with the neatness of a surgical operation. Very frequently this form of leprosy is arrested in its progress, and the patient recovers with a maimed foot or hand. In other cases, again, the disease goes on to develop itself in more vital parts. There is no especial age at which either variety shews a tendency to appear. The disease has been noticed alike in childhood and at advanced age. In the West Indies, the white population is much less liable to it than the natives or the Jews. Women also seem to possess a greater immunity than men. supply of brandy and hot water-had been placed upon the table. 'Take a cigar,' said Mr Kirke Webbe, if only to oblige me; it may prevent that quite sufficiently open countenance of yours from yawning insufferably, and, moreover, shade, in some degree, its inquisitive brightness, which might else dazzle and confuse my ideas.' 'I daresay, captain, you think that very clever -I don't. Nevertheless, I shall take a cigar-two or three, possibly, if you are especially tedious. And now, if you please, go ahead.' Leprosy is a disease essentially dependent upon a blood-poison, belonging to the large class of which scrofula, cancer, and rheumatism are representatives. It unfortunately further resembles these in the diffi- far back as 1792-in the autumn of which year two 'Nay, I must first go back, and a long way, too-as culty of its cure. Almost every article of the pharmacopoeia has been employed for this purpose, yet a gentlemen and bachelors, of about the same agespecific remains to be discovered. But although twenty-five, namely-who had never met before, incurable, it is satisfactory to be assured that the great made each other's acquaintance whilst shooting over source of terror in earlier ages-namely, dread of its the Lord Petre's well-stocked covers in the vicinage communication by contagion-is completely ground- of the market-town of Romford, Essex. One of those less. Repeated observations have established this gentlemen-bachelors was William Linwood, only son important fact. At the same time, the hereditary and heir to Robert Linwood, hide and skin merchant character, or as medical men say, the hereditary tendency to the disease is not denied. It is not unfre--who had departed this life in Leadenhall Street, quently seen to pass over one generation, reappearing London, about three years previously—and Margaret with fresh vigour in the next. his wife, who, since her husband's death, had withdrawn to Wales, where she found exercise for her constitutional activity in the superintendence of a large dairy-farm, the profits whereof were to aid her son in achieving the high social position to which, in her fond opinion, his personal and mental gifts so well entitled him. I speak too rapidly, perhaps?' We are quite as ignorant of the causes of leprosy as of its treatment. With respect to other diseases, whose cure frequently baffles medical science, we have almost invariably some acquaintance with their predisposing causes. We know that exposure to infection, deficiency of certain articles of food, breathing a polluted atmosphere, predispose respectively to typhus fever, scurvy, and cholera. But no peculiarity of climate, atmosphere, or diet satisfactorily accounts for the decay in one age or the development in another of the leprous poison. That this disease, like all others, has its own natural laws which, though undiscovered, we cannot regard as capricious, is undoubted; and we trust that the increasing attention to it now excited among medical men and physiologists, may lead to an early discovery of them. Meanwhile, with all our uncertainty, we may confidently assert, that attention to the general principles of hygiene will be found by communities and individuals the most effectual preventives, should the apprehended outbreak of this disease unhappily occur. KIRKE WEBBE, THE PRIVATEER CAPTAIN. CHAPTER III. AFTER saying 'Grace,' as described in the last chapter, Captain Webbe suggested, that as it was a tough yarn he had to spin, it might be as well to ascertain previously how my grandame was doing, and so arrange that we might be secure from interruption. I agreed, and hastened to the Crown Tavern. Mrs Linwood was, I found, considerably better, but still lamentably weak and nervous. A fly was at the door, in which, accompanied by Mr Beale and Nancy Dow, she was about to be conveyed to Oak Villa. I placed my mother's letter in her pocket, and, having seen her safely off, rejoined my new friend at the Royal Hotel. Captain Webbe had made preparation, during my brief absence, for a cozy as well as lengthened sitting. The fire had been replenished, and heaped up on the hobs; and a bundle of cigars, decanters filled with ruby and amber coloured wine-no doubt, for my especial delectation, as there was besides a plentiful 'Not at all. Allow me, however, to remark, that your speech would be pleasanter if it were less sardonic-jibing; but that is, I fear, a confirmed habit, and one which you take perverse pains to cultivate.' "If that, Master Linwood, is your serious, wellconsidered opinion,' drawled Captain Webbe through his nose, simultaneously with the ejection in the I must lose no time in endeavouring to mend my same way of two jets of smoke from a fresh cigar, manners in that particular. To resume, nevertheless, a narrative to which a deeper interest attaches just now than to wisest words of babes and sucklings. The other youthful sportsman, I was going on to say, was Mr Kirke Webbe, at that time, and in a social, pecuniary sense, an indefinite gentleman, whose parents had both died during his legal infancy, and whilst he was undergoing the preliminary ordeal of midshipmanship, consisting chiefly of mast-headings, on board his majesty's ship Gladiator. A worthy, most worthy couple,' continued Webbe, with sudden seriousness, 'who, from prudential motives, did not marry till late in life, after a courtship of twenty years, lived in perfect harmony, and died within four days of each other, leaving to their idolised boy something over a thousand pounds, scraped together by ceaseless industry and inflexible self-denial-one life, one hope, one tomb! 'A striking proof, Master Linwood,' resumed Webbe more briskly, after emptying his tumbler at a gulp— a striking proof, I say, Master Linwood, that virtues, unlike certain diseases, are not always hereditary; unless, indeed, they are governed by the same law as transmitted insanity and gout, which are said to skip usually over one generation, in order to fasten more certainly on the next: according to which hypothesis, my son should be a model youth.' You have a son?' "Truly, I have. Harry is a few months, I think, older than you, and about the same height and figure. But my good young friend, we are steering a very zigzag course with the story. Let us endeavour to keep a little closer to the wind. Kirke Webbe, I was telling you, having scrambled through the preliminary six years of midshipmanship, would, there could be no doubt, have creditably passed for lieutenant-he would be a very sorry lubber that did not-when a difficulty occurred between him and Old Blueblazes, captain of the Gladiator' 'Old Blueblazes!' "His ship sobriquet, of course, derived from the flaming hue of his proboscis. A grim old salt was he, fit for nothing upon earth but fighting and drinking, in both of which accomplishments it is but doing him justice to say he was Al. The difficulty with me fell out thus. But first please to understand, young sir,' continued Webbe, 'that I go over these matters with you, forasmuch that as it is certain some good-natured friend will inform you, if he has not done so already, that I was kicked out of the royal navy, it is well with reference to the copartnership we have entered into that you should be acquainted with the true version of the affair. The difficulty, I repeat, between Blueblazes and me fell out thus: the Gladiator lay at anchor in Plymouth Sound. The old fellow was, I supposed, in his cabin sleeping off the fumes of his after-dinner grog; the lieutenant of the watch, a moony sort of chap, was perched upon one of the guns about midships, reading a book, with his face towards the bows, when the devil, who so delights in finding work for idle boys and men, suggested to me and another promising youth to have just one quiet turn at leap-frog upon the sacred quarter-deck.' 'A turn at leap-frog upon the quarter-deck!' 'Just that, my ingenuous young friend. I am not surprised that, landsman though you are, your hair stands on end at the bare mention of such an enormity. Mine did whenever I afterwards thought of it, gradually falling off in consequence, till I was left, as you see, nearly as bald as a coot. 'Well, I had my leap, and was making a back for my friend, when the captain suddenly seized me by the neck, and had I not clung to him like grim death, would, I verily believe, have pitched me into Plymouth Sound. Finding, however, that if I went over the side, he must follow, he dropped me on my feet, at the same time favouring me with a couple of tremendous cuffs in the ear, that set my brains spinning like a top. But for that, I could never have had the inconceivable audacity to up fist, and deal a post-captain a blow on the chest, which knocked him clean off his pins, and laid him sprawling upon the quarter-deck.' 'Are you serious in saying that you knocked down the captain?' 'As sure as you sit there, I did-impossible, preternatural as it sounds. No great thing, either, to do in itself; one of the captain's legs being crippled with the gout, and the other a wooden one. Imagine, if you can, Master Linwood, the wild consternation, the hurricane-uproar that arose as it passed through the ship that that devil's cub, Kirke Webbe, had floored Old Blueblazes! Officers and men seemed to think the world had come to an end; and death, or worse punishment, was unanimously awarded to the sacrilegious culprit. 'Blueblazes himself, who at bottom was as placable and generous as he was bibulous and brave, was the least excited and angered of them all; and, though I was no favourite of the rough old salt, it was his cockswain that, in the dead of night, released me from confinement, led me past the sentry-who had suddenly become deaf as well as blind, the cramp in my legs causing me to stumble heavily when within a yard of him-lowered me from a port-hole into a shore-punt alongside, and cast off the painter with a curse-his own, and a purse-the captain's-containing ten guineas, which he flung after me. 'You now know, Mr Linwood,' resumed Captain Webbe, after another gulp of the fiery liquid, which had no more visible effect upon him than water upon a duck's back-you now know how it happened that the king's service and I parted company. I was then close upon twenty-one years of age: the day after attaining my legal majority, I obtained possession of the before-mentioned thousand pounds odd; and the next four years were passed in acquiring a knowledge of the ways of mankind, as displayed in London; an interesting study, which the limitation, rigidly adhered to, of my expenditure to two hundred pounds a year, greatly hampered, as you may suppose. 'Nevertheless, I may say without vanity that I had made progress by the autumn of 1792. Moreover, my thousand pounds odd having by that time diminished to two hundred, I bethought me that it would be prudent to delay no longer an endeavour to turn that knowledge to practical account; and it was more for the sake of being able to ask myself quietly a few important questions, than any love of sport, that I accepted leave to beat up the Lord Petre's Essex covers. There fate willed it that William Linwood and I should meet for the first time; be mutually pleased with each other, and swear eternal friendship; or rather, we should have done so, but for an untoward accident which befell us both.' 'What accident?' 'Falling in love with the same damsel-the young and charming Emily Waller, sole daughter and heiress presumptive of Anthony Waller, Esq., of Cavendish Square, London, and then upon a visit at Hare Park, not far out of Romford.-Touch the bell, if you please; the fire is getting low.' he 'Pray go on; you tantalise one terribly.' 'William Linwood and I fell into bondage instanter irredeemably-whilst I was a much less willing and tractable captive. In fact, between you and me, I doubt that I was really a captive at all. My fancy or imagination was no doubt considerably dazzled by the young lady's personal charms and graces; but much more, I am pretty confident, by the reflected lustre of her reputedly large fortune.' 'I can easily believe that, Mr Kirke Webbe.' 'Which shews, Mr William Linwood, junior, that you can appreciate character. Well, having then a very good opinion-which has really improved upon better acquaintance-of my worthy self, I saw no reason why I should not compete with Mr Linwood for the favour of the amiable heiress presumptive; and thus it came to pass, as before intimated, that the flame of friendship received a damper. 'Very absurd that, you will say, presently continued Captain Webbe, when I inform you that the lady did not condescend to honour either of us with the slightest notice, except by carefully avoiding the paths and places we usually frequented! I, for my part, bore the pangs of despised love with a noble equanimity; but poor Linwood, having fallen into a state of semidistraction, finally hit upon the remarkable expedient of endeavouring to obtain access to Miss Waller's presence, by striking up an innocent flirtation with her demoiselle de compagnie, Mademoiselle de Féron.' Louise Féron, the Frenchwoman we saw to-day!' 'Louise Féron, the Frenchwoman whom your grandame so viciously assaulted a few hours since; but at the time I am speaking of, a handsome young person, calling herself Mademoiselle de Féron, and pretendedly the sole remaining scion of a recently extinguished and noble French house. She had been engaged to perfect Miss Waller in the French language, and her youthful mistress was much attached to her. Let me see-where was I?' 'Speaking of my father's flirtation with De Féron— or Féron.' 'Right! To continue, then. How the unfortunate misapprehension on the demoiselle's part arose, I cannot say her bad English and Linwood's worse French had no doubt much to do with it—but it is certain that she fully believed the young Englishman to be madly in love with her, and dying to make her his lawful wife.' 'Could that be her serious conviction?' 'Her serious conviction! I should think it was, indeed; and a trifle over. I had abundant proof of that. Finding I had quite recovered from love-fever a very mild attack, as I have said-Linwood gave me a letter one fine day for Miss Waller, which I undertook to place for delivery in Mademoiselle de Féron's hands. I met that volcanic individual in Hare Park, and fulfilled my commission. Fire leaped from her dark eyes at sight of the direction in Linwood's hand, and you should have seen the rage and hate that blazed in them as, having instantly torn open the letter, she devoured its contents. That done, she tore it to shreds, flinging the same at innocent me, and accompanying that demonstration by a shower of epithets and imprecations, which was quite decisive of, her birth and status in French society. 'The next day but one, Miss Waller left Hare Park for London with her demoiselle de compagnie; and I lost sight of Mademoiselle de Féron for nearly three years, during which, Linwood, having managed to obtain a proper introduction to the family in Cavendish Square, had wooed, won, and married Emily Waller; and you, Master William, were passing with promise through the first of man's seven ages. Have you yet reached the third, may I ask?' added Captain Webbe with keen abruptness. 'The third! What the deuce do you mean?' "That of the lover, to be sure With a woful ballad, Made to his mistress's eyebrow.' 'No; my time is not yet come.' her disengaged right hand. The child's suspended breath would, I can scarcely doubt, have been for ever stilled but for the exclamation which betrayed my presence. Féron turned sharply round, confronted me with a face of flame; rallied, assumed as well as she could, an air of indifference, and left the apartment.' 'You of course informed Mr and Mrs Linwood of what you had seen?' In the first place, 'I did not; for several reasons. I might have misjudged the woman's intention; and in the next, I felt quite sure she would not try it on a second time after a hint I quietly gave her, that the child's death, under any circumstances, should be followed by an investigation that would probably only terminate at the Old Bailey.' 'You acted, Mr Webbe, with unpardonable weakness, if not with '- I checked with difficulty the words upon my tongue, and substituted for themYes, with unpardonable weakness, as the catastrophe of your narrative, plainly foreshadowed by what I have already heard, too clearly proved.' "That which you have already heard does not foreshadow the catastrophe of my narrative,' retorted Webbe. Clearly as you may be able to see through a millstone, it is hardly possible you can discern a catastrophe which has not yet occurred.' 'You speak riddles; but go on.' 'Could I have foreseen the lamentable consequences of interrupting Mademoiselle Féron's manipulation of the child's mouth and nostrils,' continued Webbe with acrid humour, 'I should have been strongly tempted to have turned noiselessly away, and left her to the quiet accomplishment of her purpose.' Upon my word, that is cool, Captain Webbe!' 'It would have been a blessing to all parties had I done so,' said the privateer captain. To you, who, dying in your innocence, would be at this moment an angel in heaven-a contingency which must now be booked as extremely doubtful at the best: to your father, who-the Féron's instinct of vengeance having 'I am rejoiced to hear that,' exclaimed Webbe; 'it been satiated-would not have had the best years of almost insures the success of our bold venture.' "The plague it does! As how, pray?' 'Anon-anon, my dear fellow. I was saying,' continued Webbe, 'that three years elapsed before I again sighted Linwood after we left Essex. The same fate that had befallen him, had overtaken me. I also was a husband and a father. Mademoiselle Féron-she had modestly dropped the 'de'-was still languishing in single blessedness-at least she said so then, and I believe she spoke the truth-and had lately re-entered your mamma's service as nurse, or nursery-governess, to your infant highness. What her motive could be for accepting a menial situation in your father's family, puzzled me. Poverty might be one compelling motive; but I wronged her grossly if some vague but abiding purpose of working mischief to the man by whom-to the woman for whom she had been, in her own belief, scornfully slighted and wronged-was not another and more powerful one. 'A circumstance that occurred during my visit to South Audley Street, where your father then resided, confirmed that impression or belief; albeit it is, I admit, barely possible that I misinterpreted that incident or circumstance. "You were suffering from hooping-cough, and a paroxysm of that distressing malady had left you exhausted, apparently dead, when I softly entered the drawing-room where Louise Féron was standing with her back towards me, and holding you in her arms. She did not hear my footfall, and her face and person, reflected in a lofty pier-glass, fronted me. I stopped suddenly short, shocked, though never a man of supersensitiveness, by the fiendish expression of the woman's countenance, immediately explained by her sudden, deadly grasp of the infant's mouth and nostrils with his life rendered miserable by an accusation which to this hour he has found it impossible to repel. But we are all poor short-sighted mortals; and, unconscious of the mischief I was doing, I, as before stated, saved your life.' For which piece of mischief, many thanks, Captain Webbe. I drink your health.' 'I, yours; hoping as I do so, that we may yet succeed in discovering a remedy for that unfortunate mistake of mine. But to make sail again. Anthony Waller, Esq., of Cavendish Square, finding himself lonely after his daughter's marriage-which he had never very cordially approved of, you must knowespoused a lovely young widow, and the mother of one only child, Lucy Hamblin, then in her third year, and really quite a miniature angel. Mr Waller not only doted upon his handsome young wife-that, like reading and writing, comes by nature-but upon his little step-daughter; so that your nose, which, without flattery, it is difficult to believe can be the natural development of the unpromising little pug Mademoiselle Féron took such liberties with, was quite put out of joint. 'This vexed your mother, and, let the truth be told, mightily exasperated your father. There had been no pre-nuptial settlement; and it was feared that the lion's share of Mr Waller's wealth would be diverted to his new wife and "her intrusive brat "-a frequent colloquial amenity of my friend Linwood, duly reported in the proper quarter by the Féron, who, having managed to transfer her services to the Wallers, was now little Lucy's nursery-governess. 'Thus stood matters in Mr and Mrs Waller's seventh honey-moon-a mellifluous phase of the earth's satellite, which the observation that with extensive view surveys mankind from China to Peru, will have noticed to be of indefinite duration when the poor and pretty bride happens to be about half the age of the rich and senile bridegroom.' 'Which was not the case in that particular instance, I beg to say.' Very nearly the case, I should say; but we will not discuss that fact in natural history just now. The Wallers, I say, were residing, towards the close of their seventh honey-moon, at Clarence Lodge, near Gravesend. At that time, I was in personal communication with Mr Waller, with the hope of inducing him to make one of a company for organising privateering enterprise upon a large scale. I did not succeed; but before I received a final "No," Linwood came down, unaccompanied by either his wife or son. That, however, though made a great deal of subsequently, was easily explained: your mother, as doubtless you are aware, having suffered much from ill-health during the first six or seven years of married life. I think she gave birth to four children, certainly three, who all died under a month old-a fatality which was the main reason that you remained in Wales with grandmamma. Be that, however, as it may, Linwood came alone, uninvited, and his reception was glum as winter. Nevertheless, he seemed to have made up his mind for a lengthened stay; and, which certainly looked odd, seemed anxious to conciliate the favour of little Lucy Hamblin. Your mother explained to me the other day that he did so by her advice, she thinking that a better feeling might be thereby brought about between the families. 'The eighteenth of August-a date branded upon the memory of all of us-found William Linwood still a guest, and an unwelcome one, at Clarence Lodge. The day had been sultry, thunderous, and Mr Waller and I, towards evening-fall, after a cool walk in the garden, were seated in the arbour, and enjoying some prime cigars. 'Mrs Waller had been uneasy for some time on account of the prolonged absence of Louise Féron, who had taken the child out for a walk early in the afternoon; and when the day began to decline visibly, and no Féron, no Lucy appeared, Mr Waller grew fidgety also. He had asked very often for Linwood, and was for the twentieth time remarking upon his non-appearance at the dinner-table, when we saw that gentleman enter the garden by the back-gate. 'His hair, we could not but remark, was wet and disordered, his face pale, his aspect generally flurried, ill at ease. "Hollo, Linwood!" I exclaimed, as he was passing the arbour; "what is the matter? Have you seen a ghost?" "Eh!-eh!-what?" he stammered; "a ghoststuff! Has-has," he added-"has Louise Féron returned?" "No," said Mr Waller; "and- By Heaven! here she comes by the same way that you entered, Mr Linwood, and without the child!" "Without the child!" echoed the woman, sweeping up. "Why, Mr Linwood has brought home the child, has he not?" "No-no!" exclaimed Linwood, in great agitation. "She left me on the sands, and rejoined you, did she not?" "Rejoined me!" screamed Féron. "Why, I saw you with my own eyes take her into a boat, and sail out upon the river." "No-no-no!" vehemently rejoined your father. "I meant to do so, but Lucy gave me the slip." "Liar-assassin!" shouted the woman. "I saw the child with you-alone with you in the boat: you have drowned-murdered her! A la garde!" shrieked the seemingly frantic creature, as she rushed upon and grappled poor Linwood, who, in his bewilderment, had really made a movement as if about to run for it— "seize--bind the assassin! Help-help!" 'As for me,' resumed Captain Webbe, after a consolatory drink-'as for me, I was knocked overflabbergasted; and it was hours before I could get my ideas into any kind of order or ship-shape. And so confused now is my recollection of the different versions given by Linwood and Féron; so mixed up are they in my mind with the outrageous inventions and distortions of the newspapers, that, if my life depended upon it, I could give you no intelligible digest of the conflicting statements. Enough to say, that on the morrow, no doubt remained that Lucy Hamblin had been drowned-her hat was cast ashore with a mass of sea-weed-and public opinion gradually settled down into a conviction that your father, for obvious purposes, had compassed the death of the child-a conviction which his flight, in violation of his pledged word, seemed to affirm beyond controversy. He was pursued and apprehended, as you are perhaps aware, at Llanberris farm. Take a pull at the brandy and water, Master Linwood' 'Go on, will you? Do you think I am made of stone?' "There is little to add, except that Féron absconded, leaving a note to the effect that she could not, would not, upon reflection, appear as a witness against the husband of the best friend she had ever known. Your father was ultimately liberated without trial; and after striving for several years to bear up against almost universal obloquy, took ship for America, and was captured in the Channel by a French privateer. So ends the story.' 'And with it the hope you have so wantonly kindled, merely, it should seem, to trample it out! What purpose can be answered by the fast-and-loose game, which, as far as words count, you seem to be playing?' 'A great purpose will be answered by the game I propose to play, if you have the pluck and skill to perform your part in it. I tell you again that the catastrophe which will either acquit or finally condemn your father has not yet come to pass. The last decisive act of the drama has yet to be played; and the curtain rose upon that last decisive act, after an interval of nearly fifteen years, about three months since only. Scene the first: Rue Dupetit Thouars, St Malo, Brittany. Enter from opposite sides, a lady and gentleman, who, upon seeing each other, exclaim at the same instant: "Mademoiselle Féron!" "Le Capitaine Webbe!"' 'Kirke Webbe, captain of the Scout privateer, met walking openly in the streets of St Malo! Come, that is a bold flight, even for a modern dramatist!' 'It is a positive fact that I was so met! And as to walking openly in the streets of St Malo, there is no wonderful daring in that: I was playing at rouge et noir, in the Palais Royal, Paris, last Sunday three weeks. Just, however, to bring back colour to those white cheeks, and give you an appetite for the dinner I have ordered, and which ought to have been served by this time, I will give you a hint of some one else I met with in St Malo-to wit, a charming damsel of some seventeen years of age, whom I propose that you shall marry.' 'Let us have no untimely jesting, if you please.' 'A charming damsel, whom it is part of my plan, and may be essential to its success, that you should marry: a most amiable damsel, who calls herself Clémence Bonneville; but whose true name, if I am not the dullest blockhead that ever breathed, isGuess?' "Tut! How should I be able to guess?' 'Whose true name is, I say, not Clémence Bonneville, or De Bonneville, but-Lucy Hamblin—the child supposed to have perished fourteen years ago in the Thames!' 'All-merciful Powers! Can this be true?' rate of some four or five miles over the ocean, and the 'If it prove not so, write me down an ass, in capital cable will be gently drawn out from behind, and letters. Ha! dinner at last!' THE OCEAN TELEGRAPH-CABLE ON tenderly laid down in the profound recesses of the deep, as if it were still under the careful management of its black-fingered attendants, the tar-begrimed men who have so patiently and assiduously arranged the spires of its growing coil in the yard during its manufacture. The cable will come up from the hold, as it is drawn out of the ship, round a central block designed to keep its spires from fouling, or interfering with each other as it runs along. It will then be turned over four grooved sheaves, placed one in front of one another, and geared together; and will finally pass three or four feet above the poop-deck, and make its last plunge from a fifth sheave firmly planted by arms over the stern. One of the mid-deck sheaves will also have a friction-drum geared with it, and revolving with about three times its own velocity; the axle of this drum will be griped, by two blocks of hard wood being drawn together whenever a screw is turned. As the cable runs out, an electrical current will be passed through it from end to end, and will give a signal every second, to intimate that the electrical continuity of the cable remains perfect. At the side of the ship there will be a log, composed of a spiral vane turned round by the resistance of the water as it is dragged through the liquid; this will register electrically the speed of the vessel's progress by making and breaking a voltaic circuit at each turn. The amount of strain actuating the cable at any instant will also be electrically indicated by wheel-work geared with the paying-out sheaves, when the speed of this wheel-work is compared with the speed of the vessel's progress through the water. The wary breaksman will lend a constant eye and ear to the indications of these tell-tale instruments, and while all is proportioned correctly, will leave well alone; but whenever one element is shewn to be acquiring undue preponderance, his screw will be called into immediate requisition, and a compensatory adjustment of machinery made. The electrical logs, and indeed nearly the whole of the engineering arrangements, are due to the ingenuity and skill of Mr Charles T. Bright, a gentleman who was associated to a considerable extent with Mr Wildman Whitehouse in his early electrical experiments and investigations, and who will now be the tricksy presiding spirit of the operations on board the Niagara; while Mr Whitehouse sits in the centre of his web on board the Agamemnon, in a snug cabin, feeling there the vibrations of his electrical web, and pondering fiery mysteries and subtile things. The weight and density of the Atlantic cable are such, that when it is payed out over the stern of the depositing vessel, it will sink in the salt water, and find its position of final rest at the bottom of the sea. Its weight, however, is not sufficiently great to carry it down with any inconvenient force. The several ingredients of the structure, indeed, have been so selected and adjusted as just to secure the requisite alacrity in sinking, and avoid any dangerous impetuosity in the act. The cable will indeed 'float to the bottom,' rather than sink. It will be in a measure buoyed up as it falls, first by the static pressure of the water, and secondly by the influence of friction, exerted by the watery particles against the uneven side of the twisted strands of the rope. Some alarm has been entertained lest there should be strain enough to injure the mole- Considerable care has been given to the selection cular texture of the cable, if five or six miles of its of the most auspicious season of the year for the sublength hang down in the mid-Atlantic, in consequence of mergence of this wonderful cable. By examining the the great weight of this extent. The alarm, however, is records of more than 260,000 observations, Lieutenant entirely based upon a misconception of the conditions Maury has determined that between the 20th of July in which the rope will be placed during its deposition. and the 10th of August there is less to fear from either It will not hang upon the stern of the ship on this storm, fog, or drifting iceberg, in the mid-Atlantic, than occasion; it will be drawn out from it, as the silky at any other season of the year. The vessels will filament is drawn out from the spinneret of the silk- accordingly be despatched upon their mission as near worm. Considerable force is used in winding the to this period as will be found practicable. But suppose frail, almost invisibly fine thread of the silk-worm that, in spite of this precaution, some erratic hurricane from the cocoon in which the caterpillar has deposited-either uninstructed concerning, or indifferent to, the it, when the reels are set whirling to take off the golden cord; yet the fine and frail thread does not break: the force of the revolving reel goes to draw off the silk from the cocoon, instead of to stretch its material. So will it be with the ocean-cable as it seeks its deep-sea repose; the force of its own weight and of the hold which the sea-bottom will acquire upon its strands, will go to draw its protracted length out from the hold of the advancing ship, over the revolving sheaves, and not to pull upon the cohesive grasp of its particles. The vessel will move at a requirements of marine engineering-should encounter the cable-laden ships, and should persevere in its selfwilled and vexatious interference with the arrange ments of the waves, what does the reader think will be done with the precious rope? It will be simply slipped,' as the tempest-caught sailor slips his cable when he is riding in some dangerous and threatening roadstead. Upon the deck of the paying-out ships there are two large auxiliary drums, containing each two miles and a half of a strong supernumerary iron cable, sufficiently stout to bear with impunity a direct |