"or he wouldn't have given it to the boy!
Let's look at it."

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to
be a good one. "But what's this?" said Mrs.
Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching
up the paper. "Two One-Pound notes?"

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-
pound notes that seemed to have been on terms
of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle
markets in the county. Joe caught up his hat
again, and ran with them to the Jolly Bargemen
to restore them to their owner. While he was
gone, I sat down on my usual stool and looked
vacantly at my sister: feeling pretty sure that
the man would not be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the
man was gone, but that he, Joe, had left word
at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the
notes. Then my sister sealed them up in a
piece of paper, and put them under some dried
rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top
of a press in the state parlour. There, they
remained, a nightmare to me, many and many a
night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed,
through thinking of the strange man taking aim
at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily
coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret
terms of conspiracy with convicts—a feature in
my low career that I had previously forgotten.
I was haunted by the file too. A dread
possessed me that when I least expected it, the file
would reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by
thinking of Miss Havisham's, next Wednesday;
and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out
of a door without seeing who held it, and I
screamed myself awake.

WONDERS OF THE SEA.

"THEY that go down to the sea in ships and
occupy their business in great waters," says the
Psalmist, "these men see the works of the Lord
and his wonders in the deep."

Three-fifths of the earth are covered deeply
with water, the depths varying from a few
fathoms to six or seven miles, or even more.
According to some recent calculations made by
observing the rate of motion of the tidewave (which
varies with the depth), the average is about fifteen
thousand feet in the Atlantic, and twenty thousand
feet in the Pacific. This vast body of water is
almost everywhere, and in all circumstances,
similar in the nature of its contents. It
possesses, also, a less variable temperature than the
air or earth; for the natural heat of the sea rarely
or never exceeds 87º Fahrenheit in the hottest
part of the tropics, and it is not often below the
freezing point even in very high latitudes. Its
colour, ascertained in some marine caves, where
all the light that enters has passed through
water and is reflected from a white bottom, is of
the purest azure blue, proving that it transmits
light, thus coloured, absorbing an excess of the
other tints. When clear and exposed to strong
light, it is transparent to a marvellous extent.
At twenty-five fathoms (one hundred and fifty
feet) corals can frequently be seen at the bottom
very distinctly, and the form of objects of
various kinds has been recognised at more than
double that depth in the West Indian seas.
Submarine landscapes are thus not unknown,
and have been described with glowing
enthusiasm by various travellers.

When the great ocean is disturbed it forms
surface waves, which are sometimes of great
magnitude. In a gale, such waves have been more
than once measured, and it is found that their
extreme height from the top to the deepest
depression of large storm waves, has been nearly
fifty feet; their length being from four to six
hundred yards, and their rate of motion through
the water about half a mile a minute. Such
waves, breaking over an obstacle of any kind,
or mingling strangely with the clouded
atmosphere raging above, are the wildest, grandest,
and most terrible phenomena of nature. When
they approach land, they break up into much
smaller bodies of water, but these are often
lifted by shoals and obstructed by rocks till they
are thrown up in masses of many tons to a
height of more than a hundred feet. The tidal
wave is another phenomenon of water motion of
a somewhat difterent kind, producing an alternate
rise and fall of the water over all parts of
the ocean every twelve hours.

In addition to the true waves there are also
many definite streams or currents of water
conveying large portions of the sea from one latitude
to another, modifying the temperature of the
adjacent land, and producing a mixture of the
waters at the surface or at some depth which
cannot but be extremely conducive to the general
benefit ot all living beings. Storm tides, or
those waves which occasionally rush without
any pause along narrow and confined seas or up
funnel-shaped inlets, have, occasionally proved
disastrous to a fearful extent. Thus it is
recorded that upwards of one hundred thousand
persons perished in the year 1232, and again in
1242, in this way, numerous complete villages
and towns being washed away by a wave
advancing from the North Sea over the low lands
of Holland. Between Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick the ordinary spring tide often rises
to a height of a hundred feet, sweeping away
the cattle feeding on the shore.

Fearful storms and hurricanes, recently called
cyclones, torment the waters of the ocean, lashing
them into foam, and tearing over the
surface in wild spiral curves which nothing can
resist. The events of the last eighteen months
have, unfortunately, rendered these storms but
too familiar on all our shores; but they have
also induced observations and investigations as
to their proximate causes and prognostications,
which bid fair to enable us some day to evade
their worst consequences.

Vast blocks of ice, deeply buried in the water,
float for thousands of miles through the ocean,
after being detached, loaded with mud and
stones, from Arctic and Antarctic land. Rocks
from Greenland are thus brought into the middle
of the Atlantic, and these become mixed with