What

through the shaggy black fringe on his forehead as if to say, “You see me, Tony, son of Jean, a poor but honest man. do you want?"

“Tony,” I asked, “what made you hide the poppies ?” "Poppies? Who has poppies? I'm Tony. I'm a man.” “Yes, I know, but I thought you had some in your hands as you came along."

"Poppies! Zoze is foh guls. I'm a man. Men don't like poppies."

“Well, now,” I said in the tone I use with Jack, "to tell the truth, I like them myself, though I'm a man. Of course you needn't mention it—but let's have a look at some now."

He was suspicious. His mouth always drooped at the corners as if his tiny life had known no joy. What a queer figure he was with that faded Frenchy jacket and round cap! His near-set eyes had caught the darkness of this cloudy world of poverty and misery.

"Ahn't you shamed to like 'em?” he asked, doubtfully.

“Well, I don't say much about it, but I guess it's not such a bad thing after all.”

"Enoch Lilengren says it's guls 'at like 'em."

"Very likely he thinks so, but I wouldn't care what he said. The poppies are so pretty."

Doubt and fear faded from Tony's face. He turned away, and in a moment came back with his gorgeous treasure, fire-lover that he was.

"Do you really like 'em?" he said, wistfully. Then-"Do you love 'em?" gazing passionately at their glory. "I love 'em. I love 'em better 'n anysin' else."

His face was fierce. The petals fell in a shower as he pressed the flowers tighter and tighter, crushing the life out of them. He exulted in their possession. He kissed them over and over, then he kissed me. American boys don't do such things; all his heart went out to me because I did not laugh at his love.

That was three weeks ago. Yesterday I happened to be near the French laundry and I stopped in to inquire after Tony. His mother met me. She is fat and black and greasy,

"Fer ees Tony? Ah, mon bon Monsieur, Tony ees dead sence vun veek. Heah, he jus' get seck an' die. Vould Monsieur haf some shirts vashed?"-SARAH COMSTOCK.

XVII. THE WESTINGHOUSE AIR-BRAKE.

In the Westinghouse brake the apparatus consists of an airpump or compressor on the locomotive, a main reservoir for storing the compressed air ready for use, and an engineer's brakevalve connected to this reservoir. From this brake-valve extends a pipe throughout the length of the train, composed of iron under each car, and of rubber hose with suitable couplings between each two cars, thus making practically a continuous pipe the whole length of the train. Under each car and connected to the train pipe, through a peculiar piece of mechanism called a triple valve, is a small auxiliary reservoir which is of sufficient capacity to supply air to a brake cylinder close by. This brake cylinder consists of a common cylinder with piston and rod, the rod being attached to the brake levers of the car, so that when the piston is pushed out by the pressure of air behind it the brake shoes are pushed against the wheels and the speed of the train retarded or stopped entirely, as the case may be. This triple valve consists principally of a piston and a slide valve, and when the air pressure is in excess on one side of the piston, it is pushed up and communication is direct between the train pipe and the auxiliary reservoir. This continues so long as the pressure is equal on both sides of the piston, but if a sudden reduction of pressure is made behind this piston, leaving an excess on the other side, the piston will immediately move back, carrying with it the slide valve above mentioned. This slide valve opens communication between the auxiliary reservoir and the brake cylinder, while at the same time, or a little before, it closes communication between the train pipe and auxiliary reservoir.

XVIII. THE PRECIPICES OF MONT CERVIN.*

1. To return to the Cervin. The view of it given on the left hand in Plate 38 † shows the ridge in about its narrowest profile;

* More commonly known by its German name, The Matterhorn,

+ The plates and figures are not reproduced here,

and shows also that this ridge is composed of beds of rock shelving across it, apparently horizontal, or nearly so, at the top, and sloping considerably southwards (to the spectator's left), at the bottom. How far this slope is a consequence of the advance of the nearest angle giving a steep perspective to the beds, I cannot say; my own belief would have been that a great deal of it is thus deceptive, the beds lying as the tiles do in the somewhat anomalous but perfectly conceivable house-roof, Fig. 79. Saussure, however, attributes to the beds themselves a very considerable slope. But be this as it may, the main facts of the thinness of the beds, their comparative horizontality, and the daring swordsweep by which the whole mountain has been hewn out of them, are from this spot comprehensible at a glance. Visible, I should have said; but eternally, and to the uttermost, incomprehensible. Every geologist who speaks of this mountain seems to be struck by the wonderfulness of its calm sculpturethe absence of all aspect of convulsion, and yet the stern chiseling of so vast a mass into its precipitous isolation leaving no ruin nor débris near it. “Quelle force n'a-t-il pas fallu,” exclaims M. Saussure," pour rompre, et pour balayer tout ce qui manque à cette pyramide!" "What an overturn of all ancient ideas in Geology," says Professor Forbes, “to find a pinnacle of 15,000 feet high [above the sea] sharp as a pyramid, and with perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet on every hand, to be a representative of the older chalk formation; and what a difficulty to conceive the nature of a convulsion (even with unlimited power) which could produce a configuration like the Mont Cervin rising from the glacier of Zmutt!"

2. The term "perpendicular" is of course applied by the Professor in the "poetical" temper of Reynolds,—that is to say, in one "inattentive to minute exactness in details;" but the effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great that even the gravest philosopher cannot resist it; and Professor Forbes's drawing of the peak, outlined at page 180, has evidently been made under the influence of considerable excitement. For fear of being deceived by enthusiasm also, I daguerreotyped the Cervin from the edge of the little lake under the crag of the Riffelhorn, with the somewhat amazing result shown in Fig. 80, So cautious is Nature, even in her boldest work, so

broadly does she extend the foundations, and strengthen the buttresses, of masses which produce so striking an impression as to be described, even by the most careful writers, as perpendicular.

3. The only portion of the Matterhorn which approaches such a condition is the shoulder, before alluded to, forming a step of about one twelfth the height of the whole peak, shown by light on its snowy side, or upper surface, in the right-hand figure of Plate 38. Allowing 4000 feet for the height of the peak, this step or shoulder will be between 300 and 400 feet in absolute height; and as it is not only perpendicular, but assuredly overhangs, both at this snow-lighted angle and at the other corner of the mountain (seen against the sky in the same figure), I have not the slightest doubt that a plumb-line would swing from the brow of either of these bastions, between 600 and 800 feet, without touching rock. The intermediate portion of the cliff which joins them is, however, not more than vertical. I was therefore anxious chiefly to observe the structure of the two angles, and, to that end, to see the mountain close on that side from the Zmutt glacier.

4. I am afraid my dislike to the nomenclatures invented by the German philosophers has been unreasonably, though involuntarily, complicated with that which, crossing out of Italy, one necessarily feels for those invented by the German peasantry. As travellers now every day more frequently visit the neighborhood of the Monte Rosa, it would surely be a permissible, because convenient, poetical license, to invent some other name for this noble glacier, whose present title, certainly not euphonious, has the additional disadvantage of being easily confounded with that of the Zermatt glacier, properly so called. I mean myself, henceforward, to call it the Red glacier, because, for two or three miles above its lower extremity, the whole surface of it is covered with blocks of reddish gneiss, or other slaty crystalline rocks,— some fallen from the Cervin, some from the Weisshorn, some brought from the Stockhi and Dent d'Erin, but little rolled or ground down in the transit, and covering the ice, often four or five feet deep, with a species of macadamization on a large scale (each stone being usually some foot or foot and a half in diameter), anything but convenient to a traveller in haste. Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields and furrows, hard and

dry, scarcely fissured at all, except just under the Cervin, and forming a silent and solemn causeway, paved, as it seems, with white marble from side to side; broad enough for the march of an army in line of battle, but quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city, and bordered on each hand by ghostly cliffs of that faint granite purple which seems, in its far-away height, as unsubstantial as the dark blue that bounds it ;—the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so destitute of all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness of majestic death, that it looks like a world from which not only the human, but the spiritual, presences had perished, and the last of its archangels, building the great mountains for their monuments, had laid themselves down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his white shroud.

5. The first point from which the Matterhorn precipices, which I came to examine, show their structure distinctly, is about halfway up the valley, before reaching the glacier. The most convenient path, and access to the ice, are on the south; but it is best, in order to watch the changes of the Matterhorn, to keep on the north side of the valley; and, at the point just named, the shoulder marked e in Fig. 33 is seen, in the morning sunlight, to be composed of zigzag beds, apparently of eddied sand.

6. I have no doubt they once were eddied sand; that is to say, sea or torrent drift, hardened by fire into crystalline rock; but whether they ever were or not, the certain fact is, that here we have a precipice, trenchant, overhanging, and 500 feet in height, cut across the thin beds which compose it as smoothly as a piece of fine-grained wood is cut with a chisel.

7. From this point, also, the nature of the corresponding bastion, cd, Fig. 33, is also discernible. It is the edge of a great concave precipice, cut out of the mountain, as the smooth hollows are out of the rocks at the foot of a waterfall, and across which the variously colored beds, thrown by perspective into corresponding curvatures, run exactly like the seams of canvas in a Venetian felucca's sail.

8. Seen from this spot, it seems impossible that the mountain should long support itself in such a form, but the impression is only caused by the concealment of the vast proportions of the