as in the other, there is a central orb, far surpassing all the members of the system in bulk and mass; in each system there are eight orbs circling around the central body; and lastly, each system exhibits, close by the central orb, a multitude of discrete bodies-the zodiacal light in the solar system, and the scheme of rings in the Saturnian system-doubtless subserving important though as yet unexplained purposes in the economy of the systems to which they belong.-Cornhill Magazine. PARALLEL STORIES. 'SUPPOSING you were in an invested town, threatened with starvation, how would you supply yourself with provisions?' asked the examiners at Brienne of a young student. From the enemy,' was the prompt reply. The embryo Emperor was thought to have said a good thing; but the happy hit might have been due to ready recollection rather than ready wit, for it is upon record that one of Suvorof's sergeants was promoted by giving exactly the same answer to the same question propounded by his rough chief. Paul I. of Russia no doubt believed he was acting very originally when, disgusted with the bad riding of an officer at a review, he commanded the maladroit man to resign his commission and retire to his estate; and being told he had no estate to retire to, replied: 'Give him one, then !' The eccentric Czar would have been surprised to learn that his novel mode of enforcing sentence had been anticipated by a player. Yet so it was. The hero of the Dunciad, intrusted with the delivery of a stage-message, acquitted himself so awkwardly that he marred one of Betterton's best scenes. As soon as he passed the wings, the irate actor ordered the prompter to 'forfeit' Master Colley. It can't be done,' said that useful official; 'he has no salary.' 'No salary!' echoed Betterton: 'put him down for ten shillings a week, and forfeit him five.' Mrs. Salusbury, the mother of Johnson's lovely, lively Hetty Thrale, was fond of relating an episode in Lord Harry Pawlett's courtship of a lady friend of hers. The lady in question was seized with a desire to possess a couple of monkeys of a particular species. Anxious to gratify her whim, Lord Harry-a bad scribe, with loose notions of spelling-wrote off to a friend in the East Indies, entreating him to procure the pair of monkeys, and send them home immediately. Unfortunately, he chose to spell two, t-o-o, and to write it in characters all of one height. The receiver of the order read it 100, and, to Lord Harry's dismay, notified the shipment of fifty monkeys of the required description, to be followed by the other half-hundred as speedily as possible. The obliging lover may have victimised himself in this way; Mrs. Salusbury vouched for the fact, and we have no right to set her down as a tarradiddler; but it is odd that a good century before, Sir Edward Verney should write to his son: To requite your news of your fish, I will tell as good a tale from hence, and as true. A merchant of London, that writ to a factor of his beyond sea, desired him, by the next ship, to send him 2 or 3 apes. He forgot the r, and then it was 20 3 apes. The factor sent him fourscore, and says he shall have the rest by the next ship; conceiving the merchant had sent for two hundred and three apes. yourself or friends will buy any to breed on, you could never have such a chance as now!' If Sir William Drummond, finding himself outside a tavern where the sons of song were wont to meet, to enjoy the feast of reason and the flow of sack, peeped through the window, to see if any roysterers were taking their pleasure. Caught in the act by them, he was willy-nilly dragged into the house to make merry with Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Sir Robert Kerr, and Sir William Alexander. When the hour of reckoning came, they fell to rhyming over it, and Drummond's lines were unanimously voted the best; a decision saying little for the impromptu skill of the rest of the jovial party, since it would not seem to have required much genius to equal such a verse as: The anecdote would not be worth telling, if it were not for the fact that Allan Cunningham tells a story of Robert Burns bearing a wonderful likeness to it. Strolling, one fair-day, about the streets of a Cumberland town, Burns got separated from his friends. Thinking to find them in a certain tavern, he bent his steps thither, and not doubting his lost cronies were somewhere about, popped his head into room after room; as he was closing the door of the last, one of its three occupants shouted: 'Come in, Johnny Peep!' The sociable bard, thus challenged, accepted the invitation, sat himself down, and was soon on the best of terms with his new acquaintances. After enjoying themselves for some hours, somebody proposed that a verse should be written by each, and put, with half-a-crown, under the candlestick-the best poet to take back his money, and leave his unsuccessful competitors to pay the score between them. Burns won, with: Here am I, Johnny Peep; Will pay for their fleece, An effusion pleasing the fancy of the Cumberland boys so mightily, that they insisted upon knowing their guest's name; and when they did know it, would not allow him to part company till the small-hours brought daylight with them. We can readily credit such a thing happening to Burns; but if he knew nothing of the Drummond story, his improvising a verse so suspiciously like an adaptation of Drummond's impromptu, was, as an old story has it, 'a coincidence queer.' Hogarth tried often, and tried hard, but all in vain, to persuade Fielding to sit for his portrait. It might be supposed the great artist would not have found it too difficult a task to limn his friend's face from memory; but, for once, the painter's skill failed him, he could not reproduce the familiar features. Lamenting his nonsuccess to Garrick, the mobile-faced actor suddenly asked: Is that like?' and the astonished Hogarth saw the novelist before him, and seizing his pencil, drew Fielding's portrait for posterity. What Hogarth and Garrick did between them for Fielding, Coulon and Gros accomplished for a French minister. Coulon, doctor and jester to Louis XVIII., was famous for his powers of mimicry, and one day, when Gros complained there was not a portrait that did justice to Villèle, answered: 'No; none show the profound nobility of his character, and his evanescent expression ;' and while he spoke, the words seemed to come from Villèle himself. Gros then and there sketched Coulon's transformed face, and from it produced the best portrait known of the lost statesman. Art has its parallel stories of a more tragic nature. In the Chapel proud Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffined lie, stands an exquisite example of Gothic tracery-work, known as the Apprentice's Pillar, neighbored by corbels carved with grim, grotesque human faces. How it came by its name may best be told as the old dame who acted as cicerone at the beginning of the present century used to tell it. There ye see it, gentlemen, with the lace-bands winding sae beautifully roond aboot it. The maister had gane awa to Rome to get a plan for it, and while he was awa, his 'prentice made a plan himsel, and finished it. And when the maister cam back and fand the pillar finished, he was sae enraged that he took a hammer and killed the 'prentice. There you see the 'prentice's face-up there in ae corner wi' a red gash in the brow, and his mother greetin' for him in the corner opposite. And there, in another corner, is the maister, as he lookit just before he was hanged; it's him wi' a kind o' ruff roond his face." In the same century that the Prince of Orkney founded the chapel at Roslin, the good people of Stendal employed an architect of repute to build them one new gate, and intrusted the erection of a second to his principal pupil. In this case, too, the aspiring youth proved the better craftsman, and paid the same penalty; the spot whereon he fell beneath his master's hammer being marked to this day by a stone commemorating the event; and the story goes that yet, upon moonlight nights, the ghost of the murdered youth may be seen contemplating the work that brought him to an untimely end, while a weird skeleton beats with a hammer at the stone he wrought into beauty. Another stone, at Grossmöringen, close by Stendal, tells 1 where an assistant bell-caster was stabbed by his master because he succeeded in casting a bell, after the latter had failed in the attempt. It is a tradition of Rouen that the two rose-windows of its cathedral were the work of the master architect and his pupil, who strove which of the two should produce the finer window. Again the man beat the master, and again the master murdered the man in revenge for his triumph. The transept window of Lincoln Cathedral was the product of a similar contest, but in this instance the defeated artist killed himself instead of his successful rival. his neck in the hunting-field a few months afterwards, at a place still known as Darrell's Stile. Aubrey places Littlecote in Wiltshire, makes the unhappy mother the waiting-maid of Darrell's wife, and concludes his narration thus: 'This horrid action did much run in her (the midwife's) mind, and she had a desire to discover it, but knew not where 'twas. She considered with herself the time that she was riding, and how many miles she might have ridden at that rate in that time, and that it must be some great person's house, for the room was twelve feet high. She went to a justice of the peace, and search was made the very chamber found. The knight was brought to his trial; and, to be short, this judge had this noble house, park and manor and (I think) more, for a bribe to save his life. Sir John Popham gave sentence according to law, but being a great person and a favorite, he procured a nolle prosequi.' In Sir Walter's ballad the midwife becomes a friar of orders gray, compelled to shrive as a dying woman A lady as a lily bright, With an infant on her arm; The shrift is done, the friar is gone, Next morning, all in Littlecote Hall Scott's ballad of Wild Darrell was founded upon a story, first told by Aubrey, but for which the poet was indebted to Lord Webb Seymour. An old mid-wife sitting over her fire one dark November night was roused by a loud knocking at the door. Upon opening it, she saw a horseman, who told her, her services were required by a lady of rank, and would be paid for handsomely; but as there were family reasons why the affair should be kept secret, she must submit to be conducted to her patient blindfolded. She agreed, allowed her eyes to be bandaged, and took her place on the pillion. After a and when journey of many miles, her conductor stopped, led her into a house, and removed the bandage. The mid-wife found herself in a handsome bedchamber, and in presence of a lady and a ferocious looking man. A boy was born. Snatching it from the woman's arms, the man threw the babe on the blazing fire; it rolled upon the hearth. Spite of the entreaties of the horrified midwife, and the piteous prayers of the poor mother, the ruffian thrust the child under the grate, and raked the hot coals over it. The innocent accomplice was then ordered to return whence she came, as she came; the man who had brought her seeing her home again, and paying her for her pains. The woman lost no time in letting a magistrate know what she had seen that November night. She had been sharp enough to cut a piece out of the bedcurtain, and sew it in again, and to count the steps of the long staircase she had ascended and descended. By these means the scene of the infanticide was identified, and the murderer Darrell, Lord of Littlecote House, Berkshire, was tried at Salisbury. He escaped the gallows by bribing the judge, only to break It was hardly fair to make Darrell worse than he was, by laying a second murder at his door, merely to give a local habitation and a name to a Scotch tale of murder that might have been an adaptation of the Berkshire tragedy. Somewhere about the beginning of the last century, an Edinburgh clergyman was called out of his bed at midnight on the pretext that he was wanted to pray with a person at the point of death. The good man obeyed the summons without hesitation, but wished he had not done so, when upon his sedanchair reaching an out-of-the-way part of the city, its bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded, and cut his protestations short by threatening to blow out his brains, if he refused to do their bidding. Like the sensible man he was, he submitted without further parley, and the sedan moved on again. By-and-by, he felt he was being carried up stairs; the chair stopped, the clergyman was handed out, his eyes uncovered, and his attention directed to a young and beautiful lady lying in bed with an infant by her side. Not seeing any signs of dying about her, he ventured to say so, but was commanded to lose no time in offering up such prayers as were fitting for a person at the last extremity. Having done his office, he was put into the chair and taken down-stairs, a pistolshot startling his ears on the way. He soon found himself safe at home, a purse of gold in his hand, and his ears still ringing with the warning he had received, that if he said one word about the transaction, his life would pay for the indiscretion. At last he fell off to sleep, to be awakened by a servant with the news that a certain great house in the Canongate had been burned down, and the daughter of its owner perished in the flames. The clergyman had been long dead, when a fire broke out on the very same spot, and there, amid the flames, was seen a beautiful woman, in an extraordinarily rich nightdress of the fashion of half a century before. While the awe-struck spectators gazed in wonder, the apparition cried: Anes burned, twice burned; the third time I'll scare you all!' The midwife of the Littlecote legend and the divine of the Edinburgh one were more fortunate than the Irish doctor living at Rome in 1743; this gentleman, according to Lady Hamilton, being taken blindfolded to a house, and compelled to open the veins of a young lady who had loved not wisely, but too well. In the year 1400, Ginevra de Amiera, a Florentine beauty, married, under parental pressure, a man who had failed to win her heart, that she had given to Antonio Rondinelli. Soon afterwards, the plague broke out in Florence; Ginevra fell ill, apparently succumbed to the malady, and being pronounced dead, was the same day consigned to the family tomb. Some one, however, had blundered in the matter, for in the middle of the night, the entombed bride woke out of her trance, and badly as her living relatives had behaved, found her dead ones still less to her liking, and lost no time in quitting the silent company, upon whose quietude she had unwittingly intruded. Speeding through the sleep wrapped streets as swiftly as her clinging cerements allowed, Ginevra sought the home from which she had so lately been borne. Roused from his slumbers by a knocking at the door, the disconsolate widower of a day cautiously opened an upper window, and seeing a shrouded figure waiting below, in whose upturned face he recognised the lineaments of the dear departed, he cried : Go in peace, blessed spirit,' and shut the window precipitately. With sinking heart and slackened step the repulsed wife made her way to her father's door, to receive the like benison from her dismayed parent. Then she crawled on to an uncle's, where the door was indeed opened, but only to be slammed in her face by the frightened man, who, in his hurry, forgot even to bless his ghostly caller. The cool night-air penetrating the undress of the hapless wanderer, made her tremble and shiver, as she thought she had waked to life only to die again in the cruel streets. Ah! she sighed, Antonio would not have proved so unkind.' This thought naturally suggested it was her duty to test his love and courage; it would be time enough to die if he proved like the rest. The way was long, but hope renerved her limbs, and soon Ginevra was knocking timidly at Rondinelli's door. He opened it himself, and although startled by the ghastly vision, calmly inquired what the spirit wanted with him. Throwing her shroud away from her face, Ginevra exclaimed: 'I am no spirit, Antonio; I am that Ginevra you once loved, who was buried yesterday-buried alive!' and fell senseless into the welcoming arms of her astonished, delighted lover, whose cries for help soon brought down his sympathising family to hear the wondrous story, and bear its heroine to bed, to be tenderly tended until she had recovered from the shock, and was as beautiful as ever again. Then came the difficulty. Was Ginevra to return to the man who had buried her, and shut his doors against her, or give herself to the man who had saved her from a second death? With such powerful special pleaders as love and gratitude on his side, of course Rondinelli won the day, and a private marriage made the lovers amends for previous disappointment. They, however, had no intention of keeping in hiding, but the very first Sunday after they became man and wife, appeared in public together at the cathedral, to the confusion and wonder of Ginevra's friends. An explanation ensued, which satisfied everybody except the lady's first husband, who insisted that nothing but her dying in genuine earnest could dissolve the original matrimonial bond. The case was referred to the bishop, who, having no precedent to curb his decision, rose superior to technicalities and declared that the first husband had forfeited all right to Ginevra, and must pay over to Rondinelli the dowry he had received with her a decree at which we may be sure all true lovers in fair Florence heartily rejoiced. This Italian romance of real life has its counterpart in a French cause célèbre, but the Gallic version unfortunately lacks names and dates; it differs, too, considerably in matters of detail; instead of the lady being a supposed victim of the plague, which in the older story secured her hasty interment, she was supposed to have died of grief at being wedded against her inclination; instead of coming to life of her own accord, and seeking her lover as a last resource, the French heroine was taken out of her grave by her lover, who suspected she was not really dead, and resuscitated by his exertions, to flee with him to England. After living happily together there for ten years, the strangely united couple ventured to visit Paris, where the first husband accidentally meeting the lady, was struck by her resemblance to his dead wife, found out her abode, and finally claimed her for his own. When the case came for trial, the second husband did not dispute the fact of identity, but pleaded that his rival had renounced all claim to the lady by ordering her to be buried, without first making sure she was dead, and that she would have been dead and rotting in her grave if he had not rescued her. The court was saved the trouble of deciding the knotty point, for, seeing that it was likely to pronounce against them, the fond pair quietly slipped out of France, and found refuge in a foreign clime, where their love continued sacred and entire, till death conveyed them to those happy regions where love knows no end, and is confined within no limits.' Of dead-alive ladies brought to consciousness by sacrilegious robbers, covetous of the rings upon their cold fingers, no less than seven stories, differing but slightly from each other, have been preserved; in one, the scene is laid in Halifax; in another, in Gloucestershire; in a third, in Somersetshire; in the fourth, in Drogheda; the remaining three being appropriated by as many towns in Ger many. Ring-stories have a knack of running in one groove. Herodotus tells us how Amasis advised Polycrates, as a charm against misfortune, to throw away some gem he especially valued; how, taking the advice, Polycrates went seaward in a boat, and cast his favorite ring into the ocean; and how, a few days afterwards, a fisherman caught a large fish so extraordinarily fine, that he thought it fit only for the royal table, and accordingly presented it to the fortunate monarch, who ordered it to be dressed for supper; and lo! when the fish was opened, the surprised cook's astonished eye beheld his master's cast-away ring; much to that master's delight, but his adviser's dismay; for when Amasis heard of the wonderful event, he immediately despatched a herald to break his contract of friendship with Polycrates, feeling confident the latter would come to an ill end, 'as he prospered in everything, even finding what he had thrown away.' The city of Glasgow owes the ring-holding salmon figuring in its armorial bearings to a legend concerning its patron saint, Kentigern, thus told in the Acta Sanctorum: A queen having formed an improper attachment to a handsome soldier, put upon his finger a precious ring which her own lord had conferred upon her. The king, made aware of the fact, but dissembling his anger, took an opportunity in hunting, while the soldier lay asleep beside the Clyde, to snatch. off the ring, and throw it into the river. Then returning home along with the soldier, he demanded of the queen the ring he had given her. She sent secretly to the soldier for the ring, which could not be restored. In great terror she then despatched a messenger to ask the assistance of the holy Kentigern. He, who knew of the affair, before being informed of it, went to the river Clyde, and having caught a salmon, took from the stomach the missing ring, which he sent to the queen. She joyfully went with it to the king, who, thinking he had wronged her, swore he would be revenged upon her accusers; but she, affecting a forgiving temper, besought him to pardon them, as she had done. At the same time, she confessed her error to Kentigern, and solemnly vowed to be more careful of her conduct in future.' In 1559, a merchant and alderman of Newcastle, named Anderson, handling his ring. as he leaned over the bridge, dropped it in the Tyne. Some time after, his servant |