by those pale, dead lips with such wild, despairing agony, not yet three hours ago! Oh! if she had but heard it sooner, he might have been saved before that blind, false step had precipitated him down the rock! In going over this weary chain of unrealized possibilities VOL. XII-No. 68.-0

tended within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty still; her delicate face had never suffered from any long-enduring feeling. If any thing, its expression was that of plaintive sorrow; but the soft, light hair had scarcely a tinge of gray, the wood-rose tint of complexion yet remained, if not so brilliant as in youth; the straight nose, the small mouth were untouched by time. Susan felt the contrast even at that moment. She knew that her own skin was weather-beaten, furrowed, brown-that her teeth were gone, and her hair gray and ragged. And yet she was not two years older than Nelly-she had not been in youth, when she took account of these things. Nelly stood wondering at the strange-enough horsewoman, who stood and panted at the door, holding her horse's bridle, and refusing to enter.

"Where is Michael Hurst?" asked Susan, at last.

"Well, I can't rightly say. He should have been at home last night, but he was off seeing after a public-house to be let at Ulverstone, for our farm does not answer, and we were thinking-"

"He did not come home last night?" said Susan, cutting short the story, and half-affirming, half-questioning by way of letting in a ray

"He took no shelter. Would to God he avowal in this place, lest any disappointed readhad!"

-"devilish glut, chained thunder-bolts and hail Of iron globes."

thorough and satisfactory manner. Or he may go to Sebastopol, and put his foot on a Russian fougasse, in which case the result, so far as his In other words, round-shot, grape, and chainfeelings are concerned, would be pretty much shot. It may be a question whether the somethe same. Or he may imitate Jean Bart, and what loose expression, "devilish glut," will smoke a pipe on an open powder-keg, taking cover shells; the epithet is undeniably approcare to do what the Frenchman took care to priate, but "glut" is very vague. The Right avoid, namely, to drop a spark into the keg, Reverend Dr. Pangloss has argued with great which is a very neat and emphatic way of get-force that shells were unknown to the Satanic ting blown up. Or he may allow a little chlo- artillerymen, and that they blew up nothing but rine to be absorbed in a solution of sal ammoni- an occasional gun of their own by over-chargac, and amuse himself by poking with a bit of ing it. India-rubber or a warm poker the yellow drops which are formed, and he will be blown a very long way up in a remarkably short space of time. Or he may throw a wine-glass of water into the stream of molten copper which pours from a smelting furnace, and hold his head over the stream to see the effect; in which case he may not go far, but he is likely to travel several | Schwartz, the Cordelier, who lighted upon the ways at once in detachments. Or he may try the experiment of holding a lighted candle to a jet of carbureted hydrogen in some subterranean cave, which is perhaps the poorest way of getting blown up, though it has been known to answer very thoroughly.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the art of blowing men up has been brought to its final perfection. Quite the contrary. The explosive science is yet in its infancy, though philosophers have studied it for centuries. The walls of Jericho were blown up, or rather blown down in the year before Christ one thousand four hundred fifty-one; in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred fifty-six the Russians and the Allies do not seem able to blow each other up, blow they never so strongly.

It is perhaps a mistake to allude to the case of Jericho, as many of the most orthodox commentators reject the idea of Joshua's having been favored by a revelation of an explosive agent, and consider the catastrophe as a naked miracle. Happily we do not need to rely on this case to prove the antiquity of the explosive business. Long before Joshua, nay, before the flood, before the time when Adam and his happy family were the sole tenants of the earth, the explosive power of gunpowder was thoroughly tested and proved. Any incredulous person who may feel disposed to question this indubitable fact, the writer begs to refer to the chronicle of the wars of the angels, by that veracious historian, Mr. John Milton. His testimony is precise. Speaking of Satan and his engineers, he says:

"Sulphurous and nitrous foam

They found, they mingled, and with subtle art
Concocted and adusted, they reduced

To blackest grain, and into store conveyed"—

The proportions are not given, but the method is
unexceptionable. Then as to the tools, they had
"hollow engines, long and round,

Thick rammed, at the other bore with touch of fire
Dilated and infuriate."

Something like the old bell-mouthed bombards,
probably. Their projectiles were a

The antediluvian origin of the explosive art being thus established, it becomes proper to inquire how far it was understood and practiced by the profane nations of antiquity. Within the memory of persons not extravagantly aged, it was usual to say that explosions dated from the discovery of gunpowder by old Bartholet

"devilish secret" when he ought to have been reading his breviary. But latterly the skeptical spirit of the age has rebelled against the claims of the black monk, and of his contemporaries generally. Mr. Ewbank, among others, has argued very ingeniously that the bulk of the mythological heroes may have been nothing more than men of unusual scientific attainments, and the mythological monsters mere machines contrived by them for the purpose of levying blackmail, and rendered formidable by the use of explosive and combustible compounds. It is quite easy to understand how, in a barbarous age, a slender knowledge of chemistry may have enabled a shrewd knave to appear to work miracles, and terrify the rest of mankind. The Colchian bulls, for instance, which belched flame and dashed to pieces with a roaring noise all who attempted to ravish the golden fleece, what were they but a rude species of spring-gun or infernal machine? So Typhon, the monster

Rome, it is not reasonable to suppose that no one of the many known explosive compounds was brought to light.

Still, it appears certain that none of them were used by the Greeks or Romans in war. The terrible machines which frightened the Romans at Syracuse and enabled Archimedes to defend the city for so many months, were prodigies of mechanical science; but chemistry seems to have had no part in their construction. Nor would any writer have circulated the story that Hannibal blew up the rocks on the Alps by heating them and pouring cold vinegar on them, if the military uses of explosive compounds had been known.

with many heads, from whose eyes and mouth | ried to such perfection, both at Athens and gushed hissing streams of devouring fire, may have been nothing more than a mortar of eccentric form, charged with some explosive substance, and fired off at the great warriors, Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, etc., by their more scientific adversaries. The Cyclops, who are represented as men of gigantic stature, with misshapen limbs and a single eye in the centre of the forehead, were killed by Apollo, we are told, because they hurled Jove's thunder-bolts at Esculapius and killed him; shall we say that Vulcan, or some other ingenious mechanic or wizard of the ante-historical age, made huge fire-blowing automata, whose vent was compared by the terrified men of that day to a round eye, and that they dealt death to all who opposed them, till Captain Apollo, of the Olympic Voltigeurs, captured and broke them up?

This is a simpler way, at all events, of explaining these monsters than to regard them as mere creatures of the imagination. Men who, like the Egyptian magicians, could by sleight of hand appear to turn rods into serpents, may certainly be supposed to have known something about chemistry; and the contrivers of so astute a swindle as the oracle at Delphi, must have been quite competent to pass off a hand grenade for a god. The notion that the mythical king of Rome-Numa Pompilius-was acquainted with gunpowder, and that his successor, Tullus Hostilius, blew himself up in trying to make it, may be destitute of truth; but in later times, when the art of cookery was car

In this respect the barbarians of the Middle Ages seem to have been in advance of their more civilized predecessors. Prester John, we are told, practiced the art of blowing men up with marked success. He had a number of "copper images of men" cast, and mounted upon horses, probably of the same material. Within the image was concealed a quantity of combustible and explosive materials, which, when ignited, emitted deadly fumes, and possibly solids. When Prester John was attacked by the Mongols, he marshaled his brazen men in front of their flesh-and-blood comrades; at the word of attack the match was applied, and they charged furiously into the Mongol ranks, spitting flame and poisonous gas on all sides. "Whereby," says the naif old chronicler, “many were slain, others took to sudden flight, and great numbers were burnt to ashes."