perhaps more. Lady Vance not only looked
triumphant, but Tom Spavit had a smirk
on his countenance which seemed to say that
their chance of victory was reduced to a
certainty. All over the town the other party
gave out that their side was sure to win, and
that their majority would not be less than a
hundred. I could not make it out, there were
not more than sixteen hundred electors in the
town that could vote, and of these I made out,
by my calculations, we had secured from eight
hundred and forty to eight hundred and sixty.
Again and again I went over the lists, but always
with the same results; and on the Friday morning
the polling commenced.

At noon the numbers stood:
        Mellam . . . . . 420
        Streatham . . .380
leaving us a majority of forty ahead. At one
o'clock we had polled another two hundred and
twenty, and our adversaries only a hundred and
ninety, thus still increasing our majority. At
three o'clock we had polled eight hundred and
twenty, but the other party had crept up nearer
to us, and had polled seven hundred and forty.
I thought the battle was won, and was startled
to find that at half past three we had only
increased our score by ten, whereas the enemy
had gained some sixty votes, and was now only
twenty-three or twenty-four behind us. Our
agents were busy whipping up voters in every
direction, but about a quarter to four sixty odd
electors arrived by the London train, and going
direct to the poll voted for Streatham. At four
o'clock, when the poll closed, the numbers were:
           Streatham . . . . .886
           Mellam . . . . . . . 834
Majority for the enemy fifty-two, and so the
battle was lost. I found out later that Lady
Vance's agents had all along made sure of a
number of Northenville electors who lived in
London, and had kept them in reserve until the
very last moment. They had left London
at 6 A.M. that day, but the train had been
greatly delayed on the way. Had they been
detained another quarter of an hour we should
have gained the day. As it turned out Captain
Streatham got his seat, and will in due time go
out as Governor to a West Indian colony,
where I hope he may do well. Mr. Mellam
intends to try his luck again, with me for helper,
at the approaching general election.

THE AGE OF STONE.

A BOOK has been recently published on the
other side of the Channel, entitled La Chute
du Ciel, The Fall of the Sky, of which we
say no more than that, written by a noble
author, its object is to prove, in some six
hundred pages, that coal, erratic boulders, fossil
remains in general, and a variety of sundries,
among them being the flint implements found
in "the drift," have all—all, been shot out on
the earth from the firmament above! They are
worn-out rubbish cast off by the moon or which-
ever of the planets you please.

This theory does not disturb our equanimity;
because when a new science, "Prehistoric
Archæology," fills leaders in the Times, and
occupies a prominent place in addresses of Presidents
of the British Association, we may without
anxiety leave the said things found in the
drift to receive eventually a correct account of
their use and origin.

In truth, the light of science, like the light
of day, breaks gradually on the human
understanding. At first, nothing is visible but objects
close at hand. Soon, however, the distance
widens, unsuspected points come, one by one,
into view; at last, the delighted eye takes in
the complete circuit of an extensive horizon.

As with terrestrial space, so it is with earthly
time. Within the memory of man, history,
geology, creation even, were supposed to lie
within the limits of a few thousand years.
Astronomy (through the means of the precession
of the equinoxes), first raised doubts as
to the accuracy of such narrow bounds. Geology
stretched out the lapse of past time over an
indefinitely wide extent; and finally, a French
gentleman, M. Boucher de Perthes, recently
deceased in the fulness of years, by obstinately
searching gravel pits in the valley of the Somme,
assigned to the human race a longevity which,
until quite lately, it was black heresy even to
imagine.

The world had long been puzzled by the
inscrutable antiquity of Celtic remains and so-
called Druidical erections; now, Dr. Hooker
tells us that there exist in India, within three
hundred miles of the British capital, indigenous
tribes who are still in the habit of raising
megalithic monuments. It seems that there are
countries in the East in which tombs, altars,
and places of worship, are still built after the
fashion of Stonehenge. There may even be
tribes still using exactly such knives and arrow-
heads as are found in the drift;  Dr. Hooker,
with his eyes fixed on the Khasia people of
East Bengal, proposes to besiege the problem
from this singularly practical point of attack.
All this is quite new light thrown on a
subject wrapped in gloom. Before the Iron Age,
the Silver Age, and the Golden Age, was
an Age of Stone.  Man knew not metals,
but he fabricated and made use of flint. If
fossil man were still a desideratum (which
is now denied), his fossil handiworks are to
be found in plenty. No animal (except man)
of which we have the slightest trace or relic,
is capable of fashioning knives, axes, spear-
heads, arrow-heads, symbols, toys, personal
ornaments, and tools. If such be found in
a truly fossil state, the unavoidable inference
is that man must have been the living
companion of numerous extinct animals. He
must have shared the forest with the mammoth,
have chased the gigantic Irish deer, have
feasted on the flesh of the aurochs, and trembled
at the voice of the monstrous tiger of
our caverns. What a life to lead! An intruder