a loft above. Ropes and pulleys connected with elevators | in a rafter over the head of the bed, and from another a and derricks filled up the space near the huge windows, or, rather, openings, with solid wooden screens or shutters sliding across them when needed, and the tops of some of these machines protruded oddly over the rude banisters that protected the platform just above the ladder. On the platform, lighted by a window on the upper part of the small, beautiful silver crucifix attached to a holy-water vessel of the same metal. Nevertheless, the hunchback" protégé had never been sent to the Sunday catechism-class, nor had he been known to have made his first communion. But then this might have taken place when he was at a distant boarding-school. THE HUNCHBACK'S LEGACY.-TWO FAMOUS SURGEONS, AND THREE ODD-LOOKING MEN, SUGGESTIVE OF LIBRARIES AND ANCIENT FOLIOS, WERE ALSO PRESENT. THE YOUNG MAN HEAD HIS UNCLE'S PAPER HIMSELF." sharp gable, and surrounded by a solid wooden parapet three feet high, lived the hunchback, Hyppolite. His bed was a large clean bag filled with fresh straw, but above it was a quilt of eider-down-the covering cashmere in large brown and yellow squares-and over this two down pillows with canvas bags for pillow-cases. A villainous little colored print of a hypothetical martyr, with the name "S. Hyppolite" beneath, hung from a nail Besides the bed, there was one chair, strong and new, a common table with many ink-stains and two huge, deep drawers, an iron washstand, and a large old coffer, much like a meal-chest, as it had four compartments, but suggestive of more romantic things, as each compartment had a huge lock of antique and intricate make, each key-ward being different; while one compartment had two locks, and seemed divided longitudinally. This chest was riveted to the floor and also made fast from above to a heavy chain that reached the dim confusion of cobwebbed rafters overhead. Hyppolite gravely averred that one of the four compartments had some secret communication with the belfry of the cathedral, and that if thieves should happen to touch this coffer, one of the bells of Notre Dame would ring of itself. He found a great many believers in this assertion, though, of course, thieves had tried more than once to rifle the contents of the coffer. Popular accounts said that they had been baffled each time by the crowd of people in the building, and suspicious noises near them, while the only time any one had been known to get one of the lids open, a blank and open space appeared as the only reward of the useless labor. During the war of 1870 the hunchback's nephew fought as a Garde National, and it was understood that during the Commune Hyppolite had hidden away an unlucky individual in his loft, and conveyed him to safety by night through his friends on the river, but the familiar figure was seldom seen during the chaotic time. When order was re-established, he took up his old stand again on the bridge, and begged more undisguisedly than ever, especially from the swarms of curious foreigners who came to contrast the ruins of Paris with its former brilliancy. One day, in the year of the exhbition, he was missing from his place, and all thought he had gone on a journey. But five days after his nephew came to take away the small possessions he had left on the sidewalk of the bridge, and told the bystanders that the old man was dead. He had died the day previous, rather suddenly, from the obstinate effects of a cold caught by sitting in soaking clothes after a violent shower of rain. A priest had been with him at the last, and he had died orthodoxly, though leaving a surprisingly moderate sum for Masses for his soul's repose-moderate by comparison with the reputation for immense wealth which he had left behind him. His nephew alone seemed reither surprised, disappointed, nor uneasy. The old man had told him all his secrets. The larger part of the money Hyppolite prssessed had gone to educate this boy, and fit him for making his own fortune, When the few legal formalities were over, the young man asked several of his uncle's friends to meet him in the loft and hear a manuscript read, which Hyppolite had desired to make public after his death. Two famous surgeons, and personally known to the dead man, and three odd-looking men, suggestive of libraries and ancient folios, were also present. The young man read his uncle's papers himself. It was not very long, and to all intents and purposes it was more his will than the formal document thus named, which one of the lawyers present had under lock and key at his office. The substance of the paper ran thus: "I was born in Morlain, Department de la Somme, and was the youngest of a family of five. My brothers and sisters are all alive and well-to-do. I was a hunchback from my birth. My mother died when I was born, and my father always rather disliked me. Most deformed persons can guess my experience, and I found no relief at home from the jeers and insults I received out of doors. "My foster-mother was the only one who ever showed me love, but her husband and older sons disliked and mocked at me. At school it was much the same. I learned faster than some of the boys, and they hated me for it. I knew now that I was impish and crabbed, and provoked my schoolfellows, but I thought then that all the fault was on their side. I began early to wonder why I had a hump, and why I grew broad instead of growing tall. My father made money and was elected mayor, and my eldest sister married a rich merchant's son from the south of France, while the rest of my brothers and sisters went to fashionable boarding-schools. When I was thirteen I ran away, and have never been home or communicated with my family since. They think, doubtless, that I died long ago. My father died only three years ago. I kept myself informed through the police of all that befell my relatives. "I went to Algeria first, on board of a French ship, where I was cabin-boy. After knocking along among the soldiers, who were kinder to me than my own people had been, and for whom I did odd jobs, an old Turk took a fancy to me, and bought me of myself that is, he promised me a certain sum, half down, and half when my engagement should be over, if I would live with him and do all he wanted me to, for three years. "I consented, having already in my mind's eye the making of a moderate fortune. My master made me a sort of jester in his house-that is, as far as an Oriental can be said to appreciate a jester. I iuterpreted for him, too, as he often had dealings with Europeans, and now and then I was allowed to amuse his wives. If I had not been stunted and deformed, of course, this would not have been allowed. "He wanted me to be a spy on his youngest wife, and I refused, expecting to be at least dismissed; but no, he only laughed grimly, and said no more. Nothing romantic happened; his wife did not run away, nor did I ever help in any intrigue between Frenchmen and Algerian women, either in my master's or any other household. "I staid out my three years and got my money, and my master offered to renew the engagement for another three years at a rather higher rate of payment. I was tired of the service and wanted a change, so I left him, worked my passage back to Marseilles, and there set up a stall of a few cheap Algerian baubles, all gifts to me from my friends in Africa, and some cheap eatables. "I never spent a sou except to buy food; I slept in my stall. More and more I wondered why I had chanced to be a hunchback, and the kind of infidelity which crept upon me was not that blasphemous, frivolous atheism common to my countrymen, especially the uneducated or imperfectly taught, but a serious inquiring, dreaming unbelief. "I grew to have a morbid curiosity about humps, and the history of hunchbacks, and some old prints I saw at a book-stall-medieval illustrations of various diseases and deformities, called "The Strokes of God"-finished my fascination. "Buying these was my first unnecessary investment. Since then I have bought tons of matter, printed and engraved, on the subject of humps, and the personal history of hunchbacks-some famous, some obscure. I have searched church registers in France, Germany, Switzerland, the north of Italy, and the north of Spain, for descriptions of deformed infants; I have read all the medical and surgical books I could find or buy on tho subject; I have paid money to great surgeons in various countries to follow their public lectures on humps, or listened to private information and explanations from them; I have witnessed the dissection of the bodies of hunchbacks, and especially the examination of their humps. "I have gone through hospitals, searching for hunchbacked cripples, old or young, male or female; and it was while on one of these visits that I found my nephew, the I little son of a hunchbacked woman who had just died. took him home and brought him up as my own, having ascertained that beyond his mother no one was likely to claim the baby boy. "This was not Paris, but in a large city in the west of France, where I lived some time, because the public library possessed records of a medieval hunchback, whose history I was studying. I could only see the books at the library, so I took notes and copied pages, and left the child all day at the crèche, or infant-school, kept by some Sisters of Charity. "I found begging, on the whole, rather a better way of making money than selling anything; but I often alternated one mode of life with the other, as suited my studies best. On Sundays I always took care to be at the door of some crowded church, and I never failed to make a harvest, generally of silver. "Once or twice I was robbed, and after that I took the precaution of keeping my money in a bank in Paris. I never went there on foot, but dressed well and took a coupe. My banker never knew who or what I was. I consulted him on the choice of a school for my nephew, and he furnished to the school authorities the necessary references concerning myself and the boy; that was all the intercourse we had. "I made one or two friends in Paris, chiefly foreigners. All who knew me will ask if I ever had any love affairs, and, perhaps, will not believe me when I say that I never spoke of love to a woman, or held communication with any woman, save as a matter of business. I was in love, however, and since I began I have never left off. I shall die loving one woman as strongly as I have for nearly half my lifetime. She was sixteen when I first saw her coming out of church, and she gave me money. I saw her married two years after in the same church, and every time we met she gave me alms; we never spoke. I was twice as old as she. "She is living still, and has a circle of grandchildren round her. I went every year to the town where she lives, and stood as I had stood when I first saw her-on the church-steps. She always gave me silver, and I kept all she gave me; part of it I had made into a plain ring, with which I shall be buried, the rest made the silver bénitier” -holy water vessel-"which hangs over my bed, and which I beg of my nephew to send her, anonymously, as a souvenir of one who admired her piety and charity. Her address I leave in a sealed packet, the contents of which are for my nephew's eyes alone. "The strong box in my granary loft contains my papers, books, notes, etc.; material for a work on 'Humps and Hunchbacks,' which I have begun-or, rather, mapped out. I leave money enough to pay the expenses of publication, besides a sum to endow one bed for a humpbacked cripple in the hospital at Morlain, my birthplace. My nephew has the rest, and the entire control of all arrangements. I wish him to send a copy of this short account of my life to each of my brothers and sisters. "During the Commune I became a Christian, through seeing the devoted conduct of those whom the mob denounced as scorpions. I die in a happy belief in God and trust in His providence. "I am glad to believe in the same God as the true and gentle woman whom I have loved so many years. My nephew has my blessing and my thanks for having rewarded me by his steady behavior for all I have done for him. I sign my real name, MATHIEN VILLETTE." The company gathered in this singular chamber to hear the reading of this singular will were rather disappointed at the absence of any sensational incident in the narrative, or hint of a large fortune hoarded in a romantic manner. Real life has many phases, each extraordinary in itself, but they seldom fit into each other so as to produce the coincidences necessary to a novelist. The history of Hippolite might have been twisted into several novels, each different in its plot and treatment, according to the different stages of the real history at which the imagination of the writer should have branched out into appropriate details. The most unlikely part of the tale, to those who know only the conventional phases of current literature, is the behavior of the hunchback's nephew, who is steady and grave, rising in his profession-civil engineeringand occupying his spare hours in editing Hyppolite's curious collection of papers conjointly with one of the librarians of the National Library, in Paris, and one of the three most famous surgeons of France. IN VAIN. CLASP closer arms, press closer lips, Will crimson 'neath your pressing. She waits you now-but in the far With patient eyes fixed on the door Till death's dark wall rose cold between Now silenced lies the gentlest heart By you, a fickle lover! Your wrongs to her knew never end, Her parting soul and heaven. Lies hushed in dreamless sleeping. As she whose heart I've broken." THE MARINER'S COMPASS. BY WILLIAM DURHAM, F.R.S.E. THE early knowledge of elementary scientific facts, and the slow progress of their investigation and practical application to the wants of civilized life, are well illustrated in the history of the compass. The ancient Greeks and Romans were quite aware of the attracting power of native iron magnets, or loadstones,* and also that this power could be communicated to iron, and maintained by it for a length of time. No one amongst them, however, had ever noticed the behavior of an elongated bar of magnetized iron suspended by a cord or floated in water, and to this oversight must be attributed the lateness of the discovery of "terrestrial magnetism, and the long period that elapsed before the compass was used by Europeans as a guide over the trackless paths of ocean. That remarkable people, the Chinese, seem, however, at a very early date, to have used the directive power of the compass to guide them in their journeys over the vast plains of Tartary. They made little images, whose arm, moved by a freely suspended magnet, pointed continually toward the south, An apparatus of this kind, called fsenan, or "indicator of the south," was presented to ambassadors from Cochin China, to guide them in their homeward journey, 1,100 years before our era. The knowledge the Chinese thus possessed seems to have gradually traveled westward by means of the Arabs and Crusaders, but it was fully 2,000 years afterward before A magnetic needle is attached to the underside of a circular card of some semi-transparent substance, such as talc. On this card is engraved a radiating diagram, dividing the circle into thirty-two parts, called points. The needle, with the card attached, is delicately balanced on a central pivot, round which it is free to move in a horizontal plane. The position of the card, of course, indicates the position of the needle below. The needle and its support are inclosed in a small metallic box, which is hung so as to preserve its horizontal position notwithstanding the rolling or pitching of the ship. This is accomplished by means of gimbals, which are two metallic rings one within the other; the compassbox is swung on the inner ring by two small supports it was fairly applied among the nations of Western Europe. Since then, owing to its practical value and scientific interest, terrestrial magnetism has formed one of the most attractive and, at the same time, most difficult subjects of scientific investigation, and promises to lead to results of the highest importance in our knowledge of the arrangements of nature. The immense stimulus which the application of the compass gave to navigation, and consequently to intercourse between distant lands, may be appreciated when we remember that, before that, sailors having only the positions of the sun and stars to guide them, were completely bewildered when they were hid by clouds or storms, and consequently were afraid to venture upon the open sea. In a seafaring nation like our own, the "mariner's compass" is an object familiar to almost every one, and may be very briefly described. diametrically opposite, and the inner ring is, in its turn, supported on the outer one in a similar manner, but the points of support are at right angles to those of the box, as shown on next page, where A A are the supports of the compass, and в в those of the inner ring. The whole is fixed in the top of a strong case, called the binnacle, firmly secured to the deck of the ship. The binnacle has a pane of glass in front by which light may be admitted at night to illuminate the interior. The whole is shown on succeeding page, K being the glass in front. In the practical use of the compass it is necessary that we should know and guard against certain disturbing influences on its direction, lest the very means the unwary takes to insure his safety may lead to his shipwreck and death. One or two experiments will make these plain. (1) If another suspended magnetic needle is brought near the compass, we shall find that the ends of the two needles which point northward will repel one another, while the end of one needle which points south will attract ship, which can, therefore, be allowed for when observathe end of the other which points north. (2) If any piece of iron or steel is brought near either end of the compass-needle, the latter will be attracted out of its proper direction. This we know to be due to what is called the inductive power of the magnet acting on the iron, and endowing it with temporary magnetic power, when mutual attraction is set up. These actions between magnets and iron are exactly analogous to those between electrified bodies. (4) If any piece of hard iron or steel is allowed to remain in contact with a magnet for some time, it will acquire the properties of a permanent magnet, and be capable of attracting or repelling the poles of the compassneedle as described above. These three experiments point out at once the manner in which the earth acts on the direction of the compass, and the source of those disturbing influences to which we have referred. As the compass-needle always swings round to the north and south direction when it is free to move, it is evident that the northern part of the earth possesses the properties of the south-pointing pole of the needle, as it attracts the north pole, and also that the southern part of the earth possesses the properties of the north pole of the needle that it is, in fact, just a large magnet with the pole turned in opposite directions to those of the 1 compass, or, to use a common expression, "turned end for end." B The earth, therefore, is capable of inducing temporary or permanent magnetism on iron or steel, as described in experiments (2) and (3). As many of our ships are entirely built of iron, and all of them contain more or less of that metal in their structure, it becomes a question of great importance to know how to avoid the danger of any magnetism, temporary or permanent, induced by the earth's action, so disturbing the direction of the compass so as to mislead the navigator. A THE MAGNETIC NEEDLE AND ITS SUPPORT. The inductive action of the compass-needle itself can be pretty well guarded against by having it small and placed at such a distance from any ironwork that its effects may be practically of no moment. The earth's action, however, cannot be so easily disposed of, and various methods are adopted for correcting the compass so as to know the true direction due to the earth's magnetism acting directly on the needle. To correct for any permanent magnetism, the ship is brought into such a position that the needle points to the true magnetic north and south, or is in the magnetic meridian of the place of observation; the ship is then turned gradually round on its centre as a pivot, turning, say, from north to west; if there be any permanent magnetism in its iron the compass will be moved gradually away from its position toward the one side or other of the meridan. As the vessel gradually turns towards the south, the needle also will gradually regain its first position; again, as the vessel continues turning towards the east, the needle will deviate in the opposite direction to its former movement, again returning to the magnetic meridian as the ship returns to its first position. The arc which the end of the needle describes to the one and the other side of the magnetic meridian is a measure of the magnetism of the tions are made at sea. The correction for temporarily induced magnetism is a much more difficult problem, as that is continually changing in amount and direction, according to the relative position of the ship, its cargo.(which may be composed of magnetic material), and the magnetic lines of force of the earth. The principle employed, however, may be explained as follows. The variation of the compass caused by the influence of the vessel and its cargo having been determined in the described, the compass is taken on shore and placed upon manner just a wooden pillar capable of being turned round in a horizontal plane in the same manner as the ship; pieces of iron are inserted in this pillar in such a way that their effects on the compass, when the pillar is turned round on its axis, is exactly the same as that produced by the ship, etc. The pillar, and the compass on it, are now both transferred to the ship, and if the latter is now turned as before, it is evident the effect on the compass will bo doubled. To know, therefore, the amount of correction requisite at any time, it is only necessary to note the position of the compass, and then remove the iron from the pillar, when, of course, the needle will go back toward its proper direction. The amount it goes back just requires to be doubled to give its true position. Thus if it goes back 2°, its true position is 40 from that observed before the iron of the pillar was removed. Having pointed out the precautions necessary to be taken in the use of a compass as a guide, we now come to the consideration of "terrestrial magnetism," on a correct knowledge of which the value of that instrument depends. If the earth were a regular magnet, like a symmetrical bar of magnetized steel, the compass would everywhere be directed due north and south; the magnetic and |