floor of the house but this. Your servant had bet-Steyne's sister could not have looked more diater see to your room, Lady Kew. That next is bolical.) "Have you had advice for her? Has mine; and I keep the door, which you are trying, nursing poor Kew turned her head. I came to locked on the other side." see him. Why have I been left alone for half an hour with this mad woman? You ought not to trust her to give Frank medicine. It is positively-"

"And I suppose Frank is locked up there!" cried the old lady, " with a basin of gruel and a book of Watts's hymns." A servant entered at this moment, answering Lady Walham's summons. "Peacock, the Countess of Kew says that she proposes to stay here this evening. Please to ask the landlord to show her ladyship rooms," said Lady Walham; and by this time she had thought of a reply to Lady Kew's last kind speech. "If my son were locked up in my room, madam, his mother is surely the best nurse for him. Why did you not come to him three weeks sooner, when there was nobody with him?"

Lady Kew said nothing, but glared and showed her teeth-those pearls set in gold. "And my company may not amuse Lord Kew-"

"Excuse me," said George, with a bow; "I don't think the complaint has as yet exhibited itself in my mother's branch of the family. (She always hated me," thought George; "but if she had by chance left me a legacy, there it goes.) You would like, ma'am, to see the rooms upstairs? Here is the landlord to conduct your ladyship. Frank will be quite ready to receive you when you come down. I am sure I need not beg of your kindness that nothing may be said to agitate him. It is barely three weeks since M. de Castillonnes' ball was extracted; and the doctors wish he should be kept as quiet as possible."

You may be sure that the landlord, the courier, and the persons engaged in showing the Countess of Kew the apartments above, spent an agreeable time with her Excellency the Frau Gräfinn von Kew. She must have had better luck in her encounter with these than in her previous passages with her grandson and his mother; for when she issued from her apartment in a new dress and fresh cap, Lady Kew's face wore an expression of perfect serenity. Her attendant may have shook her fist behind her, and her man's eyes and face looked Blitz and Donnerwetter; but their mis

"He-ee!" grinned the elder, savagely. "But at least it is better than some to which you introduced my son," continued Lady Kew's daughter-in-law, gathering force and wrath as she spoke. "Your ladyship may think lightly of me, but you can hardly think so ill of me as of the Duchesse d'Ivry, I should suppose, to whom you sent my boy, to form him, you said; about whom, when I remonstrated-for though I live out of the world I hear of it sometimes-you were pleased to tell me that I was a prude and a fool. It is you I thank for separating my child from me—tress's features wore that pleased look which they yes, you-for so many years of my life; and for bringing me to him when he was bleeding and almost a corpse, but that God preserved him to the widow's prayers; and you, you were by, and never came near him."

"I-I did not come to see you-or-or-for this kind of scene, Lady Walham," muttered the other. Lady Kew was accustomed to triumph, by attacking in masses, like Napoleon. Those who faced her routed her.

"No; you did not come for me, I know very well," the daughter went on. "You loved me no better than you loved your son, whose life, as long as you meddled with it, you made wretched. | You came here for my boy. Haven't you done him evil enough? And now God has mercifully preserved him, you want to lead him back again into ruin and crime. It shall not be so, wicked woman! bad mother! cruel, heartless parent!George!" (Here her younger son entered the room, and she ran toward him with fluttering robes and seized his hands.) "Here is your grandmother; here is the Countess of Kew, come from Baden at last; and she wants-she wants to take Frank from us, my dear, and to-givehim back to the-Frenchwoman again. No, no! O, my God! Never! never!" And she flung herself into George Barnes's arms, fainting with an hysteric burst of tears.

"You had best get a strait-waistcoat for your mother, George Barnes," Lady Kew said, scorn and hatred in her face. (If she had been Iago's daughter, with a strong likeness to her sire, Lord

assumed when she had been satisfactorily punishing somebody. Lord Kew had by this time got back from the garden to his own room, where he awaited grandmamma. If the mother and her two sons had in the interval of Lady Kew's toilet tried to resume the history of Bumble the Beadle, I fear they could not have found it very comical.

"Bless me, my dear child! How well you look! Many a girl would give the world to have such a complexion. There is nothing like a mother for a nurse! Ah, no! Maria, you deserve to be the Mother Superior of a House of Sisters of Charity, you do. The landlord has given me a delightful apartment, thank you. He is an extortionate wretch; but I have no doubt I shall be very comfortable. The Dodsburys stopped here, I see, by the travelers' book—quite right, instead of sleeping at that odious buggy Strasbourg. We have had a sad, sad time, my dears, at Baden. Between anxiety about poor Sir Brian, and about you, you naughty boy, I am sure I wonder how I have got through it all. Doctor Finck would not let me come away to-day; but I would come."

"I am sure it was uncommonly kind, ma'am," says poor Kew, with a rueful face.

"That horrible woman against whom I always warned you-but young men will not take the advice of old grandmammas—has gone away these ten days. Monsieur le Duc fetched her; and if he locked her up at Montcontour, and kept her on bread and water for the rest of her life, I am sure he would serve her right. When a woman once forgets religious principles, Kew, she is sure to

go wrong. The Conversation Room is shut up. The Dorkings go on Tuesday. Clara is really a dear little artless creature; one that you will like, Maria—and as for Ethel, I really think she is an angel. To see her nursing her poor father is the most beautiful sight; night after night she has sate up with him. I know where she would like to be, the dear child. And if Frank falls ill again, Maria, he won't need a mother or useless old grandmother to nurse him. I have got some pretty messages to deliver from her; but they are for your private ears, my lord; not even mammas and brothers may hear them."

"Do not go, mother! Pray stay, George!" cried the sick man (and again Lord Steyne's sister looked uncommonly like that lamented marquis). "My cousin is a noble young creature," he went on. "She has admirable good qualities, which I appreciate with all my heart; and her beauty, you know how I admire it. I have thought of her a great deal as I was lying on the bed yonder (the family look was not so visible in Lady Kew's face), and-and-I wrote to her this very morning; she will have the letter by this time, probably."

"Bien! Frank!" Lady Kew smiled (in her supernatural way) almost as much as her portrait, by Harlowe, as you may see it at Kewbury to this very day. She is represented seated before an easel, painting a miniature of her son, Lord Walham.

it was; many and many a day I used to say so to myself, and longed to get rid of it. I am a poor weak devil, I know, I am only too easily led into temptation, and I should only make matters worse if I married a woman who cares for the world more than for me, and would not make me happy at home."

"Ethel care for the world!" gasped out Lady Kew; "a most artless, simple, affectionate creature; my dear Frank, she-"

He interrupted her, as a blush came rushing over his pale face. "Ah!" said he, "if I had been the painter, and young Clive had been Lord Kew, which of us do you think she would have chosen? And she was right. He is a brave, handsome, honest young fellow, and is a thousand times cleverer and better than I am."

"Not better, dear, thank God," cried his mother, coming round to the other side of his sofa, and seizing her son's hand.

"No, I don't think he is better, Frank," said the diplomatist, walking away to the window. And as for grandmamma at the end of this little speech and scene, her ladyship's likeness to her brother, the late revered Lord Steyne, was more frightful than ever.

After a minute's pause, she rose up on her crooked stick, and said, "I really feel I am unworthy to keep company with so much exquisite virtue. It will be enhanced, my lord, by the thought of the pecuniary sacrifice which you are

hoarding-yes, and saving, and pinching-deny. ing myself the necessities of life, in order that my grandson might one day have enough to support his rank. Go and live and starve in your dreary old house, and marry a parson's daughter, and sing psalms with your precious mother; and I have no doubt you and she-she who has thwarted me all through life, and whom I hated—yes, I hated from the moment she took my son from me and brought misery into my family, will be all the happier when she thinks that she has made a poor, fond, lonely old woman more lonely and miserable. If you please, George Barnes, be good enough to tell my people that I shall go back to Baden;" and waving her children away from her, the old woman tottered out of the room on her crutch.

"I wrote to her on the subject of the last con-making, for I suppose you know that I have been versation we had together," Frank resumed, in rather a timid voice, "the day before my accident. Perhaps she did not tell you, ma'am, of what passed between us. We had had a quarrel; one of many. Some cowardly hand, which we both of us can guess at, had written to her an account of my past life, and she showed me the letter. Then I told her, that if she loved me she never would have showed it me: without any other words of reproof I bade her farewell. It was not much, the showing that letter; but it was enough. In twenty differences we have had together, she had been unjust and captious, cruel toward me, and too eager, as I thought, for other people's admiration. Had she loved me, it seemed to me Ethel would have shown less vanity and better temper. What was I to expect in life afterward from a girl who before her marriage used me so? Neither she nor I could be happy. She could be So the wicked Fairy drove away disappointed gentle enough, and kind, and anxious to please in her chariot with the very dragons which had any man whom she loves, God bless her! As for brought her away in the morning, and just had me, I suppose, I'm not worthy of so much talent time to get their feed of black bread. I wonder and beauty, so we both understood that that was whether they were the horses Clive and J. J. and a friendly farewell; and as I have been lying on Jack Belsize had used when they passed on their my bed yonder, thinking, perhaps, I never might road to Switzerland? Black Care sits behind all leave it, or if I did, that I should like to lead a sorts of horses, and gives a trinkgelt to postillions different sort of life to that which ended in send-all over the map. A thrill of triumph may be pering me there, my resolve of last month was only confirmed. God forbid that she and I should lead the lives of some folks we know; that Ethel should marry without love, perhaps to fall into it afterward; and that I, after this awful warning I have had, should be tempted back into that dreary life I was leading. It was wicked, ma'am, I knew

mitted to Lady Walham after her victory over her mother-in-law. What Christian woman does not like to conquer another; and if that other were a mother-in-law, would the victory be less sweet! Husbands and wives both will be pleased that Lady Walham has had the better of this bout: and you, young boys and virgins, when your turn

market to be knocked down to- I say, I was going to call that three-year-old, Ethelinda. We must christen her over again for Tattersall's, Georgy."

A knock is heard through an adjoining door, and a maternal voice cries, "It is time to go to bed!" So the brothers part, and, let us hope, sleep soundly.

The Countess of Kew, meanwhile, has returned to Baden; where, though it is midnight when she arrives, and the old lady has had two long

comes to be married, you will understand the hid- | don't mean her beauty merely, but such a noble den meaning of this passage. George Barnes bred one! And to think that there she is in the got "Oliver Twist" out, and began to read therein. Miss Nancy and Fanny again were summoned before this little company to frighten and delight them. I dare say even Fagin and Miss Nancy failed with the widow, so absorbed was she with the thoughts of the victory which she had just won. For the evening service, in which her sons rejoiced her fond heart by joining, she lighted on a psalm which was as a Te Deum after the battle-the battle of Kehl by Rhine, where Kew's soul, as his mother thought, was the object of contention between the enemies. I have said, this book is all about the world and a re-bootless journeys, you will be grieved to hear that spectable family dwelling in it. It is not a sermon, except where it can not help itself, and the speaker pursuing the destiny of his narrative finds such a homily before him. O friend, in your life and mine, don't we light upon such sermons daily? don't we see at home as well as among our neighbors that battle betwixt Evil and Good? Here, on one side, is Self and Ambition and Advancement; and Right and Love on the other. Which shall we let to triumph for ourselves-which for our children?

The young men were sitting smoking the Vesper segar. (Frank would do it, and his mother actually lighted his segar for him now, enjoining him straightway after to go to bed.) Kew smoked and looked at a star shining above in the heaven. Which is that star? he asked; and the accomplished young diplomatist answered it was Jupiter.

"What a lot of things you know, George!" cries the senior, delighted; "You ought to have been the elder-you ought, by Jupiter. But you have lost your chance this time."

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Yes, thank God!" says George. "And I am going to be all right-and to turn over a new leaf, old boy-and paste down the old ones, eh? I wrote to Martins this morning to have all my horses sold; and I'll never bet again—so help me—so help me, Jupiter. I made a vow-a promise to myself, you see, that I wouldn't if I recovered. And I wrote to cousin Ethel this morning. As I thought over the matter yonder, I felt quite certain I was right, and that we could never, never pull together. Now the Countess is gone, I wonder whether I was right to give up sixty thousand pounds, and the prettiest girl in London?"

"Shall I take horses and go after her? My mother's gone to bed, she won't know," asked George. Sixty thousand is a lot of money to lose."

Kew laughed. "If you were to go and tell our grandmother that I could not live the night through; and that you would be Lord Kew in the morning, and your son, Viscount Walham, I think the Countess would make up a match between you and the sixty thousand pounds, and the prettiest girl in England: she would byby Jupiter. I intend only to swear by the heathen gods now, Georgy. No, I am not sorry I wrote to Ethel. What a fine girl she is!-I

she does not sleep a single wink. In the morning she hobbles over to the Newcome quarters; and Ethel comes down to her pale and calm. How is her father? He has had a good night: he is a little better, speaks more clearly, has a little more the use of his limbs.

“I wish I had had a good night!” groans out the Countess.

"I thought you were going to Lord Kew, at Kehl," remarked her granddaughter.

"I did go, and returned with wretches who would not bring me more than five miles an hour! I dismissed that brutal grinning courier; and I have given warning to that fiend of a maid."

"And Frank is pretty well, grandmamma?" "Well! He looks as pink as a girl in her first season! I found him, and his brother George, and their mamma. I think Maria was hearing them their catechism," cries the old lady.

"N. and M. together! Very pretty," says Ethel, gravely. "George has always been a good boy, and it is quite time for my Lord Kew to begin."

The elder lady looked at her descendant, but Miss Ethel's glance was impenetrable. "I suppose you can fancy, my dear, why I came back?” said Lady Kew.

"Because you quarreled with Lady Walham, grandmamma. I think I have heard that there used to be differences between you." Miss Newcome was armed for defense and attack; in which cases we have said Lady Kew did not care to assault her. My grandson told me that he had written to you," the Countess said.

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"Yes; and had you waited but half an hour yesterday, you might have spared me the humiliation of that journey."

"You-the humiliation-Ethel!" "Yes, me!" Ethel flashed out. "Do you suppose it is none to have me bandied about from bidder to bidder, and offered for sale to a gentleman who will not buy me? Why have you and all my family been so eager to get rid of me? Why should you suppose or desire that Lord Kew should like me? Hasn't he the Opera; and such friends as Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry, to whom your ladyship introduced him in early life? He told me so: and she was good enough to inform me of the rest. What attractions have I in comparison with such women? And to this man from whom I am parted by good fortune; to this

People who are now fifty years of age have still a longer time before them than Michael Angelo and Voltaire had at the moment when they were laid in the cradle. Independently of birds thus enjoying more of life than all other beings in the same given number of years, time seems to glide over them without leaving a trace of its effects; or rather, time only improves them, reviving their colors and strengthening their voices. Age increases the beauty of birds, while in men it brings on ugliness.

man who writes to remind me that we are sep- | century, who took a month to make the passage. arated-your ladyship must absolutely go and entreat him to give me another trial! It is too much, grandmamma. Do please to let me stay where I am; and worry me with no more schemes for my establishment in life. Be contented with the happiness which you have secured for Clara Pulleyn and Barnes; and leave me to take care of my poor father. Here I know I am doing right. Here, at least, there is no such sorrow, and doubt, and shame, for me, as my friends have tried to make me endure. There is my father's bell. He likes me to be with him at breakfast, and to read his paper to him."

A bird is a model ship constructed by the hand of God, in which the conditions of swiftness, manageability, and lightness, are absolutely and necessarily the same as in vessels built by the hand of man. There are not in the world two things which resemble each other more strongly, both mechanically and physically speaking, than the carcass and framework of a bird and a ship. The breast-bone so exactly resembles a keel, that the English language has retained the name. The wings are the oars, the tail the rudder. That original observer, Huber the Genevese, who has carefully noticed the flight of birds of prey, has even made use of the metaphor thus suggested to establish a characteristic distinction between rowers and sailers. The rowers are the falcons, who have the first or second wing-feather the longest, and who are able, by means of this powerful oar to dart right into the wind's eye. The mere sailers are the eagles, the vultures, and the buzzards, whose more rounded wings resemble sails. The rowing bird is to the sailing bird what the steamer that laughs at adverse winds is to the schooner, which can not advance against them.

"Stay a little, Ethel," cried the Countess, with a trembling voice. "I am older than your father, and you owe me a little obedience, that is, if children do owe any obedience to their parents nowadays. I don't know. I am an old woman-the world perhaps has changed since my time; and it is you who ought to command, I dare say, and we to follow. Perhaps I have been wrong all through life, and in trying to teach my children to do as I was made to do. God knows I have had very little comfort from them: whether they did or whether they didn't. You and Frank I had set my heart on; I loved you out of all my grandchildren—was it very unnatural that I should wish to see you together? For that boy I have been saving money these years past. He flies back to the arms of his mother, who has been pleased to hate me as only such virtuous people can; who took away my own son from me; and now his son-toward whom the only fault I ever committed was to spoil him and be too fond of him. Don't leave me too, my child. Let me have something that I can like at my years. And The bones of highflyers, as well as their feathI like your pride, Ethel, and your beauty, myers, are tubes filled with air, communicating with dear; and I am not angry with your hard words; a pulmonary reservoir of prodigious capacity. and if I wish to see you in the place in life which | This reservoir is also closely connected with the becomes you-do I do wrong? No. Silly girl! air-cells which lie between the interior muscles, There-give me the little hand. How hot it is! and which are so many swimming-bladders by aid Mine is as cold as a stone-and shakes, doesn't of which the bird is able to inflate its volume, and it?-Eh! it was a pretty hand once! What did diminish its specific gravity in proportion. In Ann-what did your mother say to Frank's let- birds that are laden with a heavy burden of head, ter?" Nature has interposed so decided a gap between skin and flesh, that there results an almost complete detachment of the skin. Consequently, they can be stripped of their coating just as easily as a rabbit can. In man, and other mammifers, the blood, in the act of breathing, advances ready to meet the air; in birds, air enters to find the blood, and comes in contact with it, every where Hence an ubiquity of respiration and a rapidity of hamatosis, which explains the untirability of the wings of birds. The muscles do not get fatigued, because they receive new vigor every second from the influence of the ever-revivified blood. A stag or a hare drops at last, when hunted, because its lungs, rather than its legs, are tired.

"I did not show it to her," Ethel answered. "Let me see it, my dear," whispered Lady Kew, in a coaxing way.

"There it is," said Ethel, pointing to the fireplace, where there lay some torn fragments and ashes of paper. It was the same fire-place at which Clive's sketches had been burned.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT BIRDS.

BIRDS,

says M. Toussenel, a distinguished French Ornithologist, live more in a given time than any other creatures. For, to live, is not only to love; it is also to move, act, and travel. The hours of the swift, which in sixty minutes can reach the distance of eighty leagues, are longer than the hours of the tortoise, because they are better occupied, and comprise a greater number of events. Men of the present day, who can go from America to Europe in little more than a week, live four times as much as men of the last

Between the different members of a bird's body there exists a sort of equilibrium and balance, which prevents any one organ from obtaining undue development without another losing in the same proportion Thus, exaggerated length of wing generally coincides with very small feet and

of galvanism is greatly indebted. The chaffinch, in unsettled weather, recommends the traveler to take his umbrella, and advises the housekeeper not to be in a hurry to hang out her linen. Certain mystic geniuses have attributed this faculty of divination possessed by birds, to some special sensibility, acquainting them with the action of the electric currents that traverse the atmosphere, and accurately informing them of their direction. Nor is there any scientific argument which can be confidently opposed to such a theory.

legs. Examples: the frigate-bird, the swift, and | eminently nervous animal, to whom the science the humming-bird. Feathered feet and legs are mostly short, as in pigeons, bantams, ptarmigan, and grouse. Nature always contrives to economize out of one part of a bird's body the material which she has too lavishly expended upon another. Good walkers are bad flyers, and good flyers are bad walkers. First-rate runners and divers are deprived of the power of rising in the air. Half-blind individuals, like owls, are astonishingly quick of hearing. Creatures clad in plain costume are recompensed by the powers of song. The lark and the redbreast, victim species (both being greedily eaten in France), have the gift of poesy bestowed upon them to console them for their future sorrows.

The most exquisite sense a bird possesses, is sight. The acuteness and sensibility of the retina are in direct proportion to the rapidity of wing. The swift, according to Belon's calculation, can see a gnat distinctly, at the distance of more than five hundred yards. The kite, hovering in the air at a height beyond our feeble vision, perceives with ease the small dead minnow floating on the surface of the lake, and is cognizant of the imprudence of the poor little field-mouse as it timidly ventures out of its hole. All God has done and made, He has thoroughly well done and made. If He had not exactly porportioned the visual powers of the bird of prey, or the swallow, to its dashing flight, the mere extreme velocity of the bird would have only served to break its neck. Partridges constantly kill themselves against the iron wires of electric telegraphs; and nothing is more common than to find thrushes and larks with dislocated vertebræ, when they fall into the large vertical net which is used in France by twilight sportsmen.

After the organs of sight and touch, the sense of hearing comes next in importance. The delicacy of the auditory powers of birds is sufficiently apparent from the passion for vocal music which many of them manifest. It is a universally admitted physical law that, in all animals, a close and invariable correspondence exists between the organs of voice and those of hearing. Now, birds, it will be seen, are the Stentors of nature. The bull, who is an enormous quadruped, endowed with an immensely capacious chest, does not roar louder than the bittern. In Lorraine, they style him the bœuf d'eau, or "water-bull." A crane, trumpeting two or three thousands yards above the surface of the earth, pulls your head back just as violently as a friend who asks you, "How do you do?" from the balcony of a fifth-floor window; while the thundering Mirabeau, who should venture to harangue the Parisian populace from the top of the towers of Notre Dame, would run a great risk of not being able to convey a single word to a single member of his congregation.

Ascend in the air, by means of a balloon, in company with an old Atlas lion, whose formidable roaring once struck terror throughout Algerian wildernesses; and, when you have risen only half a mile, make your traveling companion give utterance to the most sonorous of his fine chest-notes. Those notes will spend themselves in empty space, without descending so low as the earth. But the royal kite, floating another

gle inflexion of his cat-like mewings, miniatures though they be of the lion's roar. It is probable, says M. Toussenel-M. Toussenel is always speaking, through our humble interpretationthat nature has expended more genius in the construction of the larynx of a wren or a nightingale, than in fabricating the ruder throats of all the quadrupeds put together.

Perhaps, after all we have said and seen, the sense of touch is the most perfect in birds, and the organs of feeling are endowed with a subtilty of perception more exquisite even than those of sight. In fact, air being the most variable and unstable of elements, birds would be endowed by nature with the gift of universal sensibility, en-half mile above you, will not let you lose a sinabling them to appreciate and foretell the slightest perturbations of the medium they inhabit. In consequence, the feathered race are armed with a nervous impressionability which comprises the different properties of the hygrometer, the thermometer, the barometer, and the electroscope. A tempest which takes the man of science by surprise, has, long before, given warning to the birds of the sea. The noddies, cormorants, gulls, and petrels, know twenty-fours beforehand, by means of the magnetic telegraph which exists within them, the exact day and moment when ocean is going into one of his great rages, opening wide his green abysses, and flinging the angry foam of his waves in insult against the forehead of the cliffs. Some birds are the harbingers of win-chines. tery storms; others usher in the advent of spring. The raven and the nightingale announce the coming of the tempest by a peculiar form of bird's expression, which they both seem to have borrowed from the vocabulary of the frog-a preVOL. IX.-No. 54.-3 E

Smell and taste are but feeble in birds; and they have no great occasion for either sense. A bird's appetite must be enormous, in order to supply the animal heat necessary for the maintenance of its superior nature. A bird is a locomotive of the very first rank-a high-pressure engine, which burns more fuel than three or four ordinary ma"Animals feed; man eats," says worthy Brillat Savarin. "Clever men alone know how to eat properly." This strictly true gastrosophic aphorism is more exactly applicable to birds than to quadrupeds. Birds feed, to assuage their hunger and to amuse themselves; not to indulge in