against it. The very rivers as they ripple to the ocean proclaim themselves for the grand social upheaving. My soul weeps at the grandeur of the position we have attained, and like an eagle full fledged wings its meteoric way heavenwards and bathes its pinions in the light of the morning sun. After which burst of eloquence who shall say that I am not in favour of female education? Let them come on, they who would thus revile me. I fling my name up to the sky. Nicaragua N. Walker stands upon the hill top and cries aloud for freedom and the education of his sisters in the two hemispheresnay, in the four hemispheres, in the twenty hemispheres; for who shall stay the onward strides of this modern Colossus ? I am also for punctuality. Herein you may learn from nature. She is the soul of punctuality, "which it is likewise as concerns business ;" so says my landlord. It is good to listen to the philosophy of the humble. All great men have done this. Dickens used to talk to all sorts of vagabonds and ruffians, and also to poor little Fortune-stricken children; he loved them for their infancy's sake, and I loved him for that. But let me not touch pathos. I was speaking of my landlord. Well, he gave me a very touching and beautiful illustration of punctuality. "Jim Flowers," says he, "is the most regler and punctool of all my customers," he says; "Jim comes to this 'ere tap-room, and gits drunk every Saturday, and, 'as done regler for fourteen year, excet once." My landlord looked straight at me and continued. "Yes, he missed once-that was when his mother died, and that time he came on the Sunday. Punctooality is a great thing." I said it was. "Right you are, Mr. Walker, sir," he replied; "a man as ain't punctual is nothing better nor a siphon in the world." "A what?" I asks mildly. "A siphon," replies the landlord, with a glare of anger. Saying that he was perfectly right, I retired to laugh in my sleeve, but my coat being rather tight I was not successful in this popular attempt at sarcastic mirth, so I called for liquor, and hid my face in a tankard. I have some important remarks to make on the education of women. I am dead on the elevation and advancement of our wives and sweethearts. Woman shall have her rights! That is my platform. Woman shall have her tights, is Boucicault's. Herein we slightly differ. I reserve the consideration of our differences for a future day. Meanwhile, O sweet daughters of our glorious mother Eve, lean your drooping heads metaphorically, and more so, if you like, upon the manly buzzum of yours devotedly, and trust to this right arm, which shall bring you safely through the wastes of Gladstone into Mill's happy valleys. Mille hominum specis et rerum, &c. HABIT. That incident of one drunkard's regularity reminds me of another story. Habit is indeed a most curious thing. It is more than second nature. I have been told on the best authority of a man who used to go home regularly to his wife every Saturday night with a full skin and an empty purse. One Saturday night he could not sleep. "Guess there is something wrong with me," he said to his spouse. "Go to sleep do," she replied. "I can't sleep, there's something wrong; haven't had enough drink, or something." "Go to sleep, and don't talk stuff," says the wife. "Can't, I tell you; get up and strike a light." They nearly came to words. At length the woman got up and lighted a candle. Her lord and master staggered out of bed and began fumbling at his trousers. After a while he exclaimed triumphantly "Ah, here it is! Thought there was something wrong. There's a fourpenny bit in the corner of my pocket. Hadn't had enough drink I knew ; hadn't spent my money. Here, chuck it out of the window, wife, and then I can sleep." She "chucked" it out, and in two minutes the man of regular habits snored the snore of contentment. THE SPORTING BREECH-LOADEI, AND ITS ORIGIN. BY CADWALLADER WADDY. RMA virumque cano-who first knocke partridge in the 'stubbles."" Whoever : ma deserves a monument "more lasting that A in these days of "big subscriptions. 1 antiquary cannot elucidate the mystery attaching : hand down a name to posterity at the present moment vague and legendary cave yclept "the past. hero could be discovered, his imaginary ef with all the honours usually accorded by EngiELO in India, as a passage 1. is also," says Mr. Grose in 'Grey's Gunnery. Tyanæus,' written in there is the following Oxydracæ:-Tier and Ganges. deterred, not by religious cons.c doubtless have DAY but their ce thousand men as brave as Achilles, or three thousand such as Ajax, to the assault; for they come not out into the field to fight those who attack them, but these holy men, beloved by the gods, overthrow their enemies with tempests and thunderbolts shot from their walls. It is said that the Egyptian Hercules and Bacchus, when they overran India, invaded this people also; and having prepared warlike engines, attempted to conquer them. They made no show of resistance; but, on the enemy's near approach to their cities, they were repulsed with storms of lightning and thunderbolts hurled on them from above." " In a work entitled "The Gunner," by Robert Norton, and printed in London in the year 1664, the author states that the Uffano reporteth that the invention and use of ordnance (and consequently of gunpowder) took place in the 58th year of our Lord, and was practised in the "great and ingenious kingdom of China; and that in the marityme provinces thereof there yet remaine certaine peaces of ordnance, both of iron and brasse, with the memory of their yeares of founding engraved upon them, and the armes of King Vitey, who, he says, was the inventor." Whether Moses, Alexander the Great, and King Vitey ever found time for such a trivial amusement as partridge shooting, we suppose will never come to light; any more than the name of Macaulay's New Zealander, the "last man," and the "hero" who first knocked over a partridge on English soil. One thing, however, we do know, that the "breech-loader" may be traced as far back in England as the reign of Edward IV. in 1471, a specimen of which may be seen in the Tower, by the curious, in this year of grace 1872, so that this weapon attained the rusty old age of 401 on its last birthday. All we wish it is "many happy returns of the day." We are also very curious to know whether in the undeveloped future our favourite weapon will figure in the Tower as an antique, and the name of the celebrated maker, stamped on the breech, become as much an object of speculation to sportsmen as those of Peter Bawd and Peter van Collen, who flourished in the reign of Henry VIII., are to the present generation. The progress which has been made during the last few years in the design and manufacture of firearms of various kinds, together with other appliances, has been in some respects greater than all that has gone before since the invention of gunpowder. The powderflask and shot-pouch have been abandoned, and are superseded by the cartridge carrying its own ignition. This change is to be attributed to the introduction of the breech-loader, and its popularity amongst sportsmen. Still, it is passing strange to find the history of firearms repeating itself, and corroborating the assertion of Tacitus, that "new inventions are but resuscitations." Yet such is the fact; the "centralfire" principle, now universally acknowledged to be the best system of ignition hitherto applied to firearms, and only introduced to this generation of sportsmen in 1861, is but a resuscitation of a method of ignition to be seen in the Tower attached to a breech-loading fowling-piece of Henry VIII. There is, however, a reason for this similarity in inventions, which at first sight does not strike the careless examiner of a collection of ancient and modern breech-loaders. After all, there are only three ways of closing a barrel-by a plug or plunger, precisely as the mouth of a bottle is closed by a cork; next, it may be secured directly by a cross-piece, wedge, or bolt; and, lastly, it may be secured by a tap, having an aperture movable on its axis. These, again, may be roughly sifted into "chamber-loaders," which can be subdivided according to the fact of the loading chamber being separate or attached to the barrel or stock. The remainder, which load directly into the barrel, may be styled "direct breechloaders." Of the detached chamber-loaders, we have six good specimens in the Tower and Woolwich collections, commencing with a gun of Henry VIII. in the Tower bearing date 1537, and ending with that of the Lefaucheux, 1836, which was first introduced into this country by Wilkinson and Co., of Pall Mall, successors of Henry Nock, the famous gunmaker to George IV. in 1844. Such, however, was the rabid antipathy displayed by sportsmen to this now widely disseminated form of breech action, that they could induce no one to use it, and it was actually sold as a curiosity to a Mr. C. D. Scarisbrick. We are indebted to Mr. Latham, of the above-named firm, for this interesting piece of information, as also for an inspection of some cartridge cases fired from this gun. As far as we can detect, there has been neither improvement nor change in the manufacture of the Lefaucheux pin-cartridge since that date. And those faults which are inherent to its nature, and which ultimately destined it to be superseded by the central-fire system, may, for aught we know to the contrary, have been as patent to users in those days as they are at the present time. Certain it is that in England at least the pin-cartridge has had but a short reign, and has been completely shunted by the introduction of Mr. Daw's central-fire gun and cartridge. It must be patent to all from the foregoing remarks that, as we have chronicled the date of a gun "1537," which may be seen any day in the Tower, as also one of Edward IV.'s reign, 1471, in the same collection, Henry II. . of France could not have invented the first breech-loader in 1540, as |