yarn of given weight to the yard, sold on reels.
Used as match-line, this burns only at the rate
of six inches a second. Its next form, yielding
a swifter match-line, is produced by plaiting
the yarn in a hollow cord; although this twist
has increased the length of yarn, fire runs
much faster along it, namely, at the rate, not of
six inches, but of six feet in a second. A yet
swifter match-line is made of that plaited cord
by casing it in a skin of india-rubber cloth. This
carries fire at the rate of twenty or thirty feet
in the second. Gun-cotton used in artillery
must, General Lenk found, not be pressed close,
but have room given to it. Squeeze it into a
dense mass, and it has violent blasting power;
give it room, and it works gently. Imprison it,
and it will burst iron bonds asunder with tremen-
dous violence; leave it free, and when lighted it
burns gently like a cheerful piece of firework.

And what next? When we fire cotton at
ships and forts protected with paper, shall we
ever go back to those leather guns, once famous,
which have so curiously and completely passed
out of common recollection? Their inventor
has now been dead, buried, and forgotten, for
two hundred and thirty years. The tribe of
biographical compilers have not devoted a line
to his memory in their bulky dictionaries; and
the historians of the science of gunnery, who
discourse so largely on the catapulta, the balista,
the ribaudequin, the mangonel, and other obsolete
"messengers of bad news," have omitted to
notice the curious invention which brought him
fortune and contemporaneous fame— most
probably for the simple reason that they knew
nothing about it. A few documents in Her
Majesty's State Paper Office, and a monument in
a London church, are the only remaining memorials
of Colonel Robert Scott, the inventor of
the once famous leathern artillery.

This Robert Scott was born in the latter half
of the sixteenth century. He came of a good
old stock, being descended from the ancient
barons of Bawerie, in Scotland. He applied
himself assiduously to study, and extended his
knowledge by visiting foreign countries. To
military science he paid special attention, and
soon perceived that it was open to great improve-
ments, as it is unto this day. The field-pieces
of that age were machines of iron or brass,
immensely cumbrous, and almost unmanageable.
The problem to be solved was, how to render a
gun more portable without lessening its projectile
force. After full consideration of the matter,
he came to the conclusion that there was
"nothing like leather." Of hardened leather,
therefore, he constructed guns. The correctness
of his idea was tested by experiment, and
the result was considered to show the immeasurable
superiority of leather over brass and iron.

Why he did not lay his invention at the feet
of his own liege sovereign it is needless to
inquire. Perhaps he did so, and was snubbed for
his pains: as other inventors have been since his
time. At all events, he raised a company of two
hundred men, and went over to Sweden, where
he was welcomed by Gustavus Adolphus, who,
seeing his ability and the value of his discovery,
forthwith took him into his service, and at the
end of two years rewarded him with the office
of Quartermaster-General of the Army.

After five years' service under Gustavus he
repaired to Denmark, where he was appointed
General of the King's Artillery, but soon
afterwards, yielding to the advice of friends, he
returned to England, and tendered his services
to his own sovereign, King Charles the First.
This step, which was taken in sixteen hundred
and twenty-nine, turned out a very profitable
one for the colonel. He was received with open
arms by Charles, who appointed him one of the
gentlemen of his privy chamber, granted him an
annual pension of six hundred pounds out of the
Court of Wards, and purchased for him a house
in Lambeth at a cost of fourteen hundred
pounds. Colonel Scott, however, did not live
long to enjoy these tokens of the royal favour,
for, dying in sixteen hundred and thirty-one, he
was buried in Lambeth Church, where a
sumptuous monument, still to be seen, was erected
to his memory by his loving wife Anne, whom
he had married in France. The sculptor has
represented the colonel as an armour-clad fierce-
looking man, wearing a heavy moustache and a
pointed beard.

In the very year of the colonel's death,
Gustavus Adolphus had ample proof of the
effectiveness and utility of the leathern artillery, at the
memorable battle of Leipzig. The guns were
found to be so easily portable, that a small battery
could easily be removed from one part of the field
to another, or a new battery made in the space
of ten minutes; and when a fresh attack was
about to be made on the part of the enemy, a
battery was immediately at hand to repel it.
In fact, it was in great measure owing to the
invention of Colonel Scott that the Swedish
king obtained so glorious a victory, and the
imperial General Tilly himself was constrained
to admit that the portable cannon performed
wonders. How it came about that the leathern
ordnance was shortly afterwards laid aside as
worthless, is difficult to explain or even to
conjecture, but it is not recorded to have made
any subsequent appearance on the battle-field,
though a leathern cannon was fired in Edinburgh
so late as the year seventeen hundred and
eighty-eight, probably out of curiosity.

A RUSSIAN ROMANCE.

I HAD my hand on Dr. Tillmann's door, and
yet I hesitated to knock. I was house-surgeon
of the great Petro-Paulovsky Hospital at St.
Petersburg, of which that testy and punctilious
old German was principal physician, and I
carried with me my daily report of the cholera
patients who had died during the night.

A moment ago I had been talking briskly
enough to a group of students, and now I was
standing like a timid boy at a schoolmaster's
door. The fact was, I knew the old automaton
was jealous of me, and disliked me, and I