was still waiting, and the two men jumped in.

"I have failed to save Nerumbia," said the Count, hastily; "but there is yet time to save myself."

"And me, I hope," remarked Farrington. "I guess I'd better get away from this country of yours as soon as convenient, Count."

"Like fury to the railway station," cried Schönstein to the coachman.

Thus abruptly did the Count von Schönstein bring his political career to an end. A more pliant Minister was immediately appointed in his stead, who, at the conclusion of the deferred marriage-ceremony on the following day, presented for the Queen's signa

Chambers's Journal.

ture a decree giving immediate liberty to all prisoners throughout the realm. Whether this will lead to the direful results anticipated by the Count, time alone can show. It has since come to the knowledge of the chronicler of these events, however, that the Duchesse de Malville, alias Adèle Lèront, was allowed by the demoralized police to make good her escape, and also that at present Queen Theresa is well and happy. At the same time, there are said to be matters connected with Her Majesty's first attempt at matrimony as to which she in vain seeks enlightenment from her prudent and far-seeing spouse, Ernest, Hereditary Prince of Landberg.

Adam R. Thomson.

At the end of the third week in June we know without the almanac that spring is over; nowhere in England, perhaps, is one more sensible of the change to full summer than in that warmest corner of Hampshire within the angle of land formed by the Solent and Southampton Water.

The cuckoo calls less and less frequently, and the nightingale has ceased singing. The passionate season is plainly over for the birds; their fountain of music is running dry. Voices are harsher and color deeper than in May and early June. One of the commonest sounds in all the open woods and along the lanes is the curious musical note of the young blackbird. It is like the chuckle of the adult, but sharper, and is the hunger call of the young bird as he sits concealed in a bush or on the ground among the corn or weeds; when he has been left unfed for a long time he emits this shrill

The

uote at intervals of ten to fifteen seconds. It may be heard distinctly two or three hundred yards away. cornfields and waste weedy grounds are everywhere splashed with the intense scarlet of poppies. Summer has Do rain in all her wide hot heavens to give to her green thirsty fields, and has sprinkled them with the red fiery moisture from her own veins.

The great unkept hedges are now in the fulness of their mid-summer beauty. After sunset the fragrance of the honeysuckle is almost too much; standing near the blossom-laden hedge, when there is no wind to carry the odor away, there is a heaviness in it which makes it like some delicious honeyed liquor which we are drinking in. The honeysuckle is, indeed, the queen of the "melancholy flowers" that give out their odor by night. But during the day, when its smell is faint, its pale, sickly blossoms are hardly no

ticed, even where they drape the hedge and are to be seen in masses. Of the hedge-flowers the rose alone is then looked at, its glory being so great as to make all other blooms seem nothing but bleached or dead discolored leaves in comparison. He would, indeed, be a vainly ambitious person who should attempt to describe this queen of all wild flowers, joyous or melancholy; but substituting flower for fruit, and the delight of the eye for the pleasure of taste, we may in speaking of it quote the words of a famous old English divine, used in praise of the strawberry. He said that the Author of all things could doubtless have made a better fruit if He had been SO minded, but doubtless He never did.

I esteem the rose not only for that beauty which sets it highest among flowers, but also because it will not suffer admiration when removed from its natural surroundings. In this particular it resembles certain brilliant sentient beings that languish and lose all their charms in captivity. Pluck your rose and bring it indoors, and place it side by side with other blossoms-yellow flag and blue periwinkle, and shining yellow marsh-marigold, and poppy and cornflower-and it has no lustre, and is no more to the soul than a flower made out of wax or paper. Look at it here, in the brilliant sunlight and the hot wind, waving to the wind on its long thorny sprays all over the vast disordered hedges; here in rosy masses, there starring the rough green tangle with its rosy stars -a rose-colored cloud on the earth and summer's bridal veil-and you will refuse to believe (since it will be beyond your power to imagine) that anywhere on the earth, in any hot or temperate climate, there exists a more divinely beautiful sight.

If among the numberless cults that flourish in the earth we could count a cult of the rose, to this spot the vo

taries of the flower might well come each midsummer to hold their festival. They would be youthful and beautiful, their lips red, their eyes full of laughter; and they would be arrayed in light silken garments of delicate colorgreen, rose, and white; and their arms and necks and foreheads would shine with ornaments of gold and precious stones. In their hands would be musical instruments of many pretty shapes with which they would sweetly accompany their clear voices as they sat or stood beneath the old oak trees, and danced in sun and shade, and when they moved in bright procession along the wide grass-grown roads, through forest and farm-land.

In this low, level country, sheltered by woods and hedgerows, we feel the tremendous power of the sun even before the last week in June. I love to feel it above all things, to bathe in the heat all day long; but at noon I have sometimes found it too hot, even on the open heath, and have been forced to take shelter in the woods. It was always coolest on the high ground among the pines, where the trees are exceptionally tall and there is no underwood. In spring it was pleasant to walk at this spot on the thick carpet of fallen needles and old dead fern; now, in a very short time, the young bracken has sprung up as if by miracle to a height of four to five feet. It spreads all round me, an unbroken sea of brilliant green, out of which rise the tall red columns of the pines supporting the dark woodland roof. One could not very well sit down among this waist-deep bracken, and it was a weariness to wade in it. I found it more agreeable to pass through it and down into the oak wood on the farther side, where I could pick my way through the undergrowth of holly, thorn and bramble, and find open spaces to sit and stand in. Here, more than in the open, it is felt during the

last ten days of June that spring is over, that it is full summer. Bird songs are few and not loud; the wren, wood wren, and willow wren being almost the only singers. A family party of jays, the young birds not long out of the nest, screamed at me for a few moments, then became silent. Then

I disturbed a pair of green woodpeckers-these, too, with young out of their breeding-hole, but unable to fly; and the parent birds, half-crazed with anxiety, flitted round me from tree to tree, and clung to the bark with wings spread and crest raised, their loud laugh changed to a piercing cry of anger that pained the sense.

All the passion and music had gone out of the bird and into the insect world; the oak wood was full of a loud, continuous hum like that of a distant threshing machine; one unbroken deep sound composed of ten thousand thousand small, fine individual sounds, but diffused and flowing like water over the surface under the bushy tangle. The incredible number and variety of blood-sucking flies makes this same low, hot part of the forest as nearly like a transcript of tropical nature in some damp, wooded region as may be found in England. But these forest flies, even when they came in legions about me, were unable to spoil my pleasure. It was delightful to see so much life-to visit and sit down with them in their own domestic circle. Their mosa vicious amused rather than hurt me.

stabs.

In other days, in a distant region, I have passed many a night out of doors in the presence of a cloud of mosquitoes, and when in my sleep I have pulled the covering from my face they had me at their mercy. For the smarts they inflicted on me then I now have my reward, since the venom they injected into my veins has proved a lasting prophylactic. But to the poor cattle this place must be a very purga

tory, a mazy wilderness swarming with minute, hellish imps that mock their horns and giant strength, and cannot be shaken off. While sitting on the roots of a tree in the heart of the wood, I heard the heavy tramping and distressed bellowings of several beasts coming at a furious rate towards me, and presently half a dozen heifers and young bulls burst through the bushes; and catching sight of me at a distance of ten or twelve yards, they suddenly came to a dead stop, glaring at me with strange, mad, tortured eyes; then swerving aside, crashed away through the underwood in another direction.

In this wood I sought and found the stream that has been well named the Dark Water; for it is grown over with old ivied oaks, and with brambles and briars that throw their long branches from side to side, and the nearly hidden current in the deep shade looks black; but when the sunlight falls on it the water is the color of old sherry from the red clay it flows over. No sooner bad I sat down on the bank, where I had a little space of sunlit water to look upon, than the flies gathered thick about and on me, and I began to pay some attention to individuals among them. Those that came to suck blood, and settled at once in a business-like manner on my legs, were some hairy and some smooth, and of various colors-gray, black, steel-blue, and barred and ringed with bright tints; and with these distinguished guests came numberless others, small, lean gnats mostly, without color, and of no consideration.

When the guests got too numerous I began to slap my legs, killing one or two of the greediest at each slap, and to throw their small corpses on the sunlit current. These slain flies were not wasted, for very soon I had quite a number of little minnows close to my feet eager to seize them as they tell. And by and by three fiddlers, or

pond-skaters, perhaps "sagacious of their quarry from afar," came skating into sight on the space of bright water; and to these mysterious, uncanny-looking creatures-insect ghosts that walk on the water, but with very unghostlike appetites-I began tossing some of the flies; and each time a fiddler seized a floating fly he skated away into the shade with it to devour it in peace and quiet all alone by himself. For a fiddler with a fly in his possession is like a dog with a bone among other hungry dogs. When I had finished feeding my ghosts and little fishes I got up and left the place, for the sun was travelling west and the greatest heat was over.

Now is the time of day when our most majestical insect begins to show himself abroad. He is, indeed, a monarch among hexapods, with none to equal him save perhaps the great death's head moth; and in shape and size and solidity he bears about the same relation to pretty bright flies as a horned rhinoceros does to volatile squirrels and monkeys and small barred and spotted felines. This is the stag-beetle "stags and does" are the native names for the two sexes; he is probably more abundant in this corner of Hampshire than in any other locality in England; and among the denizens of the forest there are few more interesting. About four or five o'clock in the afternoon, the ponderous beetle wakes out of his long siesta, down among the roots and dead vegetable matter of a thorny thicket or large hedge, and laboriously sets himself to find his way out. He is a slow, clumsy creature, and very bad climber, and small wonder when we consider how he is impeded by his long-branched horns when trying to make his way through a network of interlacing stems.

As you walk by the hedgeside a strange noise suddenly arrests your

attention; it is the buzz of an insect, but loud enough to startle you; it might be mistaken for the reeling of a nightjar, but it is perhaps more like the jarring hum of a fastly-driven motorcar. The reason of the noise is that the beetle has with great pains climbed up a certain height from the ground, and in order to ascertain whether he has got far enough, he erects himself on his stand, lifts his wing-cases, shakes out his wings and begins to agitate them violently, turning this way and that to make sure that he has a clear space. If he then attempts to fly-it is one of his common blunders -he instantly strikes against some branch or cluster of leaves, and is thrown down. The tumble does not hurt him in the least, but so greatly astonishes him that he remains motionless a good while; then recovering his senses, he begins to ascend again. At length, after a good many accidents and adventures by the way, he gets on to the topmost twig, and, after some buzzing to get up steam, launches himself heavily on the air and goes away in grand style.

Hugh Miller, in his autobiography, tells of the discovery he made of a curiously striking resemblance in shape between our most elegantly made carriages and the bodies of wasps, the resemblance being heightened by a similarity in coloring seen in the lines and bands of vivid yellows and reds on a polished black ground. This likeness between insect and carriage does not appear so striking at this day owing to a change in the fashion towards a more sombre color in the vehicles, their funeral blacks, dark blues, and greens being now seldom relieved with bright yellows and reds. The stag-beetle, too, when he goes away with heavy flight, always gives one the idea of some kind of machine or vehicle, not like the aeriel phaeton of the wasp or hornet, with its grace

ful lines and strongly contrasted colors, but an oblong ponderous armor-plated car, furnished with a beak, and painted a deep, uniform brown.

Notwithstanding his lumbering, blundering ways, when the stag is abroad in search of the doe you may see that he is endowed with a sense and faculty so exquisite as to make it appear almost miraculous in the sureness of its action. The void air, as he sweeps droning through it, is peopled with subtle intelligences which elude and mock and fly from him, and which he pursues until he has found out their secret. They mock him most, or, to drop the metaphor, he is most at fault, on a still, sultry day when not a breath of air is stirring. At times he catches what, for want of better knowledge, we must call a scent, and in order to fix the direction it comes from he goes through a series of curious movements. You will see him rise above a thorny thicket, or a point where two hedges intersect at right angles, and remain suspended on his wings a few inches above the hedge-top for one or two minutes, loudly humming and turning by a succession of jerks all round, pausing after each turn, until he has faced all points of the compass.

This failing, he darts away and circles widely round, then returning to the central point suspends himself as before. After spending several minutes in this manner, he once more resumes his wanderings.

A slight wind makes a great difference to him; even a current of air so faint as not to be felt on the face will reveal to him the exact distant spot in which the doe is lurking. The following incident will serve to show how perfect and almost infallible the sense and its correlated instinct are, and at the same time what a clumsy, blundering creature this beetle is.

Hearing a buzzing noise in a large, unkept hedge, I went to the spot, and

found a stag trying to extricate himself from some soft fern fronds growing among the brambles in which he had got entangled. In the end he succeeded, and, finally gaining a point where there was nothing to obstruct his flight, he launched himself on the air and flew straight away to a distance of fifty yards; then turned and commenced flying backwards and forwards, travelling forty or fifty yards one way and as many the other, until he made a discovery; and, struck motionless in his career, he remained suspended for a moment or two, then flew swiftly and straight as a bullet back to the hedge from which he had so recently got away. He struck the hedge where it was broadest, at a distance of about twenty yards or more from the point where I had first found him, and running to the spot I saw that he had actually alighted within four or five inches of a female concealed among the clustering leaves. On his approaching her she coyly moved from him, climbing up and down and along the branchlets, but for some time he continued very near her. So far he had followed on her track, or by the same branches and twigs over whicht she had passed, but on her getting a little further away and doubling back, he attempted to reach her by a series of short cuts, over the little bridges formed by innumerable slender branches, and his short cuts in most cases brought him against some obstruction; or else there was a treacherous bend in the branch and he was taken further away. Where he had રી chain of bridges or turnings, he seemed fated to take the wrong one, and in spite of all his desperate striving to get nearer he only increased the distance between them. The level sun shone into the huge tangle of bramble, brier, and thorn, with its hundreds of interlacing branches and