TALES IN CONVERSATION.

I.

A story, in which native humour reigns,
Is often useful, always entertains;
A graver fact, enlisted on your side,
May furnish illustration, well applied;
But sedentary weavers of long tales
Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails.
'Tis the most asinine employ on earth,
To hear them tell of parentage and birth,
And echo conversations, dull and dry,
Embellished with-He said-and, So said I.
At every interview their route the same,
The repetition makes attention lame;
We bustle up with unsuccessful speed,
And in the saddest part cry-Droll indeed!
The path of narrative with care pursue,
Still making probability your clue;
On all the vestiges of truth attend,
And let them guide you to a decent end.

II.

Of all ambitions man may entertain,
The worst that can invade a sickly brain
Is that which angles hourly for surprise,
And baits its hook with prodigies and lies.
Credulous infancy or age as weak,
Are fittest auditors for such to seek,

Who to please others will themselves disgrace,
Yet please not, but affront you to your face.
A great retailer of this curious ware,
Having unloaded and made many stare,
Can this be true? an arch observer cries;
Yes (rather moved) I saw it with these eyes!
Sir! I believe it on that ground alone;
I could not, had I seen it with my own.

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct;
The language plain, and incidents well linked;
Tell not as new what everybody knows,
And new or old, still hasten to a close;
There centring in a focus round and neat,
Let all your rays of information meet.

THE POLAR BEAR.

COWPER.

On the inhospitable shores of the Arctic regions, where the polar bear resides, there are no forests to shelter him in their recesses; he makes the margin of the sea or the craggy iceberg his home, and digs his lair in the snows of ages. He is a strong and rapid swimmer, and dives with the utmost address; as a proof of which, it is stated by Cartwright that he once witnessed a trial of skill between one of these animals and a salmon, which notwithstanding the known velocity of the salmon's movements in the water, the bear succeeded in capturing. Indeed if the bear were not at home among the rough waves of the northern seas, he would be often much straitened for food, as his chief diet is obtained from the floating carcases of whales and fishes, to obtain which he must often swim far away from the shore.

INSECTS AND MAN COMPARED.

The burrowing-bee still uses the same instrument to pierce the downright shaft, and to cluster round it the beautifully smoothed cells. Still she selects the hardbeaten soil, whence the wind may sweep the dust that otherwise would betray her labours. The sand-spider still uses the same cement to form the walls of her retreat, and to weave her branchy net. But man is found at one time burying himself in the ground, at another tearing the rocks asunder to rear magnificent palaces. Here he draws his sustenance from the ocean, there he cultivates the ground; here he clothes himself in the skin of the

wild beast, there he wears the delicate web, and prides himself on the splendour of his apparel. With man there is no permanence; everything is changing, and each season adds to his powers and comfort.

"Edinburgh Philosophical Journal."

THE CLASSICAL LANGUAGES.

The two ancient languages are as mere inventions→ as pieces of mechanism—incomparably more beautiful than any of the modern languages of Europe: their mode of signifying time and case, by terminations, instead of auxiliary verbs and particles, would of itself stamp their superiority. Add to this, the copiousness of the Greek language, with the fancy, majesty, and harmony of its compounds; and there are quite sufficient reasons why the classics should be studied for the beauties of language. Compared to them, merely as vehicles of thought and passion, all modern languages are dull, ill contrived, and barbarous.

SYDNEY SMITH, "Edin. Review."

THE ASH.

PART I.

The common ash is one of the noblest of our forest trees, and generally carries its principal stem higher than the oak, rising in an easy flowing line. Its chief beauty, however, consists in the lightness of its whole appearance. Its branches at first keep close to the trunk, but as they begin to lengthen they commonly take an easy sweep, and the looseness of the leaves corresponding with the lightness of the spray, the whole forms an elegant depending foliage. The leaves of the common ash were used as fodder for cattle by the Romans, who esteemed them better for that purpose than those of any other tree; and in this country, in various districts, they are used in the same manner.

II.

The ash will grow exceedingly well upon almost any soil, and indeed is frequently met with in rocks and ruined walls, where its winged seeds have been deposited by the wind. The roots of this tree are remarkably beautiful, and often finely veined. They, with certain knotty excrescences found on the trunks, take a very excellent polish.

With the exception of the oak, timber of the ash serves for the greatest variety of uses of any tree in the forest. It is excellent for ploughs, for axle-trees, harrows, oars, blocks for pulleys, carts, ladders, etc., and the branches make good fuel. The best time to fell an ash is after a growth of from eighty to one hundred years. Woodland Gleanings."

STRATIFIED BEDS.

In Egypt, where the Nile is always adding to its delta by filling up part of the Mediterranean with mud, the newly-deposited sediment is stratified, the thin layer thrown down in one season differing slightly in colour from that of a previous year, and being separable from it, as has been observed in excavations at Cairo, and other places.

When beds of sand, clay, and marl, containing shells and vegetable matter, are found arranged in a similar manner in the interior of the earth, we ascribe to them a similar origin; and the more we examine their characters in minute detail, the more exact do we find the resemblance. Thus, for example, at various heights and depths in the earth, and often far from seas, lakes, and rivers, we meet with layers of rounded pebbles composed of flint, limestone, granite, or other rocks, resembling the shingle of a sea-beach, or the gravel in a torrent's bed. Such layers of pebbles frequently alternate with others formed of sand or fine sediment, just as we may see in the channel of a river descending from hills bordering a coast,

where the current sweeps down at one season coarse sand and gravel, while at another, when the waters are low and less rapid, fine mud and sand alone are carried seaward.

LYELL,"Student's Elements of Geology."

SHERWOOD FOREST, IN THE TIME OF

RICHARD I.

I.

The sun was setting upon one of the rich glassy glades of the forest. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed, perhaps, the stately march of Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green-sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others, they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself; while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of sylvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees; and there they illuminated, in brilliant patches, the portions of turf to which they made their way.

II.

The human figures which completed this landscape were in number two, partaking in their dress and appearance of that wild and rustic character which belonged to the woodlands of the West Riding of Yorkshire at that early period. The eldest of these men had a stern, savage, and wild aspect. His garment was of the simplest form imaginable, being a close jacket with sleeves, composed of the tanned skin of some animal, on which the hair had been originally left, but which had been worn off in so many places that it would have been difficult to distin