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when Australian ports were menaced by foreign fleets, forced the colonies into the fortification and protection of their own coasts, and created confidence in an ability for self-defense. The isolation of Australia from the English navy when hostile invasion threatens, and the inability of the colonies individually to repel aggression, stimulated a desire for a union as necessary to organize resistance against alien foes.

This sentiment has lately found expression in the assemblage of an Australian Convention at Sydney, New South Wales, for the consideration of the formation of an Australian Colonial Confederation.

Colonial tariff policies, free trade, and protection dogmas, local divisions, and jealousies, have long retarded the harmonious deliberation of such a conference. A touch of nature makes all the world kin. perception of a common danger silences petty envies, and ffaces many animosities.

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The Australias recognized "In union there is strength," and that a consolidated house is not easily conquered. The convention resolved upon confederative co-operaion, and submitted their action to the people.

Their resolutions provide for the creation of a Federal "Australian Council," to consist of two members from each colony, to hold annual sessions successively at the respective colonial capitals, and to be empowered with legislative jurisdiction over extradition, coastal defenses, naturalization, criminal immigration, quarantine, patents, copyrights, and Polynesian relations.

The Colonial Parliament will petition the Imperial Government for recognition of the "Council," and the world will doubtless soon witness the political birth of an English-speaking nation of 3,000,000 souls in the Southern Hemisphere. Had England chosen to foster the English and aristocratic tendencies there by creating a colonial nobility, the new government would undoubtedly be one of King, Lords and Commons: but with the House of Lords menaced in England, the new state with its vast area may be a federal republic.

THE EFFECT OF AGE ON THE EYE.

Ir is found on an average of observations, that at ten years of age the crystalline lens in the eye may be rendered so convex as to give a clear image of an object three inches away. At twenty-one it will also accommodate itself to an object four and a-half inches from the eye. Anything nearer will be obscure, because the lens will not assume a form sufficiently convex to refract to a focus on the retina rays of light divergent as any nearer object will radiate. At forty years of age the "near point" has reached to a distance of nine inches, and at fifty, to thirteen inches.

At sixty years of age the lens has so far lost its flexibility, and therefore its power of responding to the muscle, that it cannot ordinarily give a clear image of any object less than twenty-six inches away. At seventy-five the power of accommodation is wholly lost; light still passes through the eye, and is focused on the retina, but only when it comes in parallel rays. Parallel rays it can converge on the retina, but divergent rays require that extra refractive power which the aged eye has lost by the hardening of the lens.

Not as a matter of disease, then, but in the ordinary course of years, and in every eye alike, is the bodily sight gradually weaned from the scrutiny of near objects around, and permitted to turn a clear vision only upon the things far off.

THE FISHERMAN'S SONG.
BY HERMAN MERIVALE.

AFTER the battle, the peace is dear,
After the toil, the rest;

After the storm, when the skies are clear,
Fair is the ocean's breast.

Out in the gold sunshine
Throw we the net and line;
The silvery chase to-day
Calls us to work away,

So throw the line, throw-Yo, heave ho! Fishers must work when the treacherous sea, Smiles with a face of light,

Though the deep bed, where their fortunes be,
May be their grave ere night.
Out in the gold sunshine
Throw we the net and line;
The silvery lives to-day
Flash in the silvery spray,

So throw the line, throw-Yo, heave ho !

PRETTY POLLY PITKIN. BY SPENCER W. CONE.

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46

SUMMER or so ago two pleasant-faced matrons were seated on the shady side of the West End" at Long Branch. They were agreeably engaged, as mothers often are, in exchanging confidences touching their children. It required both of them to arrive at the plural in that respect, for Mrs. Timmins was blessed with an only child, a son, and Mrs. Pitkin similarly with one-a daughter.

The rather pretentious name originally given to the former was Rudolph, and to the latter Maria Louise. From babyhood, however, until the date hereof, when she frankly owned to her twentieth year, she had never been known as anything but pretty Polly Pitkin.

She was luckier, however, than Rudolph, whose name had early dwindled into "'Dolph," and never grew again.

Both matrons were widows; both were well-to-do in the world, but Mrs. Timmins was very well-to-do. In fact, the defunct Timmins père having made his million in Wall Street, like a truly worthy and considerate husband and father, as he was, was sensible enough to die before he had time to lose it again.

Near these worthy women sat also Pretty Polly Pitkin. She was a young lady blessed with a neat figure, blonde hair, mischievous blue eyes and uncommonly fine and rather sharp-looking little teeth.

Pretty Polly played just then at crochet, or tatting, or some such transparent pretense of work, and apparently wholly deaf to the confidences of the worthy matrons.

"My dear," said Mrs. Pitkin, almost in a whisper, "I don't know what to make of Polly. She'll be an old maid, as sure as she lives. I have never seen her treat a man with even common politeness. She says they are such brazen-faced, conceited apes, she can't bear the sight of them."

"Ah, me," replied Mrs. Timmins, in the same tone, "she would never say so of my Dolph, if she could see him; but she can't. Poor fellow! he is so awfully modest, he's as afraid of a woman as if she was a crocodile or an anaconda, and he a lawyer, too!"

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AUSTRALIA, AND ITS COLONIAL CONFEDERATION.-1. NORTH AND SOUTH BRISBANE. 2. BRISBANE WHARF AND TERRACES. 3, PARLIAMENT HOUSE AND BOTANIC GARDENS.

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At this point in the conversation Pretty Polly rose and sauntered away, saying to herself in the strictest confidence:

"Young, rich, good-looking, and an only son-too modest, though, by half. Perhaps it would be an act of Christian charity to cure him-perhaps !"

Some few weeks after this the following appeared among the "personals" in the New York Herald:

"A young lady, good-looking, accomplished, and of some means, desires to correspond with a young professional gentleman, with a view to matrimony. P. P."

For Rudolph Timmins, Esq., attorney-at-law, of No. Nassau Street, as for all men cursed with mauvaise honte, the mysterious, the romantic-the slightly improper, in fact-possessed å supreme fascination. In imagination, he was the hero of no end of gallant actions and interesting adventures. In fact, he would no more have attempted one in which a woman was involved than a sheep would chase a tiger.

He never left his house of a morning but he imagined himself stopping a pair of runaway horses, or something of the kind, dragging a lovely young woman, half-dead, from the carriage, bearing her in his manly arms to the nearest drug store, and receiving her tender thanks as she awoke to consciousness. In fact, he would quite as soon have embraced a red-hot stove as any young woman in any condition whatever.

This contradiction between fact and fancy naturally led him to read the "personals," the first thing after he opened his paper of a morning. Of course the "personal" above mentioned struck him on the instant. He re-read, considered, smiled. It was a wonderful "personal." It suited him to a T. It came to him as a sweet boon.

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Here," said he to himself, "is the very chance I have been looking for. I will embrace it. I will open a correspondence with the lovely "P. P."; of course she is lovely. I will throw into the correspondence all the hidden poesy and disappointed heroism of my nature. I will write like Abelard, and she will answer like Heloise. I will shroud myself, however, in impenetrable mystery. Thus I shall expand like a tropic flower in the sunshine of love, without risking the horrid chill that actual contact with a young woman always sends to the marrow of my bones."

This was no vain resolve. Timmins did it. He opened the correspondence. He signed himself "William Fitz Clarence Smith."

He was a model correspondent. So was "P. P." What one dispatched one day, the other answered on the next.

Timmins was right. He had arrived at the perfection of knowledge. He knew himself. In the secure shade of an imaginary name and a post-office box, he expanded like a big sunflower.

He gushed; he overflowed. For months, with everincreasing audacity; he made love on paper like Romeo and Lauzun rolled into one.

The correspondence became his real life-eating, drinking and sleeping a fictitious one. He was like the man who dreamed one dream every night, and went to bed early every night, to recommence it where he left off the night before.

Gathered in this cloud, with a confused idea that Timmins was Smith, or Smith Timmins, or that Smith was taking Timmins along with him to forcibly present him to "P. P.," and murder his romance for ever, he started to walk up Broadway

It required great resolution to do so. It was, in fact, a heroic act, since Broadway was thronged with women, and each had eyes-two eyes-which might be fixed upon him.

Through this terrible defile, occupied in force by a fierce and man-thirsty army of petticoats, and enfiladed by flying columns of female trailleurs, he came, however, in comparative safety, to the corner of Bleecker Street.

But there Fate sternly met him; for there, suddenly, as if she had come up out of the coal-hole in the pavement on a vampire trap, a young woman rose before him. True, she was a very quiet and well-behaved young person, and uncommonly innocent-looking.

She was, in fact, a blonde, plump as a partridge, and of a very active and self-posssessed appearance all over. Timmins walked fast; so did she. Timmins crawled along; so did she.

Was it accident? Was it design?

Heaven forbid that we should hint the latter. Yet this young person kept just a trifle in advance of Timmins.

Modest as he was, and especially because he was modest, he could not help seeing that she was there all the time; nor could he help thinking :

"If I were Smith, now, I should get in front of her, instead of dodging to keep behind. I should look at her; I should stare at her, in fact. Stare! Good heavens !"

And what a nice and particular young woman she was. She must have had a perfect horror of dust or mud. To have got a speck on the hem of her garment would probably have driven her out of her senses. Of course that was why, when she came to a street-crossing, she gathered her skirts so daintily and gave a little jump, graceful as Mistress Venus when she tripped before the pious Eneas, and she showed the goddess in her airy step.

To be sure, this permitted to be seen an uncommonly pretty foot and ankle, which, as Timmins walked with eyes modestly cast down and couldn't escape seeing them, came very near knocking him off his own feet at every gutter. His ears

Timmins blushed - Timmins perspired.

burned. He longed for rest and retreat to some vast ambiguity of shade where female gaiter boots would never haunt him more.

But if horror could be accumulated on horror's head, that identical result came at the corner of Fourteenth Street, where many human tides meet and shopping females dash and mingle like waves upon the sea-shore. There this curious young woman turned, gave a littlo start, stopped, and, in the easiest and most self-possessed manner, accosted him :

“Mr. Timmins, I believe ?" she said.

"Yes, Mrs.-Madam-" stammered Timmins. "Mr. Rudolph Timmins ?"

"Yes, Miss" stuttered Timmins, with a sensation as if the Domestic Sewing Machine building had fallen on top of his head, and Wallack's Theatre and the Morton House were dancing a jig around him in frantic exultation over his early extinction.

"Of No.-Nassau Street ?" continued the lady. "I have been recommended to you as a lawyer of great ability, and am disposed to place in your hands a case of the greatest importance and delicacy. At what hour shall I call at your office to-morrow ?"

"Call at my office !" exclaimed Timmins. "MadamMiss-I—”

"Let us say 11 A. M.," continued the imperturbable unknown. "And you may rely upon my punctuality. Good-afternoon, sir."

The young lady crossed Broadway; Timmins took the opposite direction, and staggered home in a state of mental paralysis.

Had he been master of himself, he would have shunned that office for a period of years. But like the murderer, whose buried victim draws him a thousand miles to revisit the scene of his crime, a fatal fascination dragged him to his doom. Ten o'clock found him shivering in his office.

By way of settling his nerves and screwing his courage to the sticking-point, he made desultory incursions into that pleasing title of the law which treats of "Baron and Feme," blushing in solitary and silent modesty at the mere idea of a state of "coverture." Some one knocked at the door. "Come in," faltered Timmins.

"I have been vilely used, and I mean to appeal to the law for redress-for vengeance !"

And Timmins dimly saw a small hand tightly clinched, and within an inch of his nose.

"Madam-Miss-I mean Mrs.- -"he stammered, "I -that is you-somebody — hadn't you better go to Judge Beach, or William M. Evarts-or some rising young lawyer like that—I'm not prepared-great heavens ! -and state your case, and"I shall go

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"No, sir!" she interrupted, decidedly. to no one but you. I shall state my case to nobody but you. I know your chivalrous nature. I rely on it all all my hopes are centred in it. You must help me-defend me-avenge me! My mind is fixed. You must!" "If I do, I'll be hanged!" said Timmins, mentally; but her eye was upon him, and he only said aloud, "Go

At that minute the clock struck eleven. The hour had on, proceed, commence-state your case." come. So had the woman. She came in.

It was the young woman who had accosted him the day before at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Broadway. This startling result has been already foreseen by the intelligent reader. It was not, however, the less startling to Timmins.

He gasped for breath.

There she was in his office-stick, stark, alone with him! She was between him and the door. He saw that, for he thought of flight. But flight was impossible, unless he knocked her down and walked over her. In fact, she was not only between him and the door, but she closed the door, walked composedly across the office, and seated herself within three feet of him.

Fearful position! Daniel in the lions' den had a cheerful thing of it compared to the beleaguered Timmins.

Her abundant hair-it was blonde; it was not a switch, it was real-was contrasted with and displayed by a threeinch wide shell of black lace, supposed to be a hat; but her face was covered with a vail.

Timmins fervently hoped she would keep it covered; but she didn't. She had no such intention. Coolly and slowly she raised it and laid it back.

If she had undertaken to knock him down with a feather, Timmins would have expired before the feather touched his innocent cheek.

He turned all the colors of a dying dolphin; his heart shrunk to the size of a hazel-nut.

"If the sheriff," said Timmins, mentally to himself "if the sheriff would come through that door, which I can't get out of, and bring an order to consign me to State Prison for the term of my natural life, I should be unaffectedly grateful to him. But he won't; there's no such luck for me."

"Mr. Timmins," said the young lady, "I have, as you are aware from what I said yesterday, called to consult you."

"If I were a doctor, instead of an imaginary lawyer," said Timmins to himself, “one consultation would finish you. You should have arsenic enough to kill a mastodon."

"To consult you on a very delicate subject," she continued.

"Don't mention it," murmured Timmins. "But I must, sir. I have been used very badly." "I am not surprised at it," said Timmins, desperately. "Of course not," she exclaimed. "No depth of human baseness can naturally surprise a cool and able lawyer like yourself."

"Cool!" thought Timmins. "Can't this awful creature see the sweat running down my face?"

"My name, sir, is Maria Louise Pitkin."

"Thank you," said Timmins, with a vague feeling of relief at finding it was not Medea, or Lucretia Borgia, or Mrs. Allen.

"And I am the innocent victim

66

66

"Of course you are," said Timmins. "So am I."
"Of a breach of promise," continued Maria Louise.
"Thank heaven !" ejaculated Timmins.

"Heartless man !" cried the lady, starting up with flashing eyes. "Have I been mistaken in you? Do you rejoice in my injuries?"

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"No, ma'am—not at all, ma'am--nothing of the sort!" stammered Timmins. "Only I thought"What did you think, sir ?"

"I thought it might be worse!"

66

Sir, do you mean to insult me ?" "Heaven forbid, ma'am !" cried Timmins. "Only it might have been bigamy, or murder, or—"

“No, no!" said Miss Pitkin. "My soul is free from crime. I am more sinned against than sinning. Yes, sir, after the most ardent vows on paper; after the fondest assurances in black and white; after, in point of fact, the very day of our marriage ought to have been fixed, William Fitz Clarence Smith

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"Who ?-who?" said Timmins, fairly bounding in his

seat.

"William Fitz Clarence Smith."

"It can't; it isn't! There's no such man !" stammered Timmins.

"There is, there must, there shall be !" cried the lady. "Did you ever see him ?" gasped poor Timmins. "No," replied the lady; "but when I do I shall know him among a million."

"The Lord forbid !" said Timmins, piously, to himself. "I have a hundred of his letters," continued she. "They are here in my bag. I will read them to you." "You needn't," said Timmins, with his eyes shut. "I know what they—”

"Are like, you would say," interrupted Maria Louise. "Yes, they are like a false, deceitful man; but in a dozen different ones he gives me his description, and I shall know him-oh, I shall know him! I will follow him in life; I will haunt him from my grave, and

"Don't!" gasped Timmins. "Don't do it! Smith don't deserve it! Upon my word, he don't !"

"Ha! You know him?" exclaimed Maria Louise. "No, no!-of course not! How should I ?" cried Timmins. "But, on general principles, he can't, you know." "He does, he does! Oh, Heaven!" cried Maria Louise, leaning back in her chair, sobbing hysterically, and playing a lively tattoo on the floor with the heels of her boots;

"Yes, sir," she cried, hitching her chair a foot nearer, "oh, I shall faint at the recollection!"

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