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"To extract the cube root of any number. RULE:-1. Point off the figures three by three, pointing from right to left; making the decimals even periods, by adding ciphers, should their number not consist of three, six, nine, &c. 2. Find the greatest cube contained in the left hand period, and to the first difference annex the next period. 3. Divide this number by 300 times the square of the root first found, and set down the product of the quotient and divisor. 4. Multiply the square of this last quotient figure by those which precede it, and this product again by 30, and to the sum of both these products, add the cube of the last figure, and subtract the sum from the dividend. 5. To the remainder bring down the next period, and proceed as before, till all the periods are brought down; the quotient will be the required cube root."

The whole of this is illustrated by the following example only :

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Now for any pupil to comprehend the rule, he must first be able to solve the problems which it professes to explain; and, after many trials, he will begin to see the application of the words to the ideas they are intended to convey. A standard vocabulary is wanting in arithmetic, with definite meanings to the words, to which all teachers should confine themselves. At present each explains in a language of his own, which of itself first requires explanation.

The examples of the application of decimals to the proposed new coinage should have been preceded by tables showing the relative values of the proposed new pieces of money to each other.

It is, however, a very neat little pocket volume; and certainly well worth the fifteen pence charged for it.

THE LIFE OF A PIRATE:

WRITTEN BY HIMSELF,

Somewhere about the years 1730-1.

CHAPTER II.

I have mentioned my uncle's name, once or twice, in what I have thus far written; and with expressions of abhorrence. He well deserved to be so spoken of, and something worse than words; and that, in time, he got also.

He was my mother's only brother; but as unlike her as I am to a Quaker, or, as Hamlet says of himself, to Hercules. It was always a sort of mystery to me how they could have been the children of the same parents; unless all the good of them went to the one, and all the evil to the other. Strangely different influences, an Astrologer would declare, must have reigned over the hours of their birth.

By trade, or rather business, he was a farmer and grazier, and possessed of a good deal of property, with which-as he was unmarried, and, save in respect to eating and drinking, of very niggardly habits-he might well have been contented, without coveting other people's. But he was a mean avaricious hound as ever existed, and what was worse and viler—if anything can be, than idolatry of money—he had the malignity of the very devil, but unaccompanied by any of the devil's courage. Had he lived a hundred years ago, when racks and thumbikins were the fashion, he would, I verily believe, have offered himself for executioner, out of his love to look upon human suffering. He had, when quite a child, witnessed the burning, at Tyburn, of poor Mistress Graunt, of the family of Ascham's Biographer, for the sheltering of some of Monmouth's men; and nothing delighted him so much, whenever he could find a listener, as to describe and imitate, with a horrid eloquence, how she had shrieked and twisted in the flames, as the sputtering flesh peeled off her. Men, 't is an old saying, are born poets, not become so; and my uncle had derived from Nature-very little to her credit, say I—a turn and genius for cruelty that needed no cultivation. I never could satisfy myself why, in the first place, Providence should ever have permitted the existence of such a wretch at all; or why, if she had only intended him

for a specimen of what she was capable of doing, in the way of making two-legged monsters, she had not cast him upon an age, and country, and position in life, where he might have given full swing to his villanous propensities. It was quite a throwing-away of such a Nero to doom him to a Northamptonshire village. The devil would have made a king of my uncle.

I sometimes used to speculate, as I grew up, whether a good long torturing illness might not have wrought a salutary change in his disposition. But, for the misfortune of those about him, he was cursed with a constitution of adamant. Never a day's respite got they, from his being confined to his bed with illness, ever so temporary. And had it pleased God to have thus visited him, and good resolutions grown out of danger acting upon a cowardly heart, they would, I doubt not, have disappeared at the same time with the doctor-like Satan's, in the adage—a reformation brought about " non moribus sed metu." For, as was wittily, but very unjustly, said of a late poet, Mr. Prior,

"Events are chain'd to causes; generally

Those that are rascals born will rascals die."

In person he was by no means an uncomely man to look upon: of middle height, very broad and square about the shoulders, his hair of a yellowish red-something resembling rhubarb in colour, and with an exceedingly fair complexion. His face was smooth as a child's, and clear and healthy, like a pearmain apple, which was the more extraordinary as he went to bed drunk almost every night of his life; but he shewed no signs of this, except that his eyes were wet and winky of a morning, and his lips glazed and crackly. He had particularly large hands, ridged with high-standing veins, and the tips of his fingers round and stubby, from a habit he had of biting his nails, which I never remember to have seen in anyone that was of a frank and lively temper. He talked very loud and grating, and always in the same tone of voice, like a barrel-organ. His week-day wear was a horseman's coat, of a brown colour, with great flaps to it; a small three cornered hat, with a coppery-silvered binding; thicksoled boots, wax-topped and oiled, instead of blacked, the better to keep the wet out; and he always carried in his hand a heavy greasy huntingwhip. You would have set him down, at first sight, for a clownish vulgar fellow enough, without a drop of good blood in his veins, even though it came to him without a license; but it was only when you saw him in his cups and his cunning, drunk within him—or, what he liked better than

* In the margin of the M.S. are the following words :-"Xantho-coloi quasi capillis dominatur flavi-rubia bilis."-Editor.

his liquor even, when he was engaged in cheating or making some one miserable-that his flat eyes would lighten up, and his whole vile reptile soul shine malignantly through them.

During my father's lifetime he never, or very rarely, came to the Grange; for my father, though he had married his sister, could not, as poor Sarah used to say, "abide mistress's brother." But he contrived, after my father's death, to wriggle himself into the management of our property; and my poor mother strove to think herself, and persuade the neighbours, that he did it out of good-will towards her and her child. I have no doubt but that he either embezzled the profits of our land, or, out of sheer malice, purposely miscultivated it; for though it had always, the servants told me, yielded enough, in my father's time, to maintain us all in comfort—and he, as it may well be supposed, was no great proficient in the "res rustica "—we were hard pinched to live upon it now the family was reduced to two. Between me and my uncle there had never been any love lost. One day, when I was about twelve years old, he came up to the Grange and bullied and insulted my mother about an old bushel-measure that was missing. I thought, at first, he was only joking, in his brutal half-earnest sort of way, for there was a pucker upon his cheek and a twinkle in his eye all the time he was speaking. At last he said something, I forget the precise words, very disparaging about my father, and her daily visits to the churchyard, and that it was another husband that she wanted. My mother burst into tears, grasping my hand convulsively, as I stood beside her, in her efforts to suppress them. My anger had been for some time scething, but now it boiled right over, and, letting drop her hand, I flew at his throat, like a bull-dog. He was so taken by surprise, and the fury of my attack, that he staggered back a yard or two, and then fell full-length upon his back, bringing me to the ground with him. My mother shrieked out, and the farm servants, who were at dinner in the kitchen, came running in at the outcry, and pulled me from off him. I had pretty nearly throttled him, and would to God I had done so quite; for his death, at that period, would have changed, in all probability, my whole career of life, while he, by dying a few years earlier, would have the fewer sins to answer for, and he came, as it turned out, to no very different end thereafter.

At another time, only about four months before my mother's death, I caught him one day, in the farm-yard, flogging, with his eternal horsewhip, a poor half-witted dumb boy, that minded the poultry. He had tied him fast against a waggon wheel, that he might not run away, and was beating him unmercifully. I saw him raise himself on his tocs, like a man in the act of making a jump, that his blows might fall the heavier. The lad's contortions and grimaces, and the horrid sounds to which he

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gave utterance, in his ineffectual attempts to express his pain, seemed to amuse my uncle wonderfully. "O, if you don't like it," I heard him say, "you have only to tell me and I will leave off immediately; ay, but you must speak plainer than that, I don't understand what that means;" and down again came the lash, twisting and clinging round him like the coils of a boa-snake. I was so maddened, at the sight of his brutality, that I snatched up a pitch-fork, that was standing against a wall, and rushed upon him with it. He parried my first thrust, with the handle of his whip, and then taking to his heels he ran roaring across the farm-yard till he got to the gate, over which he vaulted into the homefield, with the agility of a posture-master. It was a lucky thing for him that he was too quick for me, for if I had come up with him I should have driven the tines of the fork into his back, with as little scruple as if it had been a dung-heap.

I continued so ill, for many days after my mother's death, that I had neither spirit nor strength to make any sort of resistance to my uncle's proceedings. Indeed, for the greater part of the time, I was in a state of unconsciousness. And had I been aware of what was going on, I know not how I could have prevented it; for I was but thirteen years old, and my mother had died without a will, and he being my nearest, indeed my only relation, the law, I suppose, invested him with full power over me. He lost no time, now that he had it, in exercising his authority. He let the Grange, immediately, to one Sharman, a rich shoemaker, at Wellingborough, who, however, never came to live there; and he had an auction on the premises - the very day after my mother's funeral-at which everything was sold, that could by possibility be turned into money, down to her old garden bonnet and my father's sword and walking-cane. The only relic I was ever able to obtain, of either of them, was a lock of my father's grey hair, set in a gold ring-which Sarah Hewitt bought for me, at the sale, with her own money-and one of my mother's long gloves, that was picked up by the dumb boy and carefully put aside till he had an opportunity of giving it to me. The ring I wear still, the glove I lost two years ago when I was shipwrecked off Cape de la Vela.

As I was quite unable to walk to my uncle's house, which was at the farther end of the village, he had me trundled there in a wheel-barrow. I remember, as if it were yesterday, old Sarah trudging along by the side of me, her hand on the rail of the barrow, crying and sobbing as if her heart would break. And break it did, very shortly, for she survived her mistress scarcely a month. They never told me she was ill; nor could I have gone to her if I had known it, for I was confined to my bed, the whole time, too ill to walk or even stand without assistance. Every day I would enquire, of the doctor, what had become of her, and why she did

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