the season with a panoply of umbrellas and
waterproof gear. While the almanack said it
was the first week in August, the weather said
it was April, and might be February. The
almanack probably told the truth, because corn
was to be seen in ear, and yellow, but tumbled
and laid, as if by the storms of March. Winter
came that year from the south, to spend the
summer in the northern hemisphere. Places
that ought to have been comfortably hot, were
showery and shivery instead.

The very length of summer days renders a
wet summer the more provoking. In the evening
you can scarcely draw the curtains, light the
candles, and chat or read with your feet to the
fire. Balls are impossible when the morning sun
breaks in immediately after supper, and
disperses the ladies as you are beginning to spend
the evening. How much more social near the
equator, where it is pitch dark in summer at
seven, or before! Nothing but habit or necessity
could reconcile one to the midsummer nights at
St. Petersburg, where, for tedious weeks and
weeks, the lamps in the streets have no need to
be lighted. Imagine the sufferings of a wet
summer (if they ever have one) with that
unceasing continuity of daylight.

IGNORAMUS AT THE INTERNATIONAL
EXHIBITION.

I AM an excessively ignorant person. I am
not proud of the fact, but I think it best to
acknowledge it frankly, for then I take the
sting out of criticism, and prevent the better
informed from pouncing down on me, to display my
ignorance as a trophy. But though I am
hopelessly ignorant myself, I have several scientific
friends, who vainly seek to enlighten my
benighted understanding on various points. One
of these friends is an engineer, with a passion
for machinery, and a profound belief in its
future mission as the regenerator of a degraded
society. He looks forward to the time when
chains and wheels and cogs and lathes, will take
the place of human labour, and supersede the
necessity for all merely mindless handicraft, so
that there shall be no more hewers of wood or
drawers of water, but only clear-headed stokers
and pokers, giving mind to matter and intelligent
direction to unintelligent force. The
other day, on his way to the International
Exhibition, he called for me, and carried me off
to the machinery department, to give me, for
the twentieth time at least, a lesson on the
steam-engine and its congeners; he being a man
of large faith and indomitable hope, whereby he
has never yet come to the perception of the
hopelessness of his task. For, as I began by confessing
my intellectual short-comings without much
reserve, I may as well state frankly, that never
to this day, after one-and-twenty lessons, have I
been able to fully understand a steam-engine.

With a courage worthy of a better cause,
my engineering oracle made one last attempt
to tear away the veil from before my clouded
mind, and took me off to the International,
to have a turn at the machinery again; and
this is what I saw. I saw a quantity of cast-iron
tires for railway wheels and others, as
bright as silver and as finely finished as the
minutest watchwork; I saw huge worms and
spirals of the same cast-steel, and pyramids of
coiled wire, and plaited ropes, and twisted
cables, and enormous links, good for holding
down the foundations of the earth, I should have
said; and I saw cast-steel railway chairs—what
an odd name! the things that the rails sit in,
like blocks of black cream cheese; and steel
saucepans, and cake moulds, and pie dishes, and
small fairy rings, as small as the tiniest French
charms, and thimbles, which would surely soon
get rusted on the tops of certain fat fingers,
porous and perspiring; and I saw large round
saw-wheels and toothed bands, lithe and endless;
and buffer-springs, which are pretty and
ingenious both; and a cannon in the rough, bullying,
black and fierce; and the finest steel pens; and
ornamented tools—saws with views etched on
them, and swords polished, virgin and trenchant;
and grates that dazzled; and steel reflectors cut
into facets and incomparably bright; and then
I saw a Cyclopean machine for testing iron and
steel, with weights for " breaking and tension,
and crushing and torsion," some part of it
painted grey, and some left bright, like frosted
or polished silver; and all these various things
were made out of some odd knubbly-looking
stuff, which was called kidney ore. And then
my friend explained the process by which
cast-steel was made as strong as, and stronger than,
anything else; but all I remember is, that something
was burnt in the steel during the process
—something that had been long a difficulty in the
way of making cast-steel; only I don't feel quite
clear as to what was burnt, or how it was done.
Perhaps somebody else may know, for it is of
BESSEMER'S process that I am now speaking.

Passing by the lighthouse models with their
various modes of erection, and those hideous
creatures, like the nightmares of bad dreams,
the divers in their diving-dresses, we came to
the court of ships, where the fat old tubs of
elder days, bedizened and adorned with all sorts
of gilding and carving, clear gradually down to
the clean-limbed vixenish-looking craft of
modern times, with not a spar too many, or a rope
too few, or an ounce of paint or gold-leaf beyond
the needful covering up of naked timber. Here,
too, were the new armoured ships; one, grim
and shapeless, looking like a monster tortoise
afflicted with bumps, and another, a queer
penthouse bearing thing, built on scientific
principles, which render it invulnerable, and a
perfectly safe asylum under any amount of cannonading.
For, by means of an open iron gallery with
metal pillars set in acute angles so as to
present no surface, the enemy's balls must glance
off and fly clean through her, by the paths
prepared, according to the laws of forces; doing no
damage to man or metal. So at least says the
inventor, and I, in my capacity of Fly-Swallower,
believe everything I hear, with or without the
salt. Here, too, are some pretty little models