"In plain English," he said, "my house is to be turned into a trap to catch Rachel; with a

me;

I opened it eagerly. To my surprise and dent. Being of an inquiring turn of mind, he disappointment, it began with an apology warn- poked his finger into a half-open oyster, which ing me to expect no news of any importance. resented the intrusion with a nip. When your In the next sentence the everlasting Ezra finger is hurt, you put it into your mouth; so Jennings appeared again! He had stopped did he. "Delicious!" he exclaimed, sucking Betteredge on the way out of the station, and his finger again. The idea flashed upon him had asked who I was. Informed on this point, that he had discovered a new delight, and he had mentioned having seen me to his master, oyster eating became henceforth an institution. Mr. Candy. Mr. Candy hearing of this, had That event, however, must have occurred in himself driven over to Betteredge, to express a very remote and dim antiquity. Among the his regret at our having missed each other. He débris which precede the epoch of written hishad a reason for wishing particularly to speak to tory, oyster-shells are found. In the "midden and when I was next in the neighbourhood heaps" of Northern Europe, they are mingled of Frizinghall, he begged I would let him with other rubbish, and with stone implements, know. Apart from a few characteristic utter- evidently the refuse of very ancient feasts. ances of the Betteredge philosophy, this was We have all read of Roman feasts which the sum and substance of my correspondent's began, as now in Paris, with oysters brought letter. The warm-hearted, faithful old man from considerable distances. Oyster parks or acknowledged that he had written "mainly for ponds are of Roman origin. Vitellius ate the pleasure of writing to me." oysters all day long. Seneca the wise could swallow his hundred, while Cicero the eloquent could take in his dozens. Louis the Eleventh annually gave the doctors of the Sorbonne an oyster treat. Napoleon the First ate oysters, when he could get them, on the eve of fighting an important battle. In short, we may hold it a gastronomic axiom that no feast is worthy of a connoisseur, in which oysters, during their season, do not come to the front; and fortunately no oysters are better than the English. On the oyster's anatomy we will not dwell, except to remark that, having no head, it can have no brain;-in spite of which, it has a beard.

I crumpled up the letter in my pocket, and forgot it the moment after, in the all-absorbing interest of my coming interview with Rachel.

As the clock of Hampstead church struck three, I put Mr. Bruff's key into the lock of the door in the wall. When I first stepped into the garden, and while I was securing the door again on the inner side, I own to having felt a certain guilty doubtfulness about what might happen next. I looked furtively on either side of me, suspicious of the presence of some unexpected witness in some unknown corner of the garden. Nothing appeared, to justify my apprehensions. The walks were, one and all, solitudes; and the birds and the bees were the only witnesses.

I passed through the garden; entered the conservatory; and crossed the small drawing. room. As I laid my hand on the door opposite, I heard a few plaintive chords struck on the piano in the room within. She had often idled over the instrument in this way, when I was staying at her mother's house. I was obliged to wait a little, to steady myself. The past and present rose, side by side, at that supreme moment-and the contrast shook me.

After the lapse of a few moments, I roused my manhood, and opened the door.

CREATURES OF THE SEA.

THE Land World is wide, but the Ocean World is wider. To cut short all embarrassment of choice and the difficulty of knowing where to begin, suppose we take our familiar friend the oyster; first reproaching him with getting dearer and dearer every season. Time was a very long while ago-when nobody would look at him, much less take him up and open him. Now, he is fought for by ungentle dames whose oyster-knives strike their rivals with terror, while epicures denominate the oyster the key to the paradise called appetite. But who first ate an oyster? The individual's name is not recorded, but tradition says that he did it not through hunger, but in consequence of acci

From oysters we naturally proceed to pearls. Some few pearls, from their size and beauty, have become historical. A pearl from Panama, in shape like a pear and about the size of a pigeon's egg, presented in 1579 to Philip the Second of Spain, was valued at four thousand pounds. In 1605 a Madrid lady possessed an American pearl valued at thirty-one thousand ducats. Pope Leo the Tenth paid a Venetian jeweller, fourteen thousand pounds for a single pearl. He had never heard of the class of persons who and their money are soon parted. Another pearl was purchased at Califa by the traveller Tavernier, and is said to have been sold by him to the Shah of Persia for the enormous price of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. If the saying be true, Tavernier was lucky in getting out of Persia with his head on his shoulders. A prince of Muscat possessed a pearl so valuable-not on account of its size, for it weighed only twelve carats, but because it was so clear and transparent that daylight was seen through it-that he refused four thousand pounds for it. Perhaps a better proof of its value would have been that he had taken four thousand pounds for it. The pearl in the crown of Rudolph the Second (it is said) was as large as a pear. Which pear? A jargonell, or a Duchesse d'Augoulême ? And how big was the oyster from which it was taken? The Shah of Persia actually possesses a string of pearls, each individual of which is nearly the size of a hazel nut-an inestimable

string of jewels. Finally, at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, Queen Victoria displayed some magnificent pearls. On the same occasion, the Emperor of the French exhibited a collection of four hundred and eight pearls, each weighing over nine pennyweights, and all of perfect form and the finest water.

Pearls from mussels are less generally known -produced, however, not by marine, but by fresh-water species. For the best of these, we must go to Scotland. Linnæus, who was acquainted with the origin of pearls in general, was aware of the possibility of producing them artificially from various mollusks. He suggested the collection of a number of mussels, piercing holes in their shells with an augur to produce a wound, and afterwards "parking" them for five or six years to give the pearls time to form. The Swedish Government consented to try the experiment, and long did so secretly. Pearls were produced, but they were of no value, and the enterprise was abandoned as unsuccessful.

a thermal establishment for the use of its mineral waters. All that is now left, are three marble columns, each about forty feet high. These three columns, at about ten feet from their base, are riddled with holes, and full of cavities bored deep into the marble. The borings occupy a space of three feet on each column. There is no doubt about the cause of the perforations. In some of the cavities, the shell of the operator is still found, and naturalists seem agreed that it is a species of pholas.

To enable the stone-boring mollusks, which live only in the sea, to excavate this marble, the temple and its columns must have been sunk in sea water. Only under these conditions could the borers have worked upon the marble. But since the traces of perforation are now visible ten feet above the surface, it follows that, after being long immersed in water, the columns have been elevated to their present position. The temple has been raised again, carrying with it, engraved in marble, ineffaceable proofs of its immersion.

After the pholades, come the teredos or shipworms-marine creatures with an irresistible propensity for perforating submerged wood. The galleries bored by these unsuspected miners, riddle the whole interior of a piece of wood; destroying it entirely, without any external indication of their ravages. By a strange kind of instinct, however multiplied may be their furrows or tubes in the same log of wood, they never mingle-there is never any communication between them. The wood is thus attacked at a thousand different points, until its entire substance is destroyed. Ships thus silently and secretly mined, have suddenly gone down with their crews, solely through the ravages of these relentless enemies.

Scotch pearls were much celebrated in the middle ages. Between the years 1761 and 1784 pearls to the value of ten thousand pounds were sent to London from the rivers Tay and Isla; "and the trade hitherto carried on in the corresponding years of the present century," says Mr. Bertram, "is more than double that amount. The pearl fisheries of Scotland," he adds, "may become a source of wealth to the people living on the large rivers, if prudently conducted." Mr. Unger, a dealer in gems in Edinburgh, having discerned the capabilities of the Scotch pearl, has established a scale of prices, which he gives according to their size and quality; and it is now a fact that the beautiful pink-hued pearls of our Scottish streams are admired beyond the orient pearl. Einpresses, queens, and royal and noble ladies, At the beginning of the eighteenth century, have made large purchases of these gems; and half the coast of Holland was threatened with Mr. Unger estimates the sum paid to pearl-destruction, because the piles which support finders in the summer of 1864 at ten thou- its dikes and sea-walls were attacked by the sand pounds. The localities successfully fished teredo. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been the Forth, the Tay, the Spey, the were expended in order to avert the danger. Isla, and most of the Highland rivers of note. Fortunately a closer attention to the habits of the mollusk has brought a remedy against a formidable evil. The teredo has an invincible antipathy to rust, and timber impregnated with oxide of iron is safe from its ravages. The creature's aversion being known, all that is necessary, is, to sink the timber to be submerged, in a tank of prepared oxide of iron-to clothe it, in short, in a thick coating of iron rust. Ships' timber may be so protected; but the copper with which ships' bottoms are usually sheathed serves the same purpose even better.

Passing from the mussels to the pholades, we have a family who not merely bury themselves in sand, like cockles and razor-fish, but who are able in some mysterious way to excavate for themselves a dwelling in argillaceous rocks and even in harder stone. Our wonder is increased on finding their shell not stouter than paper. One species, indeed, is called Pholas papyracea. Besides this faculty of boring and burrowing, they possess another curious property-phosphorescence. The bodies of many mollusks shine in the dark, but none emit a more brilliant light than the pholades. Those who should eat them in the dark in an uncooked state-and they are well-flavoured and delicate-would seem to be swallowing phosphorus.

Most Italian tourists have beheld the evi dence, furnished by pholades, of geological disturbance. On the shore of Pozzuolo, is a ruin called the Temple of Serapis, but probably

Respecting the cephalopods (cuttle-fish, sepias, and other creatures with eight or ten arms round their heads), it is hard to say whe ther the facts concerning them, or the fictions, are the stranger. There exists a fearful fragment, a beak nearly two feet in length, which belonged to a great sucker or cuttle-fish. This monster, if the other parts of its body were large in pro portion, must have been enormous, with arms

perhaps twenty or thirty feet long, studded with countless adhesive cups. And then, as Michelet says, there is the contradiction of a tyrant of the seas being soft and gelatinous. While making war on mollusks, he remains a mollusk also; that is to say, always an embryo. He presents the strange, almost ridiculous, appearance of a foetus furious and semi-transparent, soft and insatiably cruel, taking life not for food alone, but for the mere pleasure of destroying.

Unless travellers' tales be "the thing which is not," colossal cuttle-fish still exist, encounters with which would rival Tartar-catching. Twenty years ago, some fishermen, near Nice, took an individual six feet long. Péron saw in the Australian seas, a cuttle-fish nearly eight feet long. M. Rung met, in the middle of the ocean, a short-armed cephalopod of a reddish colour, whose body was as big round as a tun. In 1853, a gigantic cephalopod was stranded on the coast of Jutland. Its body, which was dismembered by the fishermen, furnished many barrow loads.

inky liquid which all the cephalopods have at command. Judging from its size, it would carry at least a barrel of this black liquid, if it had not been expended in some recent fray.

One of the most striking episodes in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer, is the fisherman's battle with the pieuvre. The Natural History and Fishery of the Sperm Whale contains a like incident, but true.

Mr. Beale, while searching for shells at Bonin Island, was astonished to see an extraordinary looking animal crawling back towards the surf. Its eight legs, from their soft and flexible nature, bent considerably under the weight of its body, so that it was only just lifted above the rocks. It appeared much alarmed, and made every attempt to escape. Mr. Beale endea voured to stop it by putting his foot on one of its tentacles, but it got away several times in spite of his efforts. He then laid hold of one of the tentacles with his hand and held it firmly; the limb appeared as if it would be torn asunder in the struggle. To settle the contest, he gave it a violent jerk. It resisted the pull; The French steam corvette, Alecton, when but the moment after, in a rage, it lifted a head between Teneriffe and Madeira, fell in with a with large projecting eyes, and loosing its hold gigantic calamary, not less-according to the of the rocks sprang upon Mr. Beale's naked account-than fifty feet long, without reckoning arm, clinging to it with its suckers, while it its eight arms covered with suckers. At its endeavoured to get the beak (which he could largest part, it was some twenty feet in cir- now see), between the tentacles, in a position to cumference; the tail end terminated in two bite him. Mr. Beale described its cold slimy fleshy lobes or fins of great size. The brick-grasp as extremely sickening. He called loudly red flesh was soft and glutinous, and its whole to the captain, who was also searching for weight was estimated at four thousand pounds. shells, to come to his assistance. He was reThe commandant, wishing to secure this leased by killing the tormentor with a boatmonster, actually engaged it in battle. Nu- knife, the arms being disengaged bit by bit. merous shots were aimed at it, but the balls This cephalopod, of the species called rocktraversed its flaccid mass without causing any squid by whalers, must have measured about vital injury. After one of the volleys, the four feet across its expanded arms, while its waves were observed to be covered with foam body was not bigger than a large hand and blood; and the odour of musk, peculiar to clenched. many of the cephalopods, was strongly perceptible.

Musket-shots not producing the desired result, harpoons were employed; but they took no hold on the creature's soft and flabby flesh. Escaping from the harpoon it dived under the ship, and came up again on the other side. At last they succeeded in getting it to bite the harpoon, and in passing a rope round its lower extremity. But when they attempted to hoist it out of the water, the rope, penetrating deep into the flesh, cut it in two. The head with the arms and tentacles dropped into the sea and made off, while the fins and posterior parts were brought on board. These weighed about forty pounds.

The crew in their eagerness would have launched a boat in pursuit; the commander refused, fearing the animal might capsize it. It was hardly worth risking the lives of his men for the chance of catching a cuttle-fish, however phenomenal. It is probable that this colossus was sick or exhausted by a struggle with some other monster of the deep. Otherwise it would have been more active in its movements, besides darkening the waters with the

The cuttle-fish can easily reply to Don Diego's question, "Roderick, hast thou a heart?" It has more than a heart, being furnished with three; the first two, placed at the end of the branchin; the third, on the medial line of the body. In another peculiarity the cuttle-fish surpasses man. Under the influence of strong emotion, the human face turns pale, or blushes; in some individuals it even becomes blue. The cuttle-fish does this, and more. Yielding to the impressions of the moment, it suddenly changes colour, passing through a variety of tints, and only resuming its familiar hue when the cause of the changes has disappeared. It is, in fact, gifted with great sensibility, which reacts immediately on its elastic tissues in a most extraordinary and unlooked-for way. Under the influence of passion man is born to blush; but under no sort of excitement does he cover himself with pustules. The cuttle-fish not only changes colour, but throws out an eruption of little warts. serve," says D'Orbigny, "a poulpe in a pool of water. As it walks round its retreat, it is smooth and very pale. Attempt to seize it, it quickly assumes a deeper tint, and its body

"Ob

becomes covered on the instant with warts and hairs, which remain there until its confidence is entirely restored."

he, Goodman Misery, willed that he should descend from it.

On the very day which saw the retreating figures of Peter and Paul, while Misery was gone to fetch a pitcher of water, the same thief who had stolen his finest pears returned to the tree. Goodman Misery, having set down his pitcher, perceived the rascal immovable amid the branches.

The Ocean World (which contains prettier portraits than those of calmars and cuttle-fish) has afforded us several agreeable and instructive hours. It is a book compiled to a large extent from La Terre et les Mers of M. Figuier, but the larger portion is a free translation of that author's latest work, La Vie et les Mœurs "Rascal, I have got you, have I?" Misery des Animaux. The seaside season is fast ap- shouted; and then, aside and in a low voice to proaching, and we cordially welcome a new sea- himself: "Heaven! Who, then, were my guests side book. Its value will be increased, in a last night? This time you will need to be in second edition, by the correction of several no hurry to pick my pears; but let me tell you obvious errata and mistranslations. The work that you will pay a heavy price for them in the (which is richly illustrated by four hundred torments you will have to endure at my hands. and twenty-seven excellent engravings), toge- To begin with, all the town shall see you in your ther with a few others treating of similar sub-present plight. Then I will light a roaring jects, will enable the holiday-maker to pass a fire under my tree, and smoke and dry you like rainy day at the seaside not only pleasantly but a Mayence ham." profitably.

none.

GOODMAN MISERY.

Goodman Misery having departed in quest of firewood to smoke and dry the thief like a Mayence ham, the culprit cried lustily until he attracted two of the Goodman's neighbours. Yielding to the prayers of the thief, these two honest folk climbed the tree to rescue their fellow-creature, whereupon they discovered that they too were fixed to the branches. The three had been left in company just seventeen hours and a half when Goodman Misery returned with a bag of bread and a goodly faggot upon his head. He was terrified to find three men settled in his pear-tree.

PETER and Paul met in a village on a certain day, when the rain was falling in torrents. They were wet to the skin. They were both in quest of a lodging for the night, but could find A rich man-one Richard-had turned them from his gates, bidding them remember that his house was not a public wine-shop, when a poor woman, who was washing linen in a brook, took pity on them and led them to her neighbour, the Goodman Misery. How much more considerate was the poor washerwoman than Richard with his closed gates; for, having bethought herself on the way that old Misery would probably have naught wherewith to break the fast and slake the thirst of his guests, she provided herself with some cooked fish, a big loaf, and a pitcher of Susa wine. Peter and Paul ate with a will. The hungry man tastes the sweetest viands. But sad was the case when the meal was at an end. Goodman" you want nothing in my tree, and may come Misery was so poor he had no bed to offer them, down as soon as you please; the punishment is save the straw upon which he usually rested his for thieves only." Whereupon the two neighown aching limbs. The two travellers were, bours found themselves free, and quickly rehowever, too considerate to accept it. They gained the ground; but the thief continued elected to sit up, and, by way of passing the fixed to the branches in a pitiable condition time, suggested that Misery should tell his after his long imprisonment; and the neighbours story to them. The Goodman consented, for stood astonished at the power of the Goodman, it was a short and not a very eventful one. They begged hard that Misery would take pity The most he had to tell, was, that a thief had even on the thief, who had endured torture for stripped his pear-tree, the fruit of which was many hours. The rascal prayed hard also, nearly all he had to depend upon for his wretched crying, "I'll pay any sum, but, in the name of living. He would have gladly shared the fruit God, let me come down. I am enduring torwith them, had he not suffered this cruel tures!" robbery.

"Come, come," he cried; "the fair will be a good one with so many customers. And pray what did you two new-comers want here? Couldn't you ask me for a few pears, and not come in my absence to steal them ?"

"We are no thieves," they replied. "We are charitable neighbours, who came to help a man whose lamentations smote us to the heart. When we want pears, we buy them in the market; there are plenty without yours."

Touched by his distress, Peter and Paul told Goodman Misery that they would pray to Heaven for him. And one of them considerately added, if he, Goodman Misery, had any particular desire would he mention it?

The Goodman desired no more from the Lord than that any man who might climb his peartree should be fixed in it, and immovable, until

"If what you say be true," said Misery,

At this word Misery permitted himself to be mollified. He told the thief, in releasing him, that he would forget his crime and forgive it. To show that he had a generous heart, and that self had never dictated any of the actions of his life, he would make him a present of the fruit he had stolen. He would be released from bondage in the tree, on the condition that he would take an oath never to climb it again,