own child remained; but, when the shock caused by his disappearance had a little subsided, they congratulated themselves at having got rid of his elfish substitute.

Less quaint but more poetical than the above is the legend of Rhoda Devlin. Two farmhouses at the foot of Carrick Brae were inhabited by John Devlin and Mark Callaghan. Exactly between their two farms arose the rocky hill, which was overgrown in parts with stunted hazel bushes, wild roses, and woodbine, leaving patches of scanty grass here and there where sheep or pigs might graze. Each farmer kept three gaunt pigs, as different from the sleek animals of the present day as can be imagined; and, as it was then the custom to keep them out of doors in summer, they used to send the pigs to the Brae. An amicable arrangement was made that Rhoda Devlin and Nancy Callaghan should feed these six interesting creatures day about. When it happened to be little Rhoda's day for carrying the bucket of potato-skins and buttermilk to the pigs' trough upon the Brae, she was wont to set out in high spirits, the sunshine making her yellow ringlets shine like gold, and every one who met her used to say, "What a beautiful child!" Nobody said this of Nancy, who was merely a stout, round-faced girl, like a hundred other peasant children. The beautiful Rhoda loved to play, and gather bouquets of roses, bluebells, and fairy thimbles on the Brae; and she had many pretty fancies about the nooks and tangles, and the little arbours underneath the bracken. She liked to linger there much better than to help her mother to wash the dishes, feed the poultry, or bake the cakes for supper.

• It was on a warm summer afternoon that she took her bucket, and set out for the Brae. The afternoon faded into evening, and her mother far as the green gate to look for her before she

went many times as appeared.

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Naughty child, what kept you frae your work?" asked Mrs.

Devlin.

"Oh, mammy, dinna be angry! It was the nice, wee childer on the Brae made me stop to play wi' them, an' the time went by."

"What childer is those, Rhoda?"

"I dinna know, mammy."

Maybe they belong to those M'Phersons that's come to Mr. Graham's new house down there at Carrick?"

"I dinna know," repeated the child.

"Weel, Rhoda," said her mother, pushing her roughly into the kitchen, "be they wha they may, you'll no leave your work again-idle, bad child!"

Next day it was Nancy's turn to feed the pigs, and she did not meet with any company to idle her; but on the day after that Rhoda went again. It was sunset before she returned. She was received with reproaches, to which she replied

"It was the nice, wee childer kept me, an' wouldna let me go;

an'

oh! mammy, dinna send me to the Brae again, for they say they'll keep me the next time, an' no let me awa any more."

She sobbed bitterly, and seemed to be in the liveliest terror. "Nonsense! Stop talking that foolishness!" said her father and mother, angrily.

A kind of horror appeared to possess the child: she could not be induced to settle to anything, and her restlessness increased as the hour for her next visit drew near.

"Here, be off wi' you, Rhoda," said John Devlin, putting the bucket into her hand.

"Oh, daddy, please, dinna send me! Let Mick go the day," cried the child, clasping her hands.

"Mick has his work to do. Was there ever sich a contrairy child! Go this very minute, an' tell the childer your father bids you come home at wanst."

Very slowly Rhoda lifted her pail, and turned to go, sobbing bitterly as she went. She never came home. Evening-sunset-twilight came, and brought no sign of her. Search was made upon the Brae; but no trace of her could be discovered beyond the empty bucket, and a bunch of faded foxgloves laid upon a stone. The neighbours had not seen her, and very grave indeed they looked when they heard the story.

"You shouldna ha' sent her back, when she fleeched you sae sore. Sure she was a bonnie wean, an' it's like enough the wee folk set their hearts on her. She'll be weel done for wi' them, for it's said they ha' fine houses underground, furnished like a gentleman's parlour, an' the very best o' gude living;-but it is to be feared that you'll see her nae mair."

This was cold comfort for the heart broken parents. Mrs. Devlin kept vigil upon the Brae on May eves and Hallowe'ens, for at such times mortals, it is said, may see the elfin people; but, alas! she never saw her child. She saw the powder fall from the catkins, and the hazel plumes nod to the May breeze, but never her pretty Rhoda's yellow curls. She heard fairy pipers play in the distance; and in chill October withered benweeds rustled like footsteps on the Brae; but she never heard the elphin troop ride by, nor ever caught the sound of her lost child's voice.

L. M'C.

Great Storms.

GREAT storms may be compared to those waves on a perturbed sea which rise higher than their fellows, because representing in reality the combined mass of several waves. It is not probable that the causes producing storms vary from time to time in energy, except within very narrow limits. The sun is always pouring forth his heat with unvarying abundance, though as the earth draws slightly nearer to him, or passes slightly farther from him, in traversing her slightly eccentric orbit, she receives a greater or smaller proportion of the heat which he emits. And again, though hour by hour the face of the earth turned sunwards is changing, and though as the year proceeds she now bows her northern, now her southern regions more fully towards him, yet it is not from changes such as these that great storms proceed. Such changes proceed too slowly and too uniformly to generate of themselves great atmospheric disturbances. It is in the accidental combination of irregular causes of atmospheric disturbance, not in regular variations in the action of the great source of all the atmospheric motions, that destructive hurricanes have their origin. And in this respect great storms may well be compared to those great waves which from time to time overtop their fellows on a storm-tossed sea. For such waves are not produced by the action of fiercer blasts than have perturbed the sea around them. Every portion of that sea has been equally disturbed, or nearly so. But it is because in some cases wave-movements chance to be so associated with others that wave-crests coalesce with wave-crests, and hollows with hollows, producing greater disturbance, while in other cases the wavecrests of one set agree with the hollows of another, and vice versa, reducing the disturbance, that waves over the perturbed sea are unequal; and when it so chances that several waves coalesce into one, we have one of those mighty waves which seamen dread. A ship shall have stood for hours the full brunt of a storm, riding over the lesser waves, and reeling indeed before the larger, but rising again after they have passed, when an unlucky chance will bring a wave upon her in which the waters of many waves are gathered; and at one blow she will be disabled. So with the great storms which are remembered for many years. been a stormy season. The winds have now raged for awhile, and have anon lulled; but for weeks there has been no very terrible storm in any part of the wind-swept region; at length, however, it so chances that several storms combining into one, within some limited area, a hurricane occurs which carries desolation in its track. Such was the storm which

There has

lately destroyed nearly a quarter of a million of lives in India, such the great storm of 1780. And there have been others as terrible, and only less destructive because their chief fury was spent in thinly-peopled regions.

We propose to consider some of the more remarkable storms recorded in the annals of meteorology, and then to inquire how far the evidence seems to suggest either the possibility of anticipating the approach of such great storms, or else of providing measures by which, when they occur in certain regions, their effects may be rendered less disastrous than they have been heretofore.

The most terrible storm which has, perhaps, ever occurred is that which has been called the Great Storm. It occurred, or rather its worst effects were experienced, on October 10, 1780. Generated probably in mid-Atlantic, not far from the equator, it was first felt in Barbadoes, where trees and houses were blown down. Captain Maury, in his "Physical Geography of the Sea," gives a rather exaggerated account of the effects produced by this storm in Barbadoes, apparently from memory-some of the details being like, but not quite the same as those actually recorded. He says "the bark was blown from the trees, and the fruits of the earth destroyed; the very bottom and depths of the sea were uprooted-forts and castles were washed away, and their great guns carried in the air like chaff." The bark of trees was removed, but, it is believed rather through the effects of electric action than by the power of the wind. Cannon, also, were driven along the batteries, and flung over into the fosse, but not "carried in the air like chaff." At Martinique the storm overtook a French transport fleet, and entirely destroyed it. There were forty vessels, conveying 4,000 soldiers, and the Governor of Martinique reported their fate to the French Government in three words "The vessels disappeared." 9,000 persons perished at Martinique, and 1,000 at St. Pierre, where not a house was left standing. St. Domingo, St. Vincent, St. Eustache, and Porto Rico were next visited and devastated, while scarcely a single vessel near this part of the cyclone's track was afloat on October 11. At Port Royal the cathedral, seven churches, and 1,400 houses were blown down, and 1,600 sick and wounded persons were buried beneath the ruins of the hospital. At the Bermudas, fifty British ships were driven ashore, two line-ofbattle ships went down at sea, and 22,000 persons perished.

Perhaps the most remarkable effects of the storm in this portion of its course were those experienced in the Leeward Isles. The hurricane drove a twelve-pounder cannon a distance of 400 feet. Those who lived in the Government Building took refuge in the central part, where circular walls, nearly a yard thick, seemed to afford promise of safety. But at half-past eleven, the wind had broken down parts of these walls, and lifted off the roof. Terrified they sought refuge in the cellarage, but before long the water had risen there to the height of more than a yard, and they were driven into the battery, where they placed themselves behind the heavier cannons, some of which were driven from their place

by the force of the wind. When day broke the country looked as if it had been blasted by fire; not a leaf, scarce even a branch, remained upon

the trees.

As in great floods a common terror preserves peace among animals which usually war upon each other, so during the Great Storm human passions were for the time quelled by the fiercer war of the elements. Among the ships destroyed at Martinique were two English war-ships. Twenty-five sailors who survived surrendered themselves prisoners to the Marquis of Bouillé, the Governor of the island. But he sent them to St. Lucie, writing to the English Governor of that island that "he was unwilling to retain as prisoners men who had fallen into his hands during a disaster from which so many had suffered."

The Great Storm of 1780 must not be confounded with the storm remembered for many years in Great Britain as the Great Storm. The latter occurred on November 26, 1703, and its worst effects were experienced not as usual in the tropics, but in Western Europe. The reader will remember Macaulay's reference to it in his Essay on the "Life and Writings of Addison." In his famous poem The Campaign, Addison had compared Marlborough to an angel guiding the whirlwind. "We must point out," writes Macaulay, one circumstance which appears to have escaped all the critics. The extraordinary effect which this simile produced when it first appeared, and which to the following generation appeared inexplicable, is doubtless to be chiefly attributed to a line which most readers now regard as a feeble parenthesis,—

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Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia passed.

Addison spoke, not of a storm, but of the storm. The great tempest of November 1703, the only tempest which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane, had left a dreadful recollection in the minds of all men. No other tempest was ever in this country the occasion of a parliamentary address or of a public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. Large mansions had been blown down. One prelate had been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins of houses, still attested, in all the southern counties, the fury of the blast." He strangely omits to mention one of the most striking events connected with this terrible storm-the destruction of the Eddystone Lighthouse. Winstanley, the architect of the first Eddystone Lighthouse, was confident that it could resist the fiercest storm which ever blew, and expressed a hope that he might be in it when such a storm raged. On November 26, he arrived with a party of men who were engaged to repair the building. The Great Storm soon after began to blow and raged throughout the night. On the morning of the 27th no trace of the Lighthouse was to be seen.

It is probable that the Great Storm of 1703 owed its destructiveness