is it?" he asked going close to her. It is not often that one person can plainly hear the beating of another's heart; he heard it then. A feeling of tenderness and sympathy such as he had never known before came over him, and-without taking a thought of what he was doing-he put his arm round her waist. "Samela!" he whispered. For one moment-for one momentand the remembrance of that short passage of time will thrill him till he dies he be lieved that the pressure was returned. Then she started from his grasp, and sprang from him half across the road; her breath came short and quick, and she seemed to shake as a patient does in an ague-fit. "Samela!" he cried again, frightened at her intense agitation. But she could not speak, and the thought ran through his brain that he had been ungenerous in taking advantage of her as he had done. "You will forgive me?" he asked gently. "I will never offend you so again. I did not know that you disliked me-so much." "Oh no! no! no!" cried the girl, and her wailing voice would have told him, if there had been any need of telling, whose cry it was he had heard in the room at the inn. "It is not that. Go on! go on! You must go on! I must go back !'' She pointed forward and then herself turned back. "You cannot go back alone," exclaimed Gibbs; "I must go with you. Nay," he went on as she shook her head and quickened her step, "I will not speak a word, but just walk behind you, You will trust me to do that?" But still she waved him off; he advanced toward her and then she began to run. "Good Heavens !" cried Gibbs in an "what have I done to agony of despair, frighten her like this !"' 66 Do not follow me !" she implored; "I beg you!" Then John Gibbs stood still in the middle of the road and watched the shadowy figure till it was lost in the blackness beyond. Our fisherman was in a poor state to consider an intricate business matter the next day. The lawyer wondered at his absence of mind, that such a one should have been chosen for so important a trust. But at last what had to be settled was settled, and the afternoon found him hur rying back as fast as the Highland Railway would carry him. He experienced in Inverness one of those minor calamities which are not very much in themselves, but which, when great misfortunes happen to be absent, come and do their best to embitter our lives. In a word, he lost his bunch of keys and had to have his portmanteau cut open. The loss was to him inexplicable. He always carried them in his coat pocket, and he had felt them there after leaving the inn, rattling against his pipe. Now, as may easily be imagined, his mind was too heavily burdened with a real sorrow to give more than a passing thought to this minor trouble. He Gibbs looked forward with great apprehension to his return to the inn. dreaded meeting Samela; he could not imagine on what footing they could be now; he thought that she must have resented his conduct to her the more because he was as it were her guardian that night; perhaps she imagined that the whole affair had been arranged between her father and himself. At all events he felt it would be very difficult to know how to carry himself before her. And still, at the bottom of his heart, the man had some kind of a feeling that all might come right yet. The landlord was waiting for him at the station, and as they drove up the glen was eloquent on the glory of the wedding which had taken place the previous day. Such a feast! so many carriages! so many presents! and such a good-looking bride! "How is the Professor's foot ?" asked Gibbs, who could take no interest in brides that day, and was anxious to find out if the landlord had noticed anything wrong. "There's no muckle the matter with his foot, I'm thinking," replied the landlord; 66 at any rate he's gone.' "Gone!" cried Gibbs. "Ay," replied the landlord, "he is that. He went off in a great hurry to catch the first train this morning.' "And his daughter, is she gone!" gasped Gibbs. "Gone too," answered the driver cheerfully, evidently enjoying the sensation he was causing. "Indeed, I understand it was on her account they went; he told me that she was not well, and that she must see a London doctor at once." And as the worthy man said this he turned round and looked hard at his It was an unfathomable mystery-a myscompanion. tery which it seemed to him could never be explained. Abstractedly he took up the calf binding, remembering as he did so whose hands bad touched it last. It seemed strangely light; he quickly opened it, and then as quickly let it fall-the quarto was gone! This intelligence was a terrible blow to Gibbs. How gladly now would he have gone through the meeting he had dreaded so much! Gone, without a word for him! He might have explained things somehow. What must she have thought of him? What had she told her father? Of course the illness was a blind. He thought it possible that there might be a note left for him, from the Professor; he did not expect anything from Samela Gibbs was sitting alone in the readingbut there was nothing. room of a northern county club; he was just putting down the Times, when the heading of a paragraph in a corner caught eye. It was as follows: The place looked sadly deserted and lonely. He could not fish that evening; he went to the rock where Samela had made her sketch and stared long at the pool; then he went back to the house and took out her handiwork; he felt some queer sort of satisfaction in touching things that she had touched. So short a time had passed since her joyous presence had lighted up that room; how different it seemed then! He could not bear the sight of his books. The next day he fished, and came to a resolution, which was to go south at once; his month was pearly up, and he had lost all pleasure in the river. The landlord understood something of the cause which lost him his guest, and indeed far and wide the gossips were at work. Accounts varied, but all agreed that Gibbs had behaved extremely badly and had lost his bride. He had left some money in the big chest, and it was necessary to get it out. It was then for the first time that he remembered the loss of his keys. He tried to pick the lock but failed, and Archie, who was called in, had no greater success; so they had to force the lid. Gibbs put the money in his pocket, and then stood. gazing at the little collection of volumes which had given him so much pleasure; now it pained him to look at them. Of a sudden he saw something which made him start, and for a moment disbelieve the sight of his eyes. There, on the top of a book, lay his bunch of keys, the keys which he had had in his hand the night he walked down to the station! He picked them up and examined them, as if they could tell him something themselves. They were quite bright and fresh. By what legerdemain or diablerie had those keys found a resting-place there? Some five years after the events we have been at so much pains to relate, John his HIGH PRICES FOR BOOKS IN AMERICA.-On Friday last the library of the late John Palmer of New York was disposed of by public auction. This collection was especially rich in early works relating to America, in histories of the English Counties, and in early dramatic works. Mr. Palmer was well known for his daughter, and travelling often under assumed enterprise and energy. In company with his names, he searched all over Europe for rare books; no journey was too long for him, or price too high, if anything he wished to add to his collection had to be secured. Under a somewhat acrid exterior lay a kind and sympathetic core. By his death many of the great booksellers of London and Paris lose a munificent customer. There were fine copies of the second, third, and fourth ing. But the great glory of the collection were folios-curiously enough the first was wantthe quartos, which have been allowed to be, by those best qualified to judge, by far the finest in America-perhaps, barring those in the British Museum, and at Chatsworth and Althorp-the finest in the world. [Then fol. lowed a long list of prices.] The greatest excitement was reached when a copy of Love's Labor's Lost was produced by the auctioneer. No one seems to have known of the existence of this copy, which was strange, as it is with. out the slightest question the most perfect copy in the world. Not only was it in beautiful condition and perfectly uncut, but the last ten leaves were unopened a state which is, we believe, quite unique. It measures [so many inches]. It was enclosed in a magnificent crimson morocco case, without lettering on it, made for another work by the English Bedford. This most precious volume was sold for $3900, and was bought by Mr. Cornelius Van der Hagen, of Chicago. After reading this paragraph Gibbs sat for a long time in his chair quite motionless. The day had faded away outside, and the only light in the room was the warm glow of the fire. He sat for many MRS. WATTS HUGHES, of the wellknown Islington Home for Little Boys, contributes to the current number of the Century an exceedingly interesting account, accompanied by most curious and beautiful illustrations, of the "voicefigures" which have excited so much interest in scientific and musical circles, and which were first publicly described in a letter contributed by Mrs. Russell Barrington to the Spectator about a year and a half ago. The method of producing the figures is extremely simple. On a thin indiarubber membrane, stretched across the bottom of a tube of sufficient diameter for the purpose, is poured a small quantity of water or some denser liquid, such as glycerine, and into this liquid are sprinkled a few grains of some ordinary solid pigment. A note of music is then sung down the tube by Mrs. Watts Hughes, and immediately the atoms of suspended pigment arrange themselves in a definite form,many of the forms bearing a curious resemblance to some of the most beautiful objects in Nature,-flowers, shells, or After the note has ceased to sound, the forms remain, and the pictorial representations given in the Century show how wonderfully accurate is the lovely mimicry of the image-making music. trees. Mrs. Watts Hughes's "voice-figures" are, however, interesting not merely as curiosities, or even as things of beauty, but as suggestions that the relations between sound and form may be more intricate and intimate than has heretofore been supposed even by the most careful and enterprising investigators. "I must say,' writes the experimenter herself, "that as day by day I have gone on singing into shape these peculiar forms, and, stepping out of doors, have seen their parallels liv. ing in the flowers, ferns, and trees around me; and again, as I have watched the little heaps in the formation of the floral figures gather themselves up and then shoot out their petals, just as a flower springs from the swollen bud-the hope has come to me that these humble experiments may afford some suggestions in regard to Nature's production of her own beautiful forms, and may thereby aid in some slight degree the revelation of another link in the great chain of the organized universe that, we are told in Holy Writ, took its shape at the voice of God." There is nothing in this hope which is unreasonable or fantastic; but the voice-figures are not less suggestive from another point of view, inasmuch as they seem to provide one more instance of the many fulfilments by scientific discovery of what may be called the prophecies of poetry,-those utterances in which the poets have seemed impelled to assign to the short-lived harmonies and melodies of music the permanence of material form. Perhaps the most striking of these utterances is to be found in Browning's noble "Abt Vogler. The musician who speaks has been improvising upon his instrument, and the last notes die away, apparently into an abyss of nothingness, from which they can never be recalled. The emotion of the moment, in which triumph fades into sadness, expresses itself in a soliloquy which, beginning in a sad minor key, rises into a confident pæan of exultant assurance. Why, he asks, should not his brave structure of music have the tangible permanence of that palace which rose into being as Solomon named the ineffable Name? "Would it might tarry like his, this beautiful building of mine, This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise ! Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine, Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise." But it will not stay; even as he speaks it is gone; and "the good tears start" for the creation of beauty that has been, and will be no more forever, the lovely structure of sound which, while it lasted, had such an impressive reality that he scarce can say that he feared, that he even gave it a thought, that the gone thing was to go." And yet, can it be? The soul of the musician rises in revolt, and affirms the eternity which the sense denies. He turns to God, builder and maker of houses not made with hands, and joy is born again of the glad confidence that, so long as God lives, "there shall never be one lost good, what was shall live as before," that "All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist, Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour." This thought of some soul of permanence behind the apparent transience of musical sound has again and again found utterance. It provided a motive for Miss Procter's lyric, "The Lost Chord ;" it is hinted at in that passage in the "Idylls of the King" where the Seer, speaking to young Gareth and his companions of the magical city of Camelot, says : For an ye heard a music, like enow * Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so! It cannot be." Nothing surely could well be plainer than that Mr. Browning, Miss Procter, Lord Tennyson, and Cardinal Newman have, to say the least, felt the imaginative attractiveness of the thought that there is in music a permanent element,-a something which does not pass when the sounds cease to vibrate upon the tympanum, but which endures forever. We think it can hardly be considered a merely fanciful speculation to regard these voice-figures, which reveal musical sounds in an apprehensible embodiment of form, as an indication of the reality and nature of this permanence. If, in certain artificially provided conditions, music mani fests itself as form, is not this a hint that form, which involves a certain substantiality, must be of its very essence? The wordsubstantiality" has, indeed, too much materialism of suggestion to be perfectly satisfactory; but no better word is available. Form, as an attribute of sub They are building still, seeing the city is built stance, is apprehended most surely by the 66 The thought is expressed once more with lofty eloquence in Cardinal Newman's great Oxford sermon on The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine." The preacher said:"Take another example of an outward and earthly form or economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified-I mean musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor eleinents does some great master create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning Is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIV., No 1. sense of touch, and the wave-theories of sound and light demonstrate what had long been tentatively believed without demonstration,-that of this sense our senses of hearing and seeing are but finer and subtler manifestations. From this fact comes the obvious inference that, just as the finer tact of hearing is in essence one with the grosser sensibility to which we give the name of touch, so the objects apprehended by the former have probably, like those apprehended by the latter, a real substance, and therefore a real form. Indeed, we have all had sensible experiences of this essential identity of hearing and feeling which must have suggested to many the hypothesis of a similar identity of the causes producing the diverse but allied sensations. When an artillery review is going on, we cannot only hear the cannonade, but feel the quiver of the glass in the window; if we approach a church in which the organ is being played, we are often conscious of the trembling of the ground some few instants before the wave of pure sound breaks upon the sense of 4 hearing. Beethoven, after becoming perfectly deaf, retained some strange physical susceptibility which apprised him of the fact that music was being performed, and we have heard of an old gentleman whose deafness was as absolute as that of the great composer, but who was able-if the word may be allowed—to "hear" perfectly the music of a pianoforte against the wooden framework of which he pressed the palm of his hand. If, then, music be apprehended by a subtle sense of touch-that sense by means of which we know the forms and boundaries of things-there is nothing inherently irrational in the thought that musical combinations may have forms and boundaries of their own which, though now inapprehensible by us, would at once be made apprehensible by perhaps a very slight extension of the gamut of normal sensation. The sea-waves leave upon the beach a sharply outlined tide-mark; must not the waves of harmony and melody leave as clear and sharp an outline on the shore of ether over which they roll? To speak of the" shape" of a symphony or an oratorio sounds fantastic; but may not such speech be merely a crude and necessarily inadequate utterance of a dimly discerned truth? And if this be so, may it not also be that the strains which present themselves to our hearing as sound may to more finely endowed natures-natures embodying our vague conception of angelic existencepresent itself as vision of substantial realities? If the notes produced by Mrs. Watts Hughes suffice to group her floating pigments into shapes of "weird caverns at the bottom of the sea, full of beautifully colored fancy sea-anemones and musselshells, headless snakes, and fairy-cups, and mossy entanglements of bud and leaf-like form, the imagination does not find it impossible to accept the belief that the congregated harmonies of Handel and Beethoven and Wagner live as forms of splendor-as lofty nountain summits, as towered and templed cities, as great expanses of luxuriant forest-in the vision of clearer eyes than ours; and that when the last chord of Abt Vogler's improvisation seemed to die upon the air, he had really put the top stone upon a palace as beautiful and enduring as that reared by the magic of Solomon.-Spectator. RICHARD PELSE was the chemist. The suburb was near the "6 Angel;" at the top of the City Road; on the confines of Islington. There he led his prosaic lifegetting old, and a bachelor. But into the prosaic years-years before Islingtonthere had burst once the moment of Romance. Then his shop was near Oxford Street. Into the sitting-room over it there had come, one evening, for an hour, the lady of his dream. Unexpectedly; suddenly. She had drawn her chair, by his own, to the fire. They had sat together so; and he had been happy. She had given him his tea; had opened his piano; had played, a while, Xaver Scharwenka's wild music; had kissed him once; and had gone away. Perhaps his years before and after had seemed at times two deserts, divided by that living stream which was her momen tary presence. Or perhaps there was an outstretched darkness on one side of the heavens: then a star: then again outstretched darkness-the life of the shop and the suburb. Richard Pelse was one of those poor men who are born cultivated one of the cultivated who are born poor. You had only to look at him now, across the counter and the ranged tooth-powder pots-to see the clear cut head, against its background of dry drug jars and Latin-labelled "Alumens" drawers"Flor: Sul;" "Pot: Bitar;" "Cap: Papav"-to know that he was individual. A sympathetic spectator might call him original; an unsympathetic, eccentric. What fires burnt in the brownness of his quick, keen, restless eyes? What had left his facenot yet really old-topped with a mass of silvery-white hair? There were the delicate features, decisive and refined; the nose aquiline, the kindly mouth with ner |