ing, "Oh, Jaafer, did I not put you on an equal-
ity with myself? Oh, Jaafer, how have you
requited me? You have neither observed my
rights nor kept your pact with me.
forgotten my bounty; you have not looked to

You have

the results of actions. You have not reflected on the vicissitudes of fortune. You have not counted on the revolutions of time and the changes of human circumstances. Oh, Jaafer, you have deceived me in my family; disgraced me before all men. Oh, Jaafer, you have done evil to me and to yourself."

It is all so true, and all occurred only three years ago, when the khedive ordered his chancellor of the exchequer, his own foster-brother, to be slain, and drove him in his own carriage, with kind words and soothing smiles, to the place of arrest.

From The Spectator.

AN APOLOGY FOR THE SNOW.

-

for

the general good-will which seems to re-
sult from a snowstorm, and which, in-
deed, is rather irritating than otherwise
and whose limbs are not strong enough
to people whose heads ache with snow,
any hilarious conflict with snowdrifts.
The English people, on the whole, obvi-
ously enjoy the luxury of fighting their
way against an unaccustomed obstacle.
They regard the whole thing as an elab-
orate stroke of humor, which is not only
enjoyable, but really enjoyed. Indeed,
they feel a certain virtuous self-satisfac-
tion in getting through all their work at a
doubled or trebled cost of effort, which
almost raises their stimulated sense of
fun into benignant radiance. Moreover,
it is a capital thing for men to learn, — if
they would learn, — that so far from hav
ing a moral right to an increase of profit
for every increased expenditure of labor,
they ought to be thankful for being some-
times allowed to earn what they do by a
far greater expenditure of labor than they
usually bestow, that harder work even
for the same reward is often a blessing
and not a curse; that at all events, when
life is lived, as it so often is, at half-power,
anything which calls upon us for a new
and more vigorous heave at the obstacles
before us, does us good, and not harm.
We do not know that this good effect of
the snow would last through a very long
trial of the kind, but if it did, it would do
still more good. Ordinary men
think of screwing themselves up to higher
effort than the mere gaining of their live-
lihood demands, and when that is, as it
usually is, much below what they are
capable of putting forth, it is good for
them in every way,-good for their hearts
and good for their nerves, to make the

never

THE SNOW, so long as it lasts, is certainly a mild kind of plague, not nearly so bad as the locusts, not so bad, probably, as the dust-storms of the East, not to be compared with a universal boil, or the tsetse fly, but still, a plague which sud denly paralyzes the ordinary action of man over a great surface of life, and reduces him to something like the helplessness of his savage state. If snow were to fall for a week at anything like the rate at which it fell on Tuesday, we believe that a good deal of London would be before the end of that time suffering severely from hunger. All the railways would be blocked; the only approach to town possible would be on sledges, and even the approach on sledges might be extremely difficult, on account of the softness of the snow, which renders the loco-discovery that they have a great reserve motion much more difficult for horses of power, which, at a pinch, enables them than in a Canadian winter. Snow in this not only to do their own work well when climate is clearly a serious plague, even if it is more laborious than usual, but a we admit it to be a mild plague, but there good deal of other people's, who are less is something to be said for it, neverthe- capable, too. -less. "Eöthen" speaks of a snowstorm as "a mysterious, unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, which may have been sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter." But perhaps we need not wait quite so long for a revelation of the good it does, or may do.

In the first place, it makes ordinary men put out a great deal more effort than usual to secure very much smaller results, and yet they feel a great deal better pleased with those more costly results, than they were with the larger results of less labor. Nothing is more curious than

Another thing the snow does for us. It emphasizes for us much more pointedly than we could for ourselves the rarity and exceptional character of such tasking obstacles. It shows us how, living, as we do, on the very verge of conditions which would render our life and civilization utterly impossible, the conditions which would thus make it impossible are yet almost always suppressed. Of course, under a frequently repeated snowstorm like Tuesday's and Wednesday's the present life of England could never have become what it is, or anything like what it

ates a certain force of resistance or sup
port. But with the word that is not a
deed, but only prevents some other word
which is a deed from being uttered, no
one knows how to deal; and so, like very
fine snow, which is not solid enough to
support a sledge, and is solid enough to
embarrass the motion of a carriage, it is
infinitely more obstructive than the more
positive word which represents action.
All the more perfect forms of obstruction
are half-way things, things liable to
change their forms at the least application
of pressure, solid now, liquid then, —
fluid now, gaseous then,
things that
you do not know how to deal with, be-
cause the moment you begin to deal with
them, they become something else than
they were. A substance so impalpable
that it gets into every cranny, and so near
the point at which it changes its form that
you can hardly do anything without find
ing something else in its place, is the
perfect type of obstructiveness.
And
surely that is a lesson in the evil of ob-
structiveness, an evil which is due to the
quantity of ambiguous and indeterminate
purpose in man,
-purpose determinate
enough to embarrass right action, but not
determinate enough to confront right
action with anything that can be called,
and therefore that elicits the emotion
which is appropriate to, action determi
nately wrong.

is. It would have been an Esquimaux | deal. It incurs a responsibility, and cre life, and not an English life. And yet these conditions, which would have made our life so utterly different, and kept so much of the existing life from ever existing at all, are always close at hand. The inconvenience we have feit this week is the measure of the inconvenience from which we are free, without remembering it, during almost every other week in the year. Nothing impresses on us so much as this how unstable the conditions of our civilization are, how easy it would be, with a very slight alteration in the physical conditions of the earth, to destroy the whole structure of our communications, whether in the way of railway, telegraph, or literature, and this by virtue of no process more formidable than a rapid and constant transformation of the rain into these soft, white crystals, which at first sight seem so much less aggressive than rain. The lesson of a snowstorm, if it only impresses on us that the conditions of our present human life are utterly unstable conditions, and that with no change greater than the change which is sure to come in time from the precession of the equinoxes, this part of our earth will be inhabited, if at all, under Arctic conditions once more, - would be useful by destroying all that "perilous stuff" of which the moral atmosphere is full, the tendency of which is to attribute all the so-called progressiveness of man to purely inevitable causes, and to persuade us that humanity by its own prowess has obtained for itself a fixity of tenure of all its various modern achievements, whereas really it is only a tenant-at-will, with notice to quit whenever the Arctic cycle comes round again.

And the snowstorm seems to us very impressive from another point of view. It teaches us how fine and delicate a substance may be rendered in the highest sense paralyzing and obstructive, if it can only be produced in sufficient quantity. The finer the snow is, and the softer it is, and the more easily it melts so long as it does not melt without friction, the more obstructive it is. The nearer it is to rain, so long as it retains its character of snow, the more completely it foils locomotion and makes the usual intercourse of man impossible. And is not that true of other sorts of obstruction? The nearer a word is to a mere word, so long as it has body enough to keep out a deed, the more paralyzing and unconquerable as an agency of obstruction it is. With the word that is a deed, you know how to

From Hardwicke's Science-Gossip. THE PLANE-TREE.

THIS tree is celebrated in the earliest record of Grecian history; Homer frequently mentions "the shady plane." It was dedicated by the Greeks to the beautiful Helen, and it is said that the bridal wreath which she wore on the occasion of her marriage with Menelaus was partly composed of the catkins of this tree. Theocritus, a poet who flourished 282 B.C., represents the virgins of Sparta introducing the plane in the epithalamium or marriage song of their princesses, thus,

Reverence me, for I am the tree of Helen. One Persian monarch, Xerxes, when invading Greece with his prodigious army, appears to have lost his reason at the sight of one of these magnificent trees he found in Phrygia. He compelled his army to encamp in the neighborhood,

ants paid a tribute to the Romans for permission to enjoy its shade. The Oriental plane appears to have been introduced into England about the middle of the sixteenth century.

From The Spectator.

THE STORM,* 1881.

DAME Nature, perusing the newspaper page,
Jumped out of her bed in a deuce of a rage;
She would prove on the spot she'd a will of
And swore by all saints to the calendar known,

her own.

"I have waited and waited," quoth she, "by the mass,

pass;

In the hope things might come to a likelier When sham 'Peace and Honor' were kicked out o' door,

swore to give England a chance or two more.
In return for that kicking, I gave her a year
To the heart of the Briton I thought night be
dear;
With a warm sun above him, a kind earth
below,

And seasons as true as the ocean at flow,
When crops might all flourish, and harvest in-

crease,

whilst he adorned the tree with all the jewels belonging to himself, his concubines, and the principal men of his court, until the branches were loaded with gems, necklaces, bracelets, and ornaments of every kind. He called it his mistress and his goddess, and it was some days before he could be prevailed on to leave the tree of which he was so enamored, and even then he caused a figure of it to be stamped on a gold medal which he constantly wore about him. Herodotus relates that he encircled this favorite tree with a collar of gold, and confided the charge of it to one of the ten thousand. It is said that the delay occasioned by this foolish freak was one of the causes of his defeat. The Romans named this tree platanus from the Greeks, and they appear to have held it in equal veneration with their more eastern neighbors. They planted the public and academic walks of their imperial city with it. When first introduced into Rome it was cultivated with much industry and at great cost, by their orators and statesmen; we are told that Cicero and Hortensius would exchange now and then a turn at the bar, that they might step to their handsome villas and irrigate the roots of these favorite trees, not with water but with wine. Pliny informs us that the plane-tree was first brought over the Torrian Sea, into the island of Diomede, where it was planted to ornament the tomb of that hero. This same author records the particulars of several remarkable plane-trees, and tells us of one in Lycia that had a cavity or hollow in the trunk which measured eighty-one feet in circumference. The I bowed out my Dizzy, nor grudged him the summit of this tree, notwithstanding the internal decay of the trunk, is said to have been sufficiently umbrageous to have borne quite a little forest of branches aloft. In this singular tree Licinius Mucianus, when consul, used to give dinner and supper parties, and he sometimes preferred sleeping in the hollow; perhaps, on account of the wine imbibed on such occasions, he was unable to walk home. The emperor Caligula found an extraordinary plane-tree, near Velitræ, in the cavity of which he gave a supper party to fifteen of his debauched courtiers, leaving ample room for his train of attendants to wait on the company. The emperor called it the "feast of the nest," because it had been given in a tree. Pliny states that when this tree was first introduced into the country of the Morini, a maritime people of Gaul, the inhabit

oars,

And Trade lift her head for a worthier peace;
When Zulus and Afghans might rest on their
And Bartle be fêted on civilized shores;
I drank power to his elbow, though under the
Bartle's elbow had wrought all the harm to be
done,
Believing, at least, the small reason of men
Would prevent him from shaking that elbow
again.

sun

while

smile

Of my sister, Dame Fortune, the kindliest (For tho' Truth in the end should compel us

to flee him

We both of us know a big man when we see him).

I bowed in my Gladstone, right worthy to

share

Once more in the 'will of the popular air;'†
And to warm-hearted Erin I hoped to impart,
To her brains, just a glow from the warmth of

her heart.

For, for good or for ill be their purpose and | Oh! sad was that valley when luckless she fell aim, To thee and to thine, landlord-hating Parnell! What differs the past from the present, I pray? Wherein, please, is yesterday worse than today?

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