off from the engine, and crushed under the wheels, but is turned into Heat, you must make us swallow the dictionary and the old philosophers first."

"I see I must tell you a little story," answered my Lord High Fiddlestick, gently. "As my friend Count Rumford and your friend Force were one day boring a cannon, Count Rumford tried to pick up some of the brass chips that Force had just cut off, and discovered that they were hotter than boiling water. Brass is not generally hotter than boiling water. Before we go farther, perhaps you will tell us, Mr. Traveller, what had happened to these chips."

66

'Why, the boring had squeezed so much caloric fluid into these chips," answered the traveller.

"Then, of course," said my Lord High Fiddlestick, "if the brass chips held so much more heat-fluid than they ever held before, they must be altered in some way. If you are going to put, say, a quart of heat-fluid in chips that only held a pint before, you must alter your chips. But Count Rumford found that the chips were not altered; that is, if you are right, Mr. Traveller, a pint could hold a quart; and he thought that was tougher to swallow than the old philosophers. So he took a hollow tube of brass, called a cylinder. In it he put a flat piece of hard steel. The steel was almost as large as the cylinder, so that it could just turn around the steel. He put the cylinder in a box filled with water. A horse was made to turn the cylinder round and round. The piece of steel rubbed hard all the time on the bottom of the brass cylinder. The brass grew warm, and the water grew warm. Count Rumford and a great many people stood watching it curiously. The cylinder turned and turned, all the time growing hotter. The water all the time grew hotter, too; and, at the end of two hours and a half, the water was so hot that it boiled. Now, Mr. Traveller, what makes water boil?”

"Heat," answered the little man, sulkily.

"Well, there was no Heat here," cried my Lord High Fiddlestick,—“only Force; and Force made the water boil. Own up, Mr. Traveller. It begins to look as if Heat and Force were the same person."

"I shall not own anything of the sort," answered the little man. "Pray, my Lord High Fiddlestick," catching up the hammer and bringing it down hard on the iron, "how did Force turn into Heat then?"

"This iron," said my Lord, "is made of what we call atoms, tiny particles, too small to be seen separately."

"Bosh!" snorted the traveller.

"These atoms," said the Lord High Fiddlestick, "are held fast together by a liking they have for each other, - an attraction that we call cohesion. Force strikes this iron with the weight of the hammer. He jars the iron; he jars, he stirs, the atoms; they can stir, although their band of cohesion holds them so close that they look as if they were stuck tight together. The hammer is down. You would say, Force is dead. I say, he has gone in among those atoms; he is carrying on the stir and jar from one atom to the other. "Stop!" says Cohesion, trying to hold them fast. "Go on!" cries Force. The atoms of iron cannot get away from one another, but they can

move.

Force makes them move and struggle. When you struggle, you get warm. When the atoms of iron struggle, they make what my friend, Lord Bacon, calls the fire and fury of Heat. They actually get farther away from each other; and this is why philosophers will tell you that heat makes a body larger. This hard, solid iron is actually a little larger than when it was cool, because the atoms have succeeded in getting farther from each other. Now, all the King's horses, and all the King's men, if you could set them to tug on each side of this little bit of iron, have not strength to do that. It required a great force, stronger than all the King's horses and men. But who did pull the atoms? Heat. Then Heat is Force, or perhaps I should say motion; for, when we struck this iron with the hammer, and it became warmer, what had happened really? Why, the motion of the arm and hammer that struck it went in among the atoms of iron, and they moved and pulled a little away from each other. What we call Heat was really their motion; and so—

"Stuff!" interrupted the traveller. he must be hard up for proofs."

"When a man comes down to atoms,

"Comes down to atoms!" exclaimed my Lord High Fiddlestick, opening a window. Outside, the sill was covered with fresh-fallen snow, which my Lord High Fiddlestick scraped up in his hands.

"Can anything be softer than this snow?" he asked. "Well, the pull and strain that brought the water-atoms together to make as much snow as I hold here would pitch a ton of stone over a precipice two thousand feet deep. Come down to atoms, indeed! Pray, let me show you a few of the things that atoms can do."

"My Lord," interrupted the King, in a hurry, "I observe that dinner is ready, and the beefsteak on the table. If the steak gets cold, according to your philosophy, it will grow smaller; and then, perhaps, there will not be enough to go round. Let us go to dinner, and hear what the atoms can do another time, my Lord High Fiddlestick!"

Louise E. Chollet.

D

THE STORY OF THE AMBER BEADS.

O you know Mother Nature? She it is to whom God has given the care of the earth, and all that grows in or upon it, just as he has given to your mother the care of her family of boys and girls.

You may think that Mother Nature, like the famous "old woman who lived in the shoe," has so many children that she does n't know what to do; but you will know better when you become acquainted with her, and learn how strong she is, and how active; how she can really be in fifty places at once, taking care of a sick tree, or a baby flower just born; and, at the same time, building underground palaces, guiding the steps of little travellers set

ting out on long journeys, and sweeping, dusting, and arranging her great house, the earth. And all the while, in the midst of her patient and neverending work, she will tell us the most charming and marvellous stories, — of ages ago when she was young, or of the treasures that lie hidden in the most distant and secret closets of her palace,—just such stories as you all like so well to hear your mother tell, when you gather round her in the twilight. A few of these stories which she has told to me, I am about to tell you, beginning with that one whose title is printed at the beginning of this article.

I know a little Scotch girl, she lives among the Highlands. Her home is hardly more than a hut; her food, broth and bread. Her father keeps sheep on the hillsides, and, instead of wearing a coat, wraps himself in his plaid for protection from the cold winds that drive before them great clouds of mist and snow among the mountains.

As for Jeanie herself (you must be careful to spell her name with an ea, for that is Scotch fashion), her yellow hair is bound about with a little snood; her face is browned by exposure to the weather; and her hands are hardened by work, for she helps her mother to cook and sew, to spin and weave. One treasure little Jeanie has, which many a lady would be proud to wear. It is a necklace of amber beads, "lamour beads," old Elsie calls them; that is the name they went by when she was young.

You have perhaps seen amber, and know its rich, sunshiny color, and its fragrance when rubbed; and do you also know that rubbing will make amber attract things somewhat as a magnet does? Jeanie's beads had all these properties, but some others besides, wonderful and lovely; and it is of those particularly that I wish to tell you. Each bead has inside of it some tiny thing, encased as if it had grown in the amber, and Jeanie is never tired of looking at and wondering about them. Here is one with a delicate bit of ferny moss shut up, as it were, in a globe of yellow light. In another is the tiniest fly, his little wings outspread and raised for flight. Again, she can show us a bee lodged in one bead that looks like solid honey, and a little bright-winged beetle in another. This one holds two slender pine needles lying across each other, and here we see a single scale of a pine cone, while yet another shows an atom of an acorn-cup, fit for a fairy's use. I wish you could see the beads, for I cannot tell you the half of their beauty. Now, where do you suppose they came from; and how did little Scotch Jeanie come into possession of such a treasure?

All she knows about it is, that her grandfather, old Kenraeth, who cowers now all day in the chimney-corner, once, years ago, when he was a young lad, went down upon the sea-shore, after a great storm, hoping to help save something from the wreck of the "Goshawk," that had gone ashore during the night; and there, among the slippery sea-weeds, his foot had accidentally uncovered a clear, shining lump of amber, in which all these little creatures were embedded. Now, Kenneth loved a pretty Highland lass, and, when she promised to be his bride, he brought her a necklace of amber beads. He had carved them himself out of his lump of amber, working carefully to save

in each bead the prettiest insect or moss; and thinking, while he toiled hour after hour, of the delight with which he should see his bride wear them. That bride was Jeanie's grandmother; and when she died last year, she said, "Let little Jeanie have my lamour beads, and keep them as long as she lives."

But what puzzled Jeanie was, how the amber came to be on the sea-shore; and, most of all, how the bees and mosses came inside of it. Should you like to know? If you would, that is one of Mother Nature's stories, and she will gladly tell it. Hear what she answers to our questions:

"I remember a time, long, long before you were born,- long, even, before any men were living upon the earth; then these Scotch Highlands, as you call them, where little Jeanie lives, were covered with forests, there were oaks, poplars, beeches, and pines; and among them one kind of pine, tall and stately, from which a shining yellow gum flowed, just as you have seen little drops of sticky gum exude from our own pine-trees. This beautiful yellow gum was fragrant, and, as the thousands of little insects fluttered about it in the warm sunshine, they were attracted by its pleasant odor,—perhaps, too, by its taste, — and, once alighted upon it, they stuck fast, and could not get away, while the great yellow drops, oozing out, surrounded and at last covered them entirely. So, too, wind-blown bits of moss, leaves, acorns, cones, and little sticks, were soon securely embedded in the fast-flowing gum; and, as time went by, it hardened and hardened more and more. And this is amber."

"That is well told, Mother Nature, but it does not explain how Kenneth's lump of amber came to be on the sea-shore."

"Wait, then, for the second part of the story.

"Did you ever hear that, in those very old times, the land sometimes sank down into the sea, even so deep that the water covered the very mountaintops; and then, after ages, it was slowly lifted up again, to sink indeed, perhaps, yet again and again?

"You can hardly believe it, yet I myself was there to see, and I remember well when the great forests of the north of Scotland - the oaks, the poplars, and the amber-pines-were lowered into the deep sea. There, lying at the bottom of the ocean, the wood and the gum hardened like stone, and only the great storms can disturb them as they lie half buried in the sand. It was one of those great storms that brought Kenneth's lump of amber to land." If we could only walk on the bottom of the sea, what treasures we might

find!

Author of "The Seven Little Sisters."

HALF-HOURS WITH FATHER BRIGHTHOPES.

IX.

THERE

HERE was to be a picnic at the Grove, to which all the young folks in the Vale were going.

"There'll be music by the band, and dancing on the green, and swinging in the swings under the trees; we 're to carry our own luncheons, and have such a nice time!" said Emma Reverdy. "And you must certainly go, Father Brighthopes! We can't do without you. We are going over early in the morning, to be gone all day."

"All day!" repeated the old clergyman, pleasantly. "You forget, my child, that I am no longer young. Much as I love the company of children, I fear I should become very weary before night."

"I have thought of that too," cried Emma; "and I'll tell you what we can do. If you don't like to go over when the teams go, we can go in the boat, and I am sure that will be a great deal pleasanter. The picnic is to be just across the river from Mr. Dobson's farm; there is a good boat at the Grove, and some of the boys can bring it over to the bend for us. That will save you a long ride around the dusty roads and over the old bridge. That's the way a lot of us went last year, and it was so nice!"

"Well, we will wait till the day comes, and then see what arrangements have been made, and what the weather is," said Father Brighthopes, in a way that signified to the delighted Emma that he would go.

She was up early on the morning of the picnic, to see what the weather promised; and her heart sang within her as joyously as the birds sang in the dewy orchard, when she saw the sky clear and blue, and felt the cool breezes on her cheek.

"O, it's such a day for a picnic!" she said, running to meet Father Brighthopes as he came from his room. "The boat is coming for us at eleven o'clock; and you are to be brought back the same way, just when you please. You are not to get tired at all, you know."

"Who is to bring the boat?"

"Jason Jones and Burt Thorley; they jumped at the chance, when I asked them."

"At eleven o'clock?"

"Yes; they are to be at the bend, waiting for us."

"Well," said Father Brighthopes, "we must n't disappoint them after they have taken so much trouble, nor keep them waiting long."

It was but a short walk to the bend, and prompt at the appointed hour Emma and her old friend were on the spot. The boat had not come; but they found seated under a willow-tree on the shore Miss Thorley and a number of her pupils, some of whom had been waiting there an hour, - Burt and Jason having agreed to take them to the Grove at ten, and then come back for Father Brighthopes.