shore, is enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill-stream. At high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages. There is a channel some three miles wide between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression of the city's having been built in the midst of the ocean; although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea-water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every plot of higher grounds bears some fragment of fair building but in order to know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait until the bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tide

less pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry, and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the highest tides sometimes enter the court-yards, and overflow the entrance halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.

The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the life

less, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation possible, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth in world-wide pulsation the glory of the West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendor.

WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL.

RUSSELL, WILLIAM CLARK, an English novelist; born in New York City, February 24, 1844. He was educated at Winchester, England, and in France. He then entered the British merchantservice, but after eight years of sea-life abandoned it to devote himself to literature. He was associated for some years with the Newcastle "Daily Chronicle" and the London " Daily Telegraph." His ambition has been to raise the nautical novel to a high standard, and his books are written out of his own experience. His books are "John Holdsworth, Chief Mate" (1874); "The Wreck of the Grosvenor" (1875); "The Little Loo" (1876); "A Sailor's Sweetheart" (1877); "An Ocean Free-Lance" (1880); "The Lady Maud" (1882); "Jack's Courtship" (1884); "On the Fok'sle Head " (1884); "A Strange Voyage" (1885); "In the Middle Watch " (1885); "Round the Galley Fire" (1886); "My Watch Below" (1886); "The Golden Hope" (1887); "A Frozen Pirate" (1887); "The Death Ship" (1888); "Betwixt the Forelands" (1888); "Marooned" (1889); "The Romance of Jenny Harlowe " (1889); "An Ocean Tragedy" (1890); "My Shipmate Louise" (1890); "Life of Nelson " (1890); "Helma " (1890); "List, Ye Landsmen" (1893); "The Convict Ship" (1891); "The Good Ship Mohock" (1895); "What Cheer" (1896); "The Last Entry" (1897); "The Two Captains" (1897).

THE RESCUE.

(From "The Wreck of the 'Grosvenor."")

THERE being but two of us now to work the pumps, it was more than we could do to keep them going. We plied them, with a brief spell between, and then my arms fell to my side, and I told the boatswain I could pump no more.

He sounded the well and made six incles.

"There's only two inches left that we can get out of her," said he; "and they 'll do no harm."

On which we quitted the main-deck and came into the cuddy.

"Mr. Royle," he said, seating himself on the edge of the table, "we shall have to leave this ship if we are n't taken off her. I reckon it'll require twelve feet o' water to sink her, allowin' for there being a deal o' wood in the cargo; and may be she won't go down at that. However, we'll say twelve feet, and supposin' we lets her be, she'll give us, if you like, eight or nine hours afore settlin.' I'm not saying as we ought to leave her; but I'm lookin' at you sir, and see that you're werry nigh knocked up; Cornish is about a quarter o' the man he was; an' as to the bloomin' steward, he's as good as drowned, no better and no worse. We shall take one spell too many at them pumps and fall down under it an' never get up agin. Wot we had best do is to keep a look all around for wessels, get that there quarter-boat ready for lowerin', and stand by to leave the ship when the sea calms. You know how Bermuda bears, don't you, sir?"

"I can find out to-night. It is too late to get sights now." "I think," he returned, "that our lives 'll be as safe in the boat as they are on board this ship, an' a trifle safer. I've been watching this wessel a good deal, and my belief is that wos another gale to strike her, she'd make one o' her long plunges and go to pieces like a pack o' cards, when she got to the bottom o' the walley o' water. Of course if this sea don't calm we must make shift to keep her afloat until it do. You'll excuse me for talkin' as though I wos dictatin'. I'm just givin' you the thoughts that come into my head while we wos pumpin'."

"I quite agree with you," I replied; "I am only thinking of the size of the quarter-boat-whether she is n't too small for five persons?"

"Not she! I'll get a bit of a mast rigged up in her, and it'll go hard if we don't get four mile an hour out of her somehows. How fur might the Bermuda Islands be off?"

I answered, after reflecting some moments, that they would probably be distant from the ship between two hundred and fifty and three hundred miles.

"We should get pretty near 'em in three days," said he, "if the wind blew that way. Will you go and tell the young lady what we're thinkin' o' doing, while I overhauls the boat an' see what's wantin' in her. One good job is, we shan't have to put off, through the ship's sinkin', all of a heap. There's a long warning given us, and I can't help thinkin'