"It is possible, and it must be," said Heath, coldly. "Your acquaintance with the law is limited, or you would know that the performance of such a ceremony would completely take the wind out of the detective's sails, inasmuch as the wife of an accused person is not a competent person to be examined for the prosecution or the defence. They might call her as much as they like, but she could not be examined against me, her husband, and without her testimony their proof would fail." But the captain still shook his head. "I have no doubt that you are right as to the law," he said, "but she would never consent to it-it never could be!" "She must consent to it, and it shall be," said Heath, quietly. "It is the one sole chance of my safety, and I am not going to throw it away. Your daughter must become my wife, and at once, mind. I am speaking for myself now, and not for you. It would be perfectly easy for you to hang me, and save yourself from any further punishment than penal servitude, by permitting your daughter to give her evidence, but though that might, as a last desperate resource, be your game, it would not, either first or last, be mine. When that girl is once my wife her lips are sealed for ever, and come what may, it is out of her power and yours to do me any detriment. Therefore, there is no choice or deliberation about it; the thing must be, and you must take immediate steps to bring it about." only let it be understood that I marry her simply as a safeguard for myself, that I have not the slightest feeling of liking for her, and that she may be as free of me as she likes when once the danger is tided over and appearances are saved, but my wife by this day fortnight she must make up her mind to be!" He took up his hat as he spoke, and, with a nod to his companion, left the room and the house. FACETIE CANTABRIGIENSES. JUST fifty years ago, a Cantab, too modest to put his name to his work, collected together, under the above title, sundry "anecdotes, smart sayings, satirics and retorts, by or relating to celebrated Cantabs." As in all collections of the kind, we find therein no lack of old familiar friends and plenty of "wit," that has long lost what little savour it had, but a residue remains from which we may extract something amusing. upon his It was said of Dr. Farmer, Master of Emmanuel, that there were three things he loved-old port, old clothes, and old books; and three things he could not be persuaded to do-to rise in the morning, to go to bed at night, or to settle an account. Dr. Howard, sometime rector of St. George's, Southwark, could only be accused of the last little failing, and in his case it arose rather from want of means than want of will. Some parochial business obliging him to call grocer, the worthy parson thought it advisable to anticipate any allusion to his little bill, by inquiring whether he did not Owe a trifle ? "Yes," said the grocer, "Oh no, she won't," said Heath, calmly."seventeen and sixpence." Putting his "She may say so, but she won't do it. hand in his ill-supplied pocket, the doctor You must let her know that your own pulled out some copper, a little silver, and safety depends on her consenting quietly a solitary guinea. Astonished at seeing and quickly. There is nothing more natural than that an engagement should have for some time existed between your daughter and her father's friend; such an engagement indeed would best account for our intimate association, and would in itself be a safeguard against suspicion." "She will not consent, she will die first," said the captain. "But to bind her for life to you, whose character she knows, whom she saw under such terrible circumstances! How can she ever be reconciled to such a fate?" "That," said Heath, "is your business, and with it I shall not interfere. You may make any terms you please with her the piece of gold in such hands, the shopkeeper exclaimed, "You have got a stranger there, sir!" "Indeed I have,' said the doctor, quietly replacing the coin in his pocket, "and before we part we will be better acquainted!" Burke would seem to have been an equally bad paymaster, for he left his son's college bills so long unpaid that he received a reminder, suggesting that if it were inconvenient to pay the principal, perhaps he would pay the interest; whereupon eloquent Edmund informed his creditor it was neither his principle to pay the interest, nor his S interest to pay the principal. Lord Mansfield punned to much better purpose when, wishing to save a watch-stealer from the gallows, he directed the jury to assess the time-keeper at ten pence. Ten pence!" cried the indignant prosecutor, "why, the very fashion of it cost me five pounds!" Oh," said his lordship, we must not hang a man for fashion's sake." 66 Novelist and poet having combined to take Eugene Aram out of the rank of murderers, and elevate him into a hero of romance, it interests one to learn that Paley, then a lad of sixteen, was among the rapt listeners to the melancholy usher's well-worded appeal. The great churchman never forgot that day in the York assize court, but the chief impression left upon his mind by Aram's speech appears to have been that it justified the old saying that he who advocates his own cause has a fool for his client; for, years afterwards, conversing with some friends upon the number of obscurities admitted into the Biographica Britannica, somebody instanced Eugene Aram as an example. "No," said Paley, "a man that has been hanged has some pretence to notoriety, especially a man who got himself hanged, as Aram did, by his own cleverness." The proverb says, "In courtesy rather pay a penny too much than a penny too little." Archbishop Herring, bearing the proverb in mind, requited a poetical young clergyman, named Faukes, for a flattering dedication, by giving him a general invitation, saying, "the oftener I see you, the more I shall be obliged to you.' Faukes shrewdly took the prelate at his word, engaged lodgings at Lambeth, and every day for more than nine months put his legs under his lordship's mahogany, turning a deaf ear to the broadest of hints that his visits were too frequent to be pleasant. At last, finding it was no use giving his flatterer hints, the archbishop gave him a couple of valuable livings, and so got rid of his troublesome guest, who had taught him that it does not always answer to pay a penny too much, even when it is only a pennyworth of politeness. A A couple of tolerably good stories convict Bob Acres of precipitancy in announcing that damns had had their day, since they had not quite gone out at Cambridge, if extinct in good company elsewhere. collegian named Neville stammered sadly in his talk, except when using bad language, then he could be fluent enough. Taking a ramble one day, a countryman stopped "Tu-tu him, to be set right in his road. I went to Frankfort and got drunk With that learned professor, Brunck; I went to Worts and got more drunken With that more learned professor, Runken. Epigram writing, to judge from our author's samples, was certainly not a Cambridge accomplishment. Garrick, who, according to Johnson, could knock an epigram off in five minutes, would scarcely have cared to own any one of them. Here is one on the marriage of a very thin pairSt. Paul has declared that, when persons, though Are in wedlock united, one flesh they remain. But had he been by, when, like Pharaoh's kine pairing, Dr. Douglas of Benet, espoused Miss Mainwaring, The Apostle, no doubt, would have altered his tone, And have said, "These two splinters shall now make twain, one bone." A publican took down his old sign of Bishop Blaize, and put up Dr. Watson's head in its place, provoking an undergraduate to write Two of a trade can ne'er agree, No proverb e'er was juster; They've ta'en down Bishop Blaize, d'ye see, Lord Sandwich, otherwise Jemmy out of which the modern dress of a Twitcher, had the right of appointing a fashionable female can be constructed. chorister to Trinity College. He exercised Given the three sides of a steel triangle it in favour of a voter for the borough of immersed in sulphuric acid; required a Huntingdon, who had neither voice, ear, solution of the triangle. Seven funipentaste, nor musical knowledge to qualify dulous bodies are suspended from different him for the situation; so that there was points in a common centre at the Old truth, if nothing else, in the quotation- Bailey, to find the centre of oscillation. Given a Berkshire pig, a Johnian pig, and a pig of lead, to find their different densities. State logically, how many tails a cat has? To the last query the answer is appended, namely:-"Cats have three tails. No cat has two tails. Every cat has one tail more than no cat―ergo, every cat has three tails." "A singing man and cannot sing! From whence arose your patron's bounty? Give us a song-" Excuse me, sirs, My voice is in another county!" We have heard worse puns than the double-shotted one perpetrated by the Johnian, who, as the master of his college passed by on horseback, informed an inquisitive stranger, "That is the head of St. John on a charger." Not bad either was the unintentional joke of the wineOvercome member of Maudlin, when challenged as to his identity, "I am Nott, of Maudlin," leading the disgusted proctor, not unnaturally, to exclaim, "I asked of what college you were, not of what college you were not." The story, however, is scarcely consistent with the fact that the men of Maudlin were notable for their wineless lives, and were subject to so many jibes in consequence, that one of them resolved to remove the reproach at any cost. Inviting a party of twelve to his room, as soon as he got them inside, he set his back to the door, and poker in hand, vowed that not one should leave the place again until the bottle of wine he had provided for the occasion was emptied ! The truculent tempter's notion of a big drink was on a par with that of the "pious Queen's man" who excused himself for leaving some friends very early, on the ground that he had not recovered from the previous night's debauch, when he sat up till ten o'clock, and drank two bumpers of plum wine. Undergraduate wits delighted in drawing up mock examination papers, but the fun to be found in them is not over-powering, nor the satire of the fiercest, as the following specimens, taken at random, will prove: Should you, upon consideration, say that the ancients could find the way to their mouths in the dark as well as the moderns? Prove the non-identity of Sylla the dictator and Scylla the sandbank; and does not the sea or c make all the difference between them? On what occasion did Mr. Lethbridge's hair "stand on ind?" correct the solecism, and give your reason for the alteration. Determine the least possible quantity of material The best example of this species of parody is a metaphysical examination, in the form of a dialogue, between a professor and a student, attributed to Porson. The subject of this metaphysical disquisition is a common salt box. Let us drop the questions, and see what comes out of the answers. First, then, a salt box is a box made to contain salt. Secondly, it is a salt box and a box of salt, a distinction arising from the fact that a salt box may be when there is no salt, while salt is absolutely necessary to the existence of a box of salt. Salt boxes are also divided by a partition, the use of which is to separate the coarse from the fine--no, the fine from the coarse. They are further to be distinguished as possible, probable, and positive. A possible salt box is a salt box yet unused, because it hath not yet become a salt box, having never had any salt in it, and it may be applied to some other use; for a salt box which never had, hath not now, and perhaps never may have, any salt in it, can only be termed a possible salt box. A probable salt box is a salt box in the hands of one going to buy salt, and who has sixpence in his pocket to pay the shop-keeper; and a positive salt box is one which hath actually and bonâ fide got salt in it. The idea of a salt box is that image which the mind conceives of a salt box when no salt box is present, whilst the abstract idea of a salt box, is the idea salt box, abstracted from the idea of a box, or of salt, or of a salt box, or of a box of salt; it is not a salt idea unless the idea hath the idea of salt contained in it. An abstract idea cannot be either salt or fresh, round or square, long or short, which clearly shows the difference between a salt idea and an idea of salt. An aptitude to hold salt is an essential property of a salt box, but if there be a crack in the bottom of the box, the aptitude to spill salt would be termed an accidental property of the box. Finally, the salt, with respect to the box, is called the contents, because the cook is content to find plenty of salt in the box. Despite Darwin, we believe, with the poet, that "man is man through all gradations," but there is certainly a mighty difference between the logical individual who can evolve so much out of a salt box, and such a specimen of humanity as Wordsworth's matter-of-fact hero of yellow primrose fame. PEAT FUEL. SOME time back Her Majesty's Government was given to understand that peat, available for fuel, was to be found in considerable quantities in various parts of the United States, and that operations were being undertaken for its collection, with a view to its being used as a substitute for coal. Earl Granville, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, consequently instructed Her Majesty's Consuls there to furnish reports as to the production and preparation of peat for fuel. . . . together with particulars respecting its price and the relation of such price to that of coal." Some of the replies, which have recently been made public, present features of considerable interest, and deserve more than a passing notice. 66 Consul Denis Donohoe, who, judging from his name, should be competent to speak with authority on the subject of peat, reports from Baltimore that, though the article is abundant in some of the tide-water districts of Maryland, it is used solely as manure; but that in the State of Virginia, about twelve miles from Norfolk, and extending into North Carolina, there is a place called the "Dismal Swamp," which is nothing more nor less than a peat bog." In the Virginian portion of the "Dismal Swamp" alone there are some twelve square miles of bog, and the peat is from six to eight feet in depth. Two companies have been formed at different times to carry on the preparation of peat here, but both have come to an untimely end. So we may fairly presume that their operations were found to be unprofitable, though one of the companies did endeavour to float itself by selling three hundred tons of peat at three dollars and a half (say fourteen shillings) per ton. Consul Henderson, writing from Boston, states that peat, generally of very good quality, exists in vast quantities in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In the latter States it has not been used to any extent as fuel, but in Massachusetts, during the war and the continuance of the want of coal, it was very extensively used, both for domestic purposes and in factories. Since coal has become cheaper, however, the production of peat has been virtually abandoned as being too costly and in evidence of this, one instance will suffice. A manufacturer, though possessing close to his factory an abundant suply of peat, for the preparation of which he had erected machinery, and which he used for some time with advantage, now finds it more profitable to procure coal from a distance, for which he has to pay four dollars per ton prime cost and three dollars per ton for carriage. Whilst peat was being used, continues H.M.'s Consul, various processes were adopted, with more or less success, for preparing it as fuel; but the difficulty of properly drying and compressing it by artificial means was never thoroughly overcome. In the Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans Consular Districts, we learn that nothing has been done to utilise or prepare peat for fuel, though it exists in considerable quantities, as wood can be had from the forests almost for the mere trouble of cutting and hauling it. Consul-General Archibald sends us a very interesting and instructive report from New York, from which we condense the following information. In almost all the northern portion of America, he says, there are extensive peat-bogs, formed by decomposition of plants, amid much moisture, and from the accumulation of mosses, which, while their lower parts are being converted into peat, throw out new shoots in their upper parts, thus gradually changing shallow pools into bogs. The remains of forests not cleared off the ground, by converting it into marsh-land, also make peat-swamps, in which trees are deposited in situ; and even the long-continued growth of one kind of vegetation, by exhausting the soil, tends to produce peat. On the peninsula of Michigan peat-beds of every kind of density are found, and seventy-five per cent of the fuel used in the Lake Superior Iron Furnace in that region is obtained from these beds. As compared with wood, experiments in iron. works show that two hundred and forty During and immediately after the civil to three hundred and sixty cubic feet of war, the scarcity of coal greatly stimupeat are required in the production of a lated attempts to manufacture peat. Fortyton of blooms, or from two hundred to seven companies, with capital varying two hundred and eighty cubic feet of wood. from fifty thousand to five million dollars, Peat bogs, easily accessible by rail or were organised for the purpose of raising water, exist in several Eastern States, and preparing this fuel. These have all but not much is known about them. At failed. At present, whilst no statistics White Plains in New York there are exist of the actual production, it is not thirty thousand acres in one body. probable that in the United States ten thousand tons per annum are manufactured, of a character fit for transportation or market. At the Berlin bog, we are told, on the Hartford and New Haven railroad, in Connecticut, a practical utilisation of peat by new machinery has been attempted. The bog embraces seventyfive acres; the peat is dug and raised, one ton at a time, by a steam-dredge, and deposited in tubs with perforated bottoms, through which the water drains, whilst the tubs are being moved to a wooden platform eighteen feet high, twelve feet wide and fifteen feet long. On this platform are two boom derricks, raising and discharging the tubs on the platform. The peat falls, through openings on the platform, on an Archimedean screw, feeding into a mill where revolving knives of dif ferent dimensions convert the fibre and undrained water into a thick paste, which falls into a hopper; under the hopper are moulds resting on wooden tramways, so that when one mould is full, another takes its place. The full moulds are lifted into cars and conveyed to a drying ground, where each mould is overturned and the peat left on the grass. It soon dries, and after an exposure of forty-eight hours, it is said neither frost nor rain will injure it. The machinery is capable, if required, of turning out one hundred tons per day for the one hundred and fifty working days from April to November. The selling price of the prepared peat is five dollars per ton. In Ulster County, in the same State, there are very extensive bogs of heavy, compact, dark-brown peat, averaging twenty-eight feet in depth; and allowing for water, it is estimated that each acre will yield nine thousand six hundred and eighty tons of peat-fuel, at a cost of at least two and a half dollars per ton. A geological report on these deposits states that the rocks forming the basin belong to the dislocated, indurated salt formation; and with this alteration, are the same as those which yield petroleum in parts of Pennsylvania and Western Virginia. It is thought possible, from the richness of the peat and the lively white flame it gives, that these rocks have imparted a certain amount of petroleum to the peat, specimens of which, not pressed, but sawed into slices and baked for some hours in ovens, sink in water and burn down to an impalpable white ash of less than four per cent. Charcoal made from compressed peat is found to be almost equal to that made from wood. The manufacture heretofore of peat-fuel in the United States, continues our ConsulGeneral, except in cases where coal is very costly or difficult to procure, has been a complete financial failure. The causes are obvious and to be looked for in the extensive labour required in handling a mass four or five times the bulk eventually fitted for transportation and market, and in the expense of compressing an article, naturally as elastic as sponge, unless under such long-continued and powerful pressure as to be too costly for any but ornamental purposes. Besides, to make a good fuel, it is not sufficient to break peat up, but it must be reduced to a pulp as fine as that used in the manufacture of paper. The use of artificial heat for drying and for furnishing the motor of mechanical operations-thereby consuming a disproportionate amount of fuel to that secured the cost of transportation, the low prices and abundance of competing coal, are all causes that operate against peat as a fuel. Consul-General Archibald concludes his report by pointing out that the main difficulty experienced in working peatbeds has consisted in the want of machinery to render the substance cohesive and compact enough to fit it for handling and transportation; but, with the invention of appliances that will accomplish this in an economical and effective manner, another and valuable material would be made more generally available for fuel. Consul Kortright reports from Philadelphia that peat-beds are found in the States of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and when the price of coal has risen in |