the annals of positive science. In the experiments
which M. Pouchet continually repeated
during three months at the Museum of Natural
History at Rouen, he never found any animalcule
which could bear 100°, or the boiling-point.
The rotifers perished at from 85° to 90°; the
tardigrades at from 80° to 85°; and the anguillules
at about 75°.

SHADOWS ON THE WALL.

BESIDE the hearth there is an hour of dreaming,
A calm and pensive solitude of soul,
When life and death have each another seeming,
And thoughts are with us owning no control.
These are the spirits, Memory's revealing,
  In deep solemnity they rise and fall,
Shrouding the living present, and concealing
  The world around us— Shadows on the Wall.

Hopes, like the leaves and blossoms, rudely shaken
By cruel winds of winter, from the tree
Of our existence; phantoms that awaken
  Wild passing gleams of Joy's young ecstasy;
And Love, once kind and tenderly outpouring
  Her wine into our souls, we may recal,
And find them dear and ever heavenward soaring,
Though only now as Shadows on the Wall.

Old clasping hands, old friendships and affections
  Once bodied forms beside us on the earth,
Come back to haunt us, ghostly recollections
  With mystic converse by the silent hearth.
Yet these are kindly spirits, and retiring
  Draw their long shadows slowly from the wall,
And visit us in peace and gentleness, inspiring
A hope that brings the sunshine after all.

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.

MY day's no-business beckoning me to the
East end of London, I had turned my face to that
point of the metropolitan compass on leaving
Covent Garden, and had got past the India
House, thinking in my idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib
and Charles Lamb, and had got past my
little wooden midshipman, after affectionately
patting him on one leg of his knee-shorts for
old acquaintance' sake, and had got past Aldgate
Pump, and had got past the Saracen's Head
(with an ignominious rash of posting-bills disfiguring
his swarthy countenance), and had
strolled up the empty yard of his ancient neighbour
the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed
this life I don't know when, and whose
coaches are all gone I don't know where, and I
had come out again into the age of railways, and I
had got past Whitechapel Church, and was—
rather inappropriately for an Uncommercial
Traveller— in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly
wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare,
and greatly enjoying the huge piles of
building belonging to the sugar refiners, the
little masts and vanes in small back gardens in
back streets, the neighbouring canals and docks,
the India-vans lumbering along their stone tramway,
and the pawnbrokers' shops where hard-up
Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants,
that I should have bought a few cheap
if I had the least notion how to use them,
I at last began to file off to the right, towards
Wapping.

Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping
Old Stairs, or that I was going to look at the
locality, because I believe (for I don't) in the
constancy of the young woman who told her
sea-going lover, to such a beautiful old tune,
that she had ever continued the same, since she
gave him the 'baccer-box marked with his name;
I am afraid he usually got the worst of those
transactions, and was frightfully taken in. No,
I was going to Wapping, because an Eastern
police magistrate had said, through the morning
papers, that there was no classification at the
Wapping workhouse for women, and that it was
a disgrace and a shame and divers other hard
names, and because I wished to see how the
fact really stood. For, that Eastern police
magistrates are not always the wisest men of
the East, may be inferred from their course
of procedure respecting the fancy-dressing
and pantomime-posturing at St. George's in
that quarter: which is usually, to discuss the
matter at issue, in a state of mind betokening
the weakest perplexity, with all parties concerned
and unconcerned, and, for a final expedient, to
consult the complainant as to what he thinks
ought to be done with the defendant, and take
the defendant's opinion as to what he would recommend
to be done with himself.

Long before I reached Wapping I gave myself
up as having lost my way, and, abandoning
myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish frame
of mind, relied on predestination to bring me
somehow or other to the place I wanted if I
were ever to get there. When I had ceased for
an hour or so to take any trouble about the
matter, I found myself on a swing-bridge, looking down
at some dark locks in some dirty
water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely
in the likeness of a young man, with a
puffed sallow face, and a figure all dirty and
shiny and slimy, who may have been the youngest
son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the
drowned man about whom there was a placard
on the granite post like a large thimble, that
stood between us.

I asked this apparition what it called the
place? Unto which, it replied, with a ghastly
grin and with a sound like gurgling water in its
throat:

"Mister Baker's trap."

As it is a point of great sensitiveness with me
on such occasions to be equal to the intellectual
pressure of the conversation, I deeply considered
the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the
apparition— then engaged in hugging and sucking
a horizontal iron bar at the top of the locks.
Inspiration suggested to me that Mr. Baker
was the acting Coroner of that neighbourhood.

"A common place for suicide," said I, looking
down at the locks.

"Sue?" returned the ghost, with a stare.
"Yes! And Poll. Likeways Emly. And Nancy.
And Jane;" he sucked the iron between each
name; " and all the bileing. Ketches off their
bonnets or shorls, takes a run, and headers