avenue of constables into the open street, where
he can do no harm.

Valuable, however, as the lightning conductor
has proved to ships, it cannot guard against
exceptional electric phenomena. No human
science can, for instance, defend against meteorolites.
St. Elmo lights will still burn harmless
as glowworms on the masts, and the store-room
mail's china will still suffer from the aerial
broadsides of thunder shocks. But to all
intents and purposes vessels armed with
conductors are now safe. We no longer hear of
ships suffering as the Chichester revenue-cutter
suffered, that was struck on the 7th of
February, 1840, in Kilkerran Bay. The
unfortunate little craft was all but destroyed. Her
topmast was shivered into laths, five feet of her
mainmast were split out, and the rest was
charred, her head was destroyed, her
bulkheads and berths were smashed, her bulwarks
were blown out, all her china and glass was
destroyed, part of her deck was raised off her
beams, her hold was filled with smoke, and her
compasses were destroyed.

MISUNDERSTANDING.

SOME people are born to be misunderstood.
They are like shot-silk—no one can define their
exact shade and colour: or like those Athenian
images to which Alcibiades compared Socrates—
satyrs outside, but a god within. It may be the
other way sometimes, when a porcelain Apollo
closes over a coarse clay demon: which is
being misunderstood in the sense of taking
fustian for velvet, and accepting my wife's
undoubted paste for brilliants of the finest water.
A sense of which no one complains, or points
out to his neighbours the manifest injustice done
to truth thereby.

How much pain and trouble come to us in life
from that simple fact of being misunderstood!
Old friends divided, homes made uncomfortable,
marriages broken off, and many a slice off the
pudding of prosperity forfeited, merely for the
sake of not being able to speak one's mother
tongue in such fluency and precision as shall
ensure our being accurately comprehended—
merely for the sake of living in a state of
lingual apehood, too cunning or too stupid to
tell out frankly what we want, and what we
would be at! Look at that fool of a brother
of mine: if ever a man loved, as women care to
be loved, it was he: and, unless I dream, Mary
loved him, reasonably well. There was
absolutely nothing in heaven or earth that should
have stood between them. They were of
suitable age, and my brother's prospects were
quite up to the mark of Mary's expectations;
our father would have consented, and hers
would have said, "Blesh ye, my children,"
in a suffusion of tenderness and gin-and-
water, proper to the occasion. But my brother
was one of those provoking beings who believe
in mares'-nests and the golden qualities of silence
at the same time—dangerous beliefs to go
together and—when he met Mary walking arm-in-
arm in the moonlight with the young cornet of
dragoons, quartered at the market-town, half a
dozen miles off, he jumped at once to the
conclusion that they were engaged—"Oh dear yes!
and that he should only expose himself to a humiliating
defeat if he entered the lists with such a
rival." They were talking low and in whispers
together, he said, but not so low that he did not
hear "dear, good Mary!" in a fervent voice flung
out like a caress on the air, as he passed; and
though moonlight is not sunshine, yet it was
vivid enough for him to see the young cornet
take her hand in both of his, and press it ardently
to his lips. Of course the thing was settled
in that ridiculous head of his, and no preaching
of mine or any other person's could change
him. He should ask for no explanation, and volunteer
none. Mary was quite free to bestow herself
where she liked: he did think, indeed, that she
had preferred him, but he had been mistaken,
that was all; and when he imagined that she
had encouraged him, he had misunderstood her
intentions. He did not accuse her of anything
wrong; she was free, as he had said, and why
not the cornet as well as any one else? He
might have been unwise not to have declared
himself in time; but after all, a love that grows
up like Jonah's gourd in a night, and less than a
night—that grows up only between the question
and answer, the—"Will you," and "Ask papa,"
—was not of much value in his eyes. If she had
loved him, she would not have wanted his mere
words to have confirmed her heart; she would
have waited patiently for the hour of ripe
explanation, and have held herself true to their implied
promises. So, acting on this train of thought
and feeling, my brother kept himself aloof from
poor Mary; at first with the air of a martyr, then
gradually darkening to the air of an assassin; till
the misunderstanding came to be a quarrel, and
the quarrel came to be a feud, and Mary was
sent off to her aunt's in London, to recover the
health and good temper which had unaccountably
deserted her for the last few months. She
recovered both before the year was out; when
she married the curate of the district church
where her aunt had sittings. The young cornet,
for his part, ran off with her sister: the father
not coming to the point of suffusion and gin-and-
water over his "long sword, saddle, bridle;"
and it was when he was pleading his cause with
Mary, and canvassing for her influence in his
behalf, that my brother met them sauntering up
the green lane together, with her hand in his,
and "Dear, good Mary" fervently whispered as
he passed. Five minutes of good honest English
talk would have enlightened his mind, and
prevented his very natural mistake from bearing
fruit: but my brother preferred dignified silence,
and lost his happiness, his home, and his wife,
because the Moors once said "Speech is silver,
but Silence is golden," and he chose to add
"Amen" to the creed.

There was another misunderstanding of the
same kind, and almost as painful, that
happened not so long ago. There were two dear