at all; whether it consists in setting our Is this instrument ourselves? Are we feet and eyes going in the proper direction quite inseparable from this machinery of for walking or riding, or in painting for us thoughts? If it never acted except by our the choicest galleries of pictures in dream-volition and under our control, then, inland, or composing for us as many novels deed, it might be somewhat difficult to as taxed the imagination of poor Alexan-conceive of our consciousness apart from dre Dumas. It is the conscious Self alone it. But every night a different lesson is whose exertions ever flag, and for whose taught us. The brain, released from its repose merciful Nature has deserved the bit and rein, plays like a colt turned to blessing of Sancho Panza on "the man pasture, or, like the horse of the miller, who invented sleep." goes round from left to right to relieve itself from having gone round from right to left all the day before. Watching these instinctive sports and relaxations by which we benefit, but in whose direction we have no part, do we not acquire the conviction that the dreaming brain-self is not the true self for whose moral worthiness we strive, and for whose existence after death alone we care? "We are of the stuff which dreams are made of." Not wholly so, O mighty poet, philosopher; for in that "stuff" there enters not the noblest element of our nature that Moral Will which allies us, not to the world of passing shadows, but to the great Eternal Will, in whose Life it is our hope that we shall live for ever. Take it how we will, I think it remains evident that in dreams (except those belonging to the class of nightmare wherein the will is partially awakened) we are in a condition of entire passivity; receiving impressions indeed from the work which is going on in our brains, but incurring no fatigue thereby, and exempted from all sense of moral responsibility as regards it. The instrument on which we are wont to play has slipped from our loosened grasp, and its secondary and almost equally wondrous powers have become manifest. It is not only a finger-organ, but a selfacting one; which, while we lie still and listen, goes over, more or less perfectly, and with many a quaint wrong note and variation, the airs which we performed on it yesterday, or long ago. EUROPEANS have always been led to suppose THE CARPENTER'S SHOP.- A professor at that by the act of suttee Hindoo wives declared Munich, says the Cornish Telegraph, has pubtheir undying attachment to their husbands, lished the results of his experience on the seabut Dr. Chever, in his recent work on Indian soning of wood, which, as a practical question, is Medical Jurisprudence, traces the custom to a worth attention in many quarters. Growing very different origin. He brings forward au- wood, says the professor, contains in winter thorities to show that the Brahmins themselves about 50 per cent. of water; in March and invented the law as a means of self-protection April, 46; and 48 per cent. in the next three against their wives. Before its introduction the months, with but little variation up to Novemwives were in the habit of avenging themselves ber. Timber dried in the air holds from 20 on their husbands for neglect and cruelty by to 25 per cent. of water-never less than 10 mixing poison with their food, and at last things per cent. Wood dried by artificial means until came to such a height that the least matrimo- all moisture is expelled, is deprived of its elasnial quarrel resulted in the husband's death. An ticity, and becomes brittle. If the natural easier remedy for the evil might have been found qualities of the wood are to be preserved, the in permitting the wife to eat out of the same drying must begin at a moderate heat, and be dish as the husband, but this would have in- carried on very slowly. For the drying of small volved too wile a departure from the customs pieces of wood, such as are used by joiners and of society; and it must be admitted that there cabinet-makers, the professor recommends a bath is a peculiar refinement of cruelty in the expe- of dry sand heated to a temperature not exdient adopted which would commend itself to ceeding 100°. The sand diffuses the heat and the Asiatic mind. Of late years the law of sut-absorbs moisture; but it must be cold when the tee has been occasionally set at defiance, but the wood is first buried therein. widow cannot altogether escape the consequences of her husband's death. His family degrade her, and put her to the most menial duties in the house. Pall Mall Gazette. A STEAMBOAT has been placed on the remarkable lake of the Incas, the Lake of Titicaca, in Peru. From The Sunday Magazine. A CHANCE CHILD. eyes and light brown hair, coarsely dressed in a thick woolsey, with no mother's pride wrought into braiding or frilling. "I didna think I could tak sae kindly to ony wean in my auld age," said the Lowland 66 It's no in me to be unkind THERE had been a funeral from a little, old, deep-windowed house in the chief street of Dingwall, Rossshire. An old maid's funeral, attended only by a grave, housekeeper. decorous" writer," two young men, strang- to a bairn, God forbid! but I've just passed ers in the place, and a girl, little Mary them by like. An' she's no bonny, and Dallas, who had no more right to that she's backward wi' her tongue. Master name than she had to anything else in this says that that failin' will be worth a tocher wide world of ours. A "chance child," to her if she keeps it when she's grown. with a black veil over all her history pre- It's the way men talk, Miss Vass, wantin' vious to the day when the "writer," to have all the crackin' to theirselves, and Duncan Gair, put her, a two-year-old baby, us to mix the toddy to help them on. But into the charge of worthy Miss Vass, with if mony a ane canna help frae lovin' an such sum of money as paid a little more auld dumb dog, that was never a beauty than her expenses, but was not to be men- at his best, just because he loves them, tioned beside the value of the sterling what for am I a fule to be taken wi' a wean godly upbringing that she received. that tuk to me? She has a kind o' way as if she was thankful for little things that maist bairns take as their right. Ye'll hae an easy handfu' o' her, Miss Vass." Miss Vass had been a scrupulous and a proud woman, with the pride of a race of decent farmers; and she had taken two days of consideration before she had written her consent to Mr. Gair's letter, inquiring whether she would undertake the control of the worse than orphan baby. The payment for so pleasant and womanly a duty was a sore temptation to her pinched table and thinning wardrobe, and her yearning clinging to the town and home of her birth. But, welcome as the money might be, Elspeth Vass was not the woman to do for its sake what she would not have done without it. She had referred to many good books and to sundry portions of Scripture, and had wrestled long in prayer. Elspeth was not one to display her mental processes, except as they involuntarily showed in the few dry sentences of her tardy reply: "That, seeing what was done could not be undone, and that the Lord had expressly declared that He Himself would not hold a child responsible for its parents' evil ways, unless it followed in the same, she did not see that it would be inconsistent with her duty as a Christian woman to undertake to do her best to direct the bairn to better paths." She had added, "though it was overlike to be ill-guided by its hereditary nature, if there was any truth in birth or breed," but under the double reflection that Ezekiel says nothing on that point, and that it was a queer-like thing for a single woman to write to a bachelor, she had drawn her pen through those lines, and fair-copied the letter without them. It was no fairy child, of high-born grace and lustrous beauty, that Elspeth Vass took from the arms of Mr. Gair's old housekeeper. Just a thin-faced child, with grey Miss Vass was rather doubtful. She could not forget the child's parentage; and, being accustomed to walk safe paths of antecedent and precedent, she was not sanguine enough to hope that she might have come across that exception which proves the rule. But with all her rigid strictness, she was not a prejudiced woman; and when the little girl showed herself gentle and docile, her kind old heart opened readily to her, though her strong principle never neglected to apply the wholesome discipline which her womanly consciousness taught her was most likely to check any dangerous tendencies in this hopeful shoot of a tainted tree. Mary was brought up in habits of punctuality and unremitting industry, of self-denial and self-control. Miss Vass watched carefully over the subtle moral influences of conversation and general reading, even surrendering her national laxity of judgment upon Mary Queen of Scots; and to satisfy the girlish yearning for a heroine of beauty, love, and pathos, supplied her place with the image and story of sweet, pure Magdalen of France. And so, for full fourteen years, the young girl lived with the old woman in the little old-fashioned house, the only home they had either of them ever known. And truly happy had those fourteen years been, albeit their quiet calendar of steady plodding in the common day-school, little household duty, and diligent evening needlework, had been enlivened by no redletter days more startling than a drive to Strathpeffer, a tea-drinking at the manse, or a day's trip to Inverness. Mary had grown up a healthy-looking, well-mannered girl, useful about the house, and clever at her needle, but with no more prettiness than good habits, good temper, and superfine neatness are sure to produce. As was only natural, Miss Vass had occasionally certain private cogitations. Mr. Gair had said not a word about her ward's parents, beyond the simple fact that they and their child were no credit to each other. She did not know which of them supplied the funds which the lawyer doled out. She could not form the slightest idea of their respective positions in life, nor whether Mary was far from the scene of her birth or unsuspiciously near it. Like the wise woman that she was, she reflected that if she could not repress these wandering wonderments, much less could the child, so much more immediately interested. Therefore she resolved that no unwholesome mysteries should surround the secret, like ghouls about a corpse. There it was, a sad and serious truth, to be recognized, and solemnly covered up, without prurient peep or touch. So when Mary was a lassie just entering her teens, Miss Vass did not repress her timid hints, but met them boldly and truthfully, as she would had it been a story of death instead of disgrace. Truthfully, tenderly in utter truthfulness, she answered the questions with which Mary sought to probe the world's ways about such matters, offering no insulting pity or weakening consolation. It pained her-pained her honest virtuous heart, doubtless, far more than bitterer things had pained poor Mary's mother's-to see the child, spiritually the child of her own soul, go about her daily duties with a graver face and a lower voice than before. But she took no notice. Only once when Mary was sewing, with a thoughtful face and an occasional sigh, Miss Vass ventured to say, with a dramatic imitation of lightness, whose success astonished herself, "A penny for your thoughts, Mary bairn." "I was thinking," said candid Mary, "of a fable that our master read to us once at dictation class. How there was a man doomed by a wicked spirit to wander, without a friend or a penny, through a desert country. But the man was attended by a good genius, and wherever he came the good genius provided him with friends and home, and found money for him, and dug wells for him, and made trees grow over his path. But then we know there are no genii, after all;" and the fingers resumed the sewing, and there came another sigh. "My child Mary," said Miss Vass, laying her thin, pale hand on the girl's warm shoulder, "there is God. Need you turn to these poor fables-though I own they are pretty enough- while you have the true histories of Joseph, and David, and Esther? Let the ancient heathen that were born in the dark, and the modern heathen that choose it, talk in riddles about fairy and genii, fortune and luck. Let us call Him by the name He taught us- God our Father. Our Father, Mary bairn! Let us trust Him, Mary. He never asks us to trust Him till we have proved Him. The youngest beggar-child, before it can know the want of bread, has been fed a deal more than starved. Need you wish for genii, bairn? Does not the angel of the Lord encamp about them that fear Him, and deliver them? He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into water-springs. Mary bairn, the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, and if we are his, then He and his are ours. Trust in the Lord and do good, so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed - body and soul, bairn, heart and head!" That night Mary had kissed Miss Vass with a warmth that showed she had received her heartening words in all their underscore of emphasis. And the good old maid had lain awake some little time thinking of the girl and her future. The hints about this she had conveyed to Mr. Duncan Gair had elicited nothing but the reply that Mary would be expected ultimately to depend upon herself, and that he was sure she had been so reared that she would find it easy. With a prayer for the lassie's well-being, temporal and eternal, she had fallen asleep, to be awakened by the sunbeams, and Mary's voice a-lilting blithe as ever- and it was nothing but blithe. Miss Vass was one of those women who sit well in the saddle of life till the last, and die quickly, before their foot is out of the stirrup. She was only ailing for a day or two before she died, and was even up and dressed in her afternoon dress, too, lace cap, point collar, and pearl brooch when death came. She had not broken her habits for him. It was the woman's version of the royal spirit that takes a sick man to the battle field, to drop dead of disease before the bullet can reach him; that gives the dying captain voice for one more conquering command. It was sense of duty, to be done as long as possible, – and once more. No 66 last words," so called. Her last words were to give Tibbie Seer, the char woman (for they kept no servant), some | Elspeth's wish, he had been inclined to pacurrant scones for a relish with her tea, "she'd had a hard day's work, poor body, and didn't look over-strong." So is it often with the bravest and best. What is death to them, that they should say his litany? Do we stop to cower and tremble before the outside porter of our Father's mansion? Straight on, straight in, with the same step that we always walked. "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" rade their engagement before he left for Edinburgh. But she did not make a moan, nor run away, but took his ring from her hand, and stopped working at her homely trousseau and household plenishing. She wore out the first, piece by piece, as she needed it, and used the other to brighten her old-maiden abode. Sorely, sorely did the false lover misunderstand this brave and sound nature; but she was avenged in the galling sincerity which crept into his It was all over. Tibbie Šeer stayed in self-comforting formula, "that she had the house from the death to the funeral, never really cared for him, being worthy and Mr. Gair came to and fro, and the of some one far better." Also the little nephews in Aberdeen wrote to appoint the pearl brooch, and the silk-bound, embroiday of their arrival for the funeral. Mary dered album, wherein Miss Vass had Dallas lived on, lonely amid her breaking stored the quaint, queer bits of literature home; lonely and sad, as the fondest and art which had crossed her own humble daughter bereaved of the best of mothers, by-path- the striking metaphor remembut not dutiless, and therefore not com-bered from the Sabbath sermon, the verses fortless. Miss Vass had left everything written by local talent upon local interests arranged with a kind and righteous ar- in the local journal, the flower-painting on rangement as became a Christian. Her rice-paper bought at the laird's lady's stall furniture and the current amount of her little annuity were to be made over to her nephews. Their father, the husband of Elspeth's only sister, dead long ago, had paid the debts of old Mr. Vass's long illness twenty years before, and had been kind and brotherly to Elspeth in her days of penury. In justice to his children, one sickly and the other married and struggling, she must return them what she could. It was not adequate to the debt she owed their father; and so, thinking of the little great-nephews and nieces, growing from and wearing out so much, she had firmly set aside her natural leaning to the better-provided Mary, and to the money and the furniture she had even added, "and all my wearing apparel." Mr. Gair told Mary this; and in all her grief the girl arose to fold and arrange and pack for the benefit of others. She even went through the little store of lace, carefully repairing the slight decays which negligence would soon reduce to utter worthlessness. It was her last service to her friend, to make her bequests as valuable as pos sible. But something there was for Mary's self. The little black-paper profile of Elspeth Vass when a girl. It had its history. It had been procured as a gift for Elspeth's lover, who had immediately after gone away to Edinburgh, and had forgotten the plain, grave woman in the far north, until he remembered to send back her picture and her true, sensible letters on the eve of his marriage with somebody else. It was no secret in Dingwall; for, against in the charity bazaar, even one or two caricatures by that clever lad Bob Rose, who went to London, and got some of his things into Punch, and died young. All these for Mary Dallas, quietly described as "my dear and dutiful pupil." Little things truly, scarcely worth so much as the oldest household thing that was to go to the strange nephews, but precious to Mary, with a preciousness beyond the highest commercial value-something that could not be bought. The visible traces of a good, true life that had lovingly mingled with her own. The thought of them, and of all they suggested, lay at the girl's sad heart, like the pure guardian snow round the patient flowers in winter, while Mr. Gair told her that she was now to be sent to London, to live with and assist a widow lady, who was starting a boarding-school in the suburbs; and explained that her allowance of twenty pounds per annum (just half what it had hitherto been) would cease entirely when she came of age. Mary was to go first to Edinburgh, and rest a day and a night with his old housekeeper's sister, and then she was to go on to London, where his own brother, a solicitor in Gray's Inn, had engaged to send a responsible person to meet her at the railway station, and conduct her to her destination. Mr. Gair was not an unkindly man, though his old housekeeper described him as "ane o' thae canny bodies, that hae lockit theirselves up sae safely, that they dinna ken whaur to find their ain key; and their was in his manner to Mary much ar of that sort of careful consideration with [ saw her and her poor belongings safely which we provide for the transit of a valu- into the hands of Mrs. Lambert, described able and fragile parcel. But Mary did on her own circulars as the "lady superinnot notice this, thinking so much of the tendent" of the establishment. Mrs. Lamprecious portrait and jewel and book that bert led Mary up-stairs, volubly informing bore their testimony to so much more. her that the house was very quiet just In a sort of unconscious, natural way, she now, and the "dormitory " in fact empty, felt that what we have once had we can since "term" would not begin till next never lose, except by our own will. And week. Mrs. Lambert knew that "term she thanked Mr. Gair so warmly, that he would bring at least one day-pupilclapped an extra padlock on his heart, in the builder's daughter- and one boarder self-defence, lest she should find the miss- -the child of a widowed Italian ing key, and enter the castle by storm! tist, who was engaged to teach his lanAnd then she went away and packed her guage or his art, should any young ladies three treasures in the safest corner of her require either, which understanding had old hair-trunk. enabled Mrs. Lambert's prospectus to boast of "the services of Signor Barti." Others would surely turn up. Mrs. Lambert argued from innate consciousness that many people put off things to the last moment; and having sown her circulars broadcast, with "term-time " duly notified, she was now diligently touching up her silk dress for that momentous day, before which she would surely have many inquiring callers. An iron-grey, taciturn man was Mary's custodian from King's Cross to her final destination. There was but little of the beauty or majesty of London to be seen in the shortest cut from the new Road to Brixton. And Mary's heart sunk within her at the sight of one dreary street after another, all sordid with dirt and bad weather, and filled with a density of squalor and wretchedness new to the Highland-bred girl. Gradually, however, the roads widened, the houses looked more like homes, and trees and shrubs, albeit in their wintry nakedness, broke and beautified the grim lines of brick and mortar, like pleasant fancies amid stern facts. "It improves towards the end," thought Mary hopefully. Poor Mrs. Lambert! Her deceased husband had been a struggling man, lacking robustness in health, education, and character. In her own bed-room she had a drawerful of the prospectuses of different defunct companies which he had served as secretary, together with divers specimens of the ores and minerals whereon they had founded schemes of golden wealth-sad relics of a married life which began in sentiment and ended in a weary shuffle. A sainted in the trials she had passed through; a weak one like hers was merely soured and spoilt. A faded, shifty, and shiftless woman, she stood before Mary Dallas with the Scotch breezes still cool on her fresh cheek, and the bracing teaching of Elspeth Vass still girding up her soul. Alas! Presently the cab turned off the main road, and struck into a purlieu of new-built villas, duly stuccoed, and stand-strong, good nature would have been ing close together, two-thirds of them with a great white mark upon their windows, to proclaim that the desirable family residence was still untenanted, while all the rest had that painful cheap newness about the window drapery and visible furniture that suggests households built on sand, and the constant presence of the broker's man. No tiniest patch of green before "Perhaps you will not mind my leaving the houses. No distinction between road you for the present," Mrs. Lambert said. and footpath both in miserable equality" As soon as you have arranged your little of stone and dust and slush. No foot-pas-matters as far as you need, you can go sengers and that seemed no wonder- down to the drawing-room, and I will join and one or two tradesmen's carts prowling you there by-and-by. You will quite unabout to pick up new customers, only to derstand that I am very much occupied — be served, however, on the strictest ready-new house, new school, and my own two money system. dear fatherless boys, and a most useless It was in the heart of this wilderness servant, Miss Dallas; and I'm afraid it is that the cab stopped. Before a villa ex-against me that I have not been long used actly like hundreds round it, both in its to such a state of things." building and its furbishing, individual only Mary readily excused her; and after in the little brass plate, engraved, " Estab-opening her box and correcting the defilishment for Young Ladies." ciencies of her travelling toilet, she duly Mary's escort stayed with her until he 'repaired to "the drawing-room," where, |