insipid to the eye. While Epsom salt,
nauseous to swallow, is richly magnificent to
behold. Washerwoman's soda displays gaudy
blotches with a tendency to an irregular
leaflike shape. Sugar offers but a faint sensibility
to polarised light, unless you know how
to manage it. The crystals show touches of
coloured light, but they are too minute to
have much effect. To get sugar crystals, the
evaporation must be slow, requiring perhaps
four and twenty hours; if you hasten the
process by heating the syrup on the slide,
you get, instead, an amorphous crust of sugar
barley. Use neither powder sugar nor white
lump sugar, but sugar candy, to form your
solution; then, with patience, you will
obtain a crop of lovely crystals, arranged either
in circular, or in fan-like groups, which will
well reward your pains. Many of these
candy crystals are striped transversely, or
diagonally, zebra-fashion, not with black and
white, but with the seven prismatic colours.
Nitre, although repulsive to the taste, is
extremely attractive to the view. Put a drop
of warm solution of nitre on a heated slip of
glass; introduce it to polarised light, and
you will see glittering sword-blades, flashing
dirks and bayonets, steel-blue battle-axes,
and bloody tomahawks, darting across the
field, as if they were stabbing at some unseen
enemy. The very crystals of nitre are suggestive
of battle and storm. You get permanent
representations of flashes of lightning.
An artist about to paint either a Jovine, or
an imperial eagle, will do well to consult a
crystallisation of nitre as a model for his
thunderbolts.

The several vitriols of the Alchymists—
blue, green, and white—the sulphates of
copper, iron, and zinc—are three lovely daughters
of Iris, born to fathers each more
resplendently rich than the other, with gnomes
and sylphs for their godfathers and
godmothers. These beauties should always be
kept in attendance, ready to display their
charms, and to dazzle the inexperienced
stranger by their wondrous hues. The first,
sulphate of copper, is gorgeously attired; on
her robe, the supplemental colours come out
with striking contrast and alternation. The
second, sulphate of iron (rumoured to have
occasional dealings with London porter),
looks as if her parent, the king of the gnomes,
had been trying how fine he could make his
offspring. White vitriol, the progeny of zinc,
is clothed in a spangled mantle that far
outshines the starry heavens.

THE FIRST SNOW ON THE FELL.

       OUR days had begun to darken;
           The shadows upon the lawn
      To fall from the elm-trees early,
           To linger long for dawn;
      The leaves of the elm to redden,
           And tremble to the wind,
      With its bitter news and whispers
           Of the worse that lay behind.
      And now and again would flutter
          A dead leaf to the ground,
      Which sun should never gladden,
         Nor rain with a summer sound.
      The fern was red on the mountain,
         The cloud was low in the sky,
      And we knew that the year was failing,
         That the wintry time was nigh.

      But we thought, as thinks the lover
         With his loved one near her grave,
      "O, Death, leave her here for a little,
          Leave her, whom nought can save."
     A little more warmth and brightness,
          And tarrying of the green,
     Had left no content with the future,
         Thankful for what had been;
     We dreamt not of Winter, standing
          As to-day we see him stand,
      In the midst of the mountains yonder,
         With Helvellyn in his hand.
      Though he dares not come to the valleys,
         Though he leaves the hill ere noon,
       His foot will be on the lake's breast,
         He will hush the river soon.
      Yon print of his hoary finger
        We Northerns know full well,
     Our sign that summer is over,—
       The first snow on the Fell.

LYNDON HALL.
IN SEVEN CHAPTERS. CHAPTER THE FIRST.

NORAH LYNDON sat under the great beech-tree
at the end of the long walk with her
cousin Gregory. Norah was fair, pale, timid,
and depressed; Gregory fiery as an Arab and
almost as swarthy: Norah was gentle and
cold, loving no one and harming nothing,
while Gregory's very caresses were less
tender than the reproaches of other men, and his
love more fierce than ordinary hate. Yet
though so singularly unsuited to each other,
these two creatures were betrothed; because
Norah's father wished to unite the estates,
and because Gregory had a savage kind of
love for his beautiful little cousin—that love
which thinks only of itself, and looks only to
its own fulfilment. As for Norah, she had
simply been required to say "I will," after
her father's stern "you shall." No one
dreamed of any spontaneous wish on her part
as either desirable or necessary; and it never
occurred even to herself that she might by
chance do more than obey—that she might
claim the common birthright of humanity,
and desire and will for herself. Her father
had not ground her down through all the
facile years of her early youth to leave her
such dangerous thoughts as these. He had
not suppressed every spark of self-assertion
to no purpose. He had made her what he
willed her to be—a passive machine that did
as it was bidden—walking by rule and living
by law, but devoid of all the impulse, passion,
strength, and will, which spring from an
independent inner life.

This suited Colonel Lyndon. To his ideas