eclipsed at one o'clock to-day; we also as certainly
know that on the nineteenth of August,
eighteen hundred and eighty-seven, at three
o'clock in the afternoon, the next, great eclipse
will occur, leaving only the small fraction of
a digit of the sun unobscured."

  After about half of the sun had been
eclipsed, came a woeful disappointment;—
a total eclipse by clouds.   No annulus, no
flames, no Bailey's beads; very little darkness,
even at the moment  (two minutes
past one)  of the greatest obscuration.
Bright-Eyes, in admiration of whom I had
been again lost, woke me up by observing
that the atmosphere (Miss Sidery is a distinguished
amateur in water-colours) seemed
to be tinted with a weak wash of Indian
ink.  The air was perceptibly colder, all
the thermometers having fallen at a mean
rate of three degrees.  I am bound, however,
to state that the cow in the meadow, the
crocuses, the violets, and the other natural
objects that came under my ken, treated the
eclipse with curious unconcern—as if it
were a darker cloud passing over other clouds.
The spruce sparrow flew away from the wires,
leisurely and playfully, over the station roof;
the country people going along the road,
did not even look up; everything in the
surrounding landscape conducted itself very
much as usual; but, a despondent astronomer
coming back from the churchyard under a
load of unused instruments assured us that
he saw a flight of rooks return to their nests;
and Mr. Charles Sidery—who, having given
up the annular eclipse in despair, had strolled
into the village testified to the jack-daw
belonging to the Odd Fellow's Arms going
to roost, and to a horse having been so
frightened (perhaps by the darkness) that he
threw his rider and ran away. We ourselves
witnessed an unpleasant phenomenon.  A
good-looking young country squire had mistaken
mid-day for dinner-time, and, created
great consternation at the station by banging
everybody and everything about, in a state
of distressing post-prandial excitement. He
was speedily eclipsed by the police.

  The journey back to London, I asked my
friend The Count to describe; finding the
task impossible, for reasons which need not
be explained; but, as his manuscript is
arranged in columns in the manner of Bradshaw's
Guide, and consists of a record of the
times of our passing places of note; of our
arrival and departure at each station; of the
number of successful puns he made, and of
the number which all the rest of us failed in,
I shall make no further mention of it.

  It is now five weeks since the Great Solar
Eclipse happened.  I have been observing
the stars, as much as possible, ever since;
having become Mr. Sidery's pupil. Every
evening, clear or cloudy, I have spent at his
charming little villa at Dulwich. I find in
him a friend and a confidant.  Last night,
during an occulation od Venus  (she had
hastily retired to her mamma's room after
an embarrassing interview with me) I laid
before the kind astronomer, while standing at
the end of his telescope in the garden, a
statement of my private circumstances and
prospects.  MacAliquot has since made
his calculations, and confidently predicts that
the Annular Eclipse of my bacherlorhood will
take place on an early day in August next.

THE BLUE DYE PLANT.

  THE indigo plant is a beautiful, bright
green grass, or shrub; and is called a biennial,
because it passes through all the
phases of its existence in two years.  Its
leaves consist generally of a collection of
leaflets arranged, alternately, one above the
other upon each side of the petiole or leaf-stalk.
At the base of the leaf-stalk, but
separated from it, are two leaflets called
stipules, which are distinguishable from the
others by having no median nervure or vein
down the middle.  In the Monocotyledonic
plants, or plants with one primordial leaf,
such as the palm-trees, the stipules form the
sheaf,—a kind of living cradle provided by
Nature for the protection of the leaves during
their tender infancy.

  The bright-red flowers of the indigo plant,
which are all assembled together at the summit
of the peduncules or flower stalks, present the
appearance, like the sweet-peas in blossom, of
a butterfly; for this reason all the plants
of this class are called papilionaceous, from
the Latin papilio,—a butterfly.  The shapes
of the petals or flower-leaves, which to the
number of five compose this blossom, are so
peculiar that each of them has received a
distinct name.  Thus the large upper one,
which turns backwards, is called the standard
or flag; the two next, which are both alike
and placed one on each side, are the wings;
and the lower one between the wings is the boat
or keel, and is composed of one or two hollow
flower-leaves, holding the stamens and
the pistil, and sheltering them from the
rain.  In the indigo the wings are sometimes
joined together in the form of a
carina, car or bark.

All the butterfly plants, including the
indigo, have the habit of spreading out
their wings in the day and folding them up
at night.  Linnæus discovered this fact in an
interesting way: A friend having sent him
some seeds of a butterfly-plant, he sowed
them in his greenhouse, where they soon
produced two beautiful flowers. His gardener
having been absent when he first observed
them, Linnæus went with a lantern in the evening
to show them to him.  But to his surprise
they were nowhere to be found, and Linnæus
was obliged to content himself by supposing
that they had been destroyed by some accident
or by insects.  Great, however, was his
astonishment next morning at finding his