to us, and enjoyed much of my father's
confidence. "So, they tell me you have heard from
that runaway of yours, Potts, is it true? What
face does he put upon his disgraceful conduct?
What became of the livery-stable-keeper's horse?
Did he sell him, or ride him to death? A bad
business if he should ever come back again,
which, of course, he's too wise for. And where
is he now, and what is he at?"

"You may read his letter, Mr. Lynch,"
replies my father; "he is one who can speak for
himself." And Lynch reads and sniggers, and
reads again. I see him as plainly as if he were
but a yard from me. "I never heard of this
ducal capital before," he begins, "but I suppose
it's like the rest of them—little obscure dens of
pretentious poverty, plenty of ceremony, and
very little to eat. How did he find it out?
What brought him there?"

"You have his letter before you, sir," says
my parent, proudly. "Algernon Sydney is, I
imagine, quite competent to explain what relates
to his own affairs."

"Oh, perfectly, perfectly; only that I can't
really make out how he first came to this place,
nor what it is that he does there now that he's
in it."

My father hastily snatches the letter from his
hands, and runs his eye rapidly along to catch
the passage which shall confute the objector
and cover him with shame and confusion. He
cannot find it at once. "It is this. No, it is on
this side. Very strange, very singular indeed;
but as Algernon must have told me——" Alas!
no, father, he has not told you, and for the simple
reason that he does not know it himself. For
though I mentioned with becoming pride the
prominent stations Irishmen now hold in most
of the great states of Europe, and pointed to
O'Donnell in Spain, Mac Mahon in France, and
the Field-Marshal Nugent in Austria, I utterly
forgot to designate the high post occupied by
Potts in the Duchy of Hesse Kalbbratenstadt.
To determine what this should be was now of
imminent importance, and I gave myself up to
the solution with a degree of intentness and an
amount of concentration that set me off sound
asleep.

Yes, benevolent reader, I will confess it,
questions of a complicated character have
always affected me, as the inside of a letter
seems to have struck Tony Lumpkin—" all
buzz." I start with the most loyal desire to be
acute and penetrating; I set myself to my task
with as honest a disposition to do my best as
ever man did; I say, "Now, Potts, no self-
indulgence, no skulking; here is a knotty
problem, here is a case for your best faculties in
their sharpest exercise;" and if any one come in
upon me about ten minutes after this resolve,
he will see a man who could beat Sancho Panza
in sleeping!

Of course this tendency has often cost me
dearly; I have missed appointments, forgotten
assignations, lost friends through it. My
character, too, has suffered, many deeming me
insupportably indolent, a sluggard quite unfit for
any active employment. Others, more mercifully
hinting at some "cerebral cause," have done me
equal damage; but there happily is an obverse on
the medal, and to this somnolency do I ascribe
much of the gentleness and all the romance of
my nature. It is your sleepy man is ever
benevolent, he loves ease and quiet for others as for
himself. What he cultivates is the tranquil
mood that leads to slumber, and the calm that
sustains it. The very operations of the mind in
sleep are broken, incoherent, undelineated—just
like the waking occupations of an idle man; they
are thoughts that cost so little to manufacture
that he can afford to be lavish of them. And now
—Good night!

          SANITARY SCIENCE.

MANY of the Levitical laws are sanitary
laws. In the fourteenth chapter of Leviticus,
and beginning at the thirty-third verse,
we have the signs of leprosy and plague in
houses described, and means of removing or
destroying such leprosy and plague set forth. The
description is not more curious than it is true
of houses in the present day. There are at
this time in London, and in great Britain generally,
as also over the whole of the known
world, sites and houses with subsoils so tainted,
and the walls of the houses so leprous, plague-
stricken, and foul, that entire removal of such
houses, and of the material, is the only safe
remedy. Some of our hospital surgeons could
have defined streets, and even houses, from which
patients, suffering under certain forms of
malignant diseases, were regularly brought, and
had been brought, for years. With a destruction
of such houses there has been a cessation
of that form of virulence in the particular class
of disease. "And he shall break down the
house, the stones of it, and the timber thereof,
and all the mortar of the house; and he shall
carry them forth out of the city, into an unclean
place."

Examine the cities in the East, and we shall
find pre-eminent ignorance of Sanitary law, and
consequent filth, squalor, and human misery,
disease and premature death. The entire
subsoil is a vast mass of putrid and putrefying
human and animal refuse and ordure. Recently,
in Calcutta, the workmen employed to excavate
the trenches for laying gas-pipes died from the
effects of the noxious gases liberated by breaking
through the upper oxydised crust of foul deposit,
the accumulation of years. Sunshine, rain, and
wind are most powerful disinfectors; if it were
not so, the sites of cities and houses would long
since have become more deadly than the
emanations from the upas-tree of fable.

Owners of estates and builders of houses are
alike ignorant of sanitary laws, even now in this
our day, or alike careless as to consequences.
Architects design and execute cloud-capp'd
towers, solemn temples, and gorgeous palaces,
but only that these buildings, with richly-carved
outsides, may become vast poison generators,
health destroyers, and life shorteners. In this