W

ABOUT THE MOON.

E have all heard of the "Man in the Moon," with a thornbush and a dog, or as two children bearing a bucket of water on a pole. In Ceylon it is said that as Sakyamuni was one day wandering half starved in the forest, a pious hare met him, and offered itself to him to be slain and cooked for dinner; whereupon the holy Buddha set it on high in the moon, that future generations of men might see it and marvel at its piety. In the Samoan Islands these dark patches are supposed to be portions of a woman's figure. A certain woman was once hammering something with a mallet, when the moon arose, looking so much like a bread-fruit that the woman asked it to come down and let her child eat off a piece of it; but the moon, enraged at the insult, gobbled up woman, mallet, and child, and there, in the moon's belly, you may still behold them. According to the Hottentots, the Moon once sent the Hare to inform men that as she died away and rose again, so should men die and again come to life. But the stupid Hare forgot the purport of the message, and, coming down to the earth, proclaimed it far and wide that though the Moon was invariably resuscitated whenever she died, mankind, on the other hand, should die and go to the Devil. When the silly brute returned to the lunar country and told what he had done, the Moon was so angry that she took up an axe and aimed a blow at his head to split it. But the axe missed and only cut his lip open; and that was the origin of the "hare-lip." Maddened by the pain and the insult, the Hare flew at the Moon and almost scratched her eyes out; and to this day she bears on her face the marks of the Hare's claws.

This

Again, every reader of the classics knows how Selene cast Endymion into a profound slumber because he refused her love, and how at sundown she used to come and stand above him on the Latmian hill, and watch him as he lay asleep on the marble steps of a temple half hidden among drooping elm-trees, over which clambered vines heavy with dark blue grapes. represents the rising moon looking down on the setting sun; in Labrador a similar phenomenon has suggested a somewhat different story. Among the Esquimaux the Sun is a maiden and the Moon is her brother, who is overcome by a wicked passion for her. Once, as this girl was at a dancing-party in a friend's hut, some one came up and took hold of her by the shoulders and shook her, which is (according to the legend) the Esquimaux manner of declaring one's love. She could not tell who it was in the dark, and so she dipped her hand in some soot and smeared one of his cheeks with it. When a light was struck in the hut, she saw, to her dismay, that it was her brother, and, without waiting to learn any more, she took to her heels. He started in

hot pursuit, and so they ran till they got to the end of the world, -the jumping-off place,-when they both jumped into the sky. There the Moon still chases his sister, the Sun; and every now and then he turns his sooty cheek toward the earth, when he becomes so dark that you cannot see him.

MUSIC.

MUSIC, thou burning gate of worship, open wide
Thy golden self; one glimpse of God's wrapt choir reveal!
I wept, dreaming that thou wert dead.

The wild swan sadly wavered with his wing of snow
And ceased to be; the heart of Rapture broke; laid low
The dumb reed shivered when pale Pan forbore to blow;
The myrtle drooped in pain; frost numbed the lover's glow;
Blue-eyed forget-me-nots all ceased to grow,

For merry wedding-bells were dead.

Music, sweet child of bitter war, thy serfs rejoice.
Thou warblest, and they fall. They bleed in lands afar.
Thy hounds caress thee, and are dead.

Thy thrilling war-song sends each eager slave
Home to the cannon's mouth. It consecrates a grave
In deserts, flings the gay plume to the laughing wave,
Welcome as wine, it showers dangers on the brave,
Who thirsts to do and dare, to slaughter and to save.
Thou pilest hecatombs of dead.

Music, soft prince of joy, see where thy white feet glide,
The Universe quick drinks thy honeyed strains. We kneel
To Beauty which is never dead.

Kneel, prouder than the crest of Alexander's pride,
Who knit the East and West, whom carnage glorified,
Than Europe's fire-brand, who at St. Helena died,

Than Triton's horn of triumph, sounding far and wide
From crag to crag above the blue Ægean tide,

And foam that veils the shipwrecked dead.

Music, thou chorister adorable, whose voice
Leaps lusciously from lark to lark, from star to star,
Lovely amidst the dying, dead.

Thou harmony of all creation's glory, say

When Phidias saw Hellenic gods in sluggish clay,

When Newton read the spheres, when Luther learnt to pray,
Whose fruitful mercy framed hymn, statute, pæan, lay,

Inspired serenades by night, crusades by day,

Till harping Orpheus roused the dead?

ROBERT BATSON.

WE

THE FORMS OF WATER.

No. VI.-Architecture of Lake Ice.

E have thus made ourselves acquainted with the beautiful snow-flowers self-constructed by the molecules of water in calm cold air. Do the molecules show this architectural power when ordinary water is frozen? What, for example, is the structure of the ice over which we skate in winter? Quite as wonderful as the flowers of the snow. The observation is rare, if not new, but I have seen in water slowly freezing six-rayed icestars formed, and floating free on the surface. A six-rayed star moreover, is typical of the construction of all our lake ice. It is built up of such forms wonderfully interlaced.

Take a slab of lake ice and place it in the path of a concentrated sunbeam. Watch the track of the beam through the ice. Part of the beam is stopped, part of it goes through; the former produces internal liquefaction, the latter has no effect whatever upon the ice. But the liquefaction is not uniformly diffused. From separate spots of the ice little shining points are seen to sparkle forth. Every one of those points is surrounded by a beautiful liquid flower with six petals.

Ice and water are so optically alike that unless the light fall properly upon these flowers you cannot see them. But what is the central spot? A vacuum. Ice swims on water because, bulk for bulk it is lighter than water; so that when ice is melted it shrinks in size. Can the liquid flowers then occupy the whole space of the ice melted? Plainly no. A little empty space is formed with the flowers, and this space, or rather its surface, shines in the sun with the lustre of burnished silver.

In all cases the flowers are formed parallel to the surface of freezing. They are formed when the sun shines upon the ice of every lake; sometimes in myriads, and so small as to require a magnifying glass to see them. They are always attainable, but their beauty is often marred by internal defects of the ice. Even one portion of the same piece of ice may show them exquisitely, while a second portion shows them imperfectly.

You

Here we have a reversal of the process of crystallization. The searching solar beam is delicate enough to take the molecules down without deranging the order of their architecture. Try the experiment for yourself with a pocket-lens on a sunny day. will not find the flowers confused; they all lie parallel to the surface of freezing. In this exquisite way every bit of the ice over which our skaters glide in winter is put together.

I said that a portion of the sunbeam was stopped by the ice and liquefied it. What is this portion? The dark heat of the The great body of the light waves and even a portion of the

sun.

dark ones, pass through the ice without losing any of their heating power. When properly concentrated on combustible bodies, even after having passed through the ice, their burning power becomes manifest.

And the ice itself may be employed to concentrate them. With an ice-lens in the polar regions Dr. Scoresby has often concentrated the sun's rays so as to make them burn wood, fire gunpowder, and melt lead; thus proving that the heating power is retained by the rays, even after they have passed through so cold a substance.

By rendering the rays of the electric lamp parallel, and then sending them through a lens of ice, we obtain all the effects which Dr. Scoresby obtained with the rays of the sun.

THE

AN IDYLL OF THE RHINE.

Her loveliness I never knew,

Until she smiled on me.-WORDSWORTH.

HE thrushes were piping merrily, and it was to them that Lischen was listening, not to the three men and a boy who were puffing lustily at their instruments of music down below. For it was a feast day, and the people of Löwenberg were at the Weinwirthschaft, enjoying the fine evening and the music and the beer of their native land. The little circular dancing-ground was nicely sanded, the tables and chairs were set in rows beside it, and the German fathers and uncles were seated there, with their modest bottles of pale, jasper-coloured wine, or glasses of amber beer. And as the band puffed and blew with the sober steadfastness of Germans who knew their duty, and the young people went round and round in the waltz with the same sobriety, the men nodded gravely to the music and thought, "my Tracy or my Anna is the best dancer in the village."

Meanwhile, the mothers sat in an arbour and gossiped over their knitting, and sipped coffee from thick white cups, which might have served as shuttlecocks without injury to themselves. Those who had no beer and no coffee and no partner for the dance, sat on the edge of the road above and watched the fun. Lischen was one of these. Her sweet face, with its pure oval outline and clear thoughtful eyes, was framed in by a background of vine leaves, growing on a trellis. The sunlight flickered and fell across her light brown hair, smoothly braided in a round coil behind. She had none of the fine daggers or silver-headed pins with which the other girls ornamented their tresses. Her hands, brown with the sun, but smooth and finely formed, moved rapidly over her knitting; the pins twinkled as they moved; but her eyes roved with their calm, restful, thoughtful gaze on all the life around her.

No one asked her to dance: it was not because she was an orphan, the adopted daughter of old Jacob Müller, who had but little to give or leave. The lads of Löwenberg were not so sordid as that; but it was because she was so silent, so reserved, seemingly so far removed in mind from those about her. The young fellows were half afraid of Lischen, and the girls, when they gossiped at the spring, felt that she did not care for their simple chatter; she would rather get through her work as quickly as possible, and so save an hour for her beloved books. Even the Bauer's son, who had a great education, was shy of Lisa; but then it was known that he admired the wheelwright's handsome Katinka, with whom he was now dancing. The Bauerin herself was among the group in the summer-house, and as her eyes fell on Lischen sitting all alone, she observed to her neighbour, with that conviction which a sense of property is apt to give to all one's opinions: "Lischen is alone as usual. I am sorry for the girl; she must alter before she will get a lover. Men like a girl who can chat a little and laugh at their jokes, not seem to be dreaming of some one in the stars while they are speaking."

Meanwhile, the children of Frau Knatage, the wirthin, having to amuse themselves while their mother was running hither and thither among her guests, were dragging the baby to and fro in a little cart. Baby's round face, oddly placed in its little rims of cap, peeped over the top of the cart: the wheels made a frightful noise, scroop, scroop, scroop. All of a sudden, there was an outery: Röschen, a little toddling woman of two, trotting steadily beside this majestic equipage, had been overthrown by its great speed, and lay prone and squealing upon the highroad. It was Lischen who ran to pick the child up, soothed her, and rocked her to sleep upon her knee. The little head lay pillowed on Lischen's bosom. The cart went scrooping up and down as before.

The dancing went on. Between the dances, two or three singers would stand up and take parts in a Volkslied, and all the rest, listening calmly, would afterwards hammer a little encouragement with their pots of beer; then a fresh waltz would begin. The sun began to sink; the shadows on the hill grew violet; the waters of the Rhine, seen between two slopes, began to wear a tender glow. Frau Knatage came and thanked Lischen for her care of the child, and the girl smiled with a strange smile which was quite her own, and gently smoothed the little head. The village shepherd came down the hill, walking slowly, because one of his sheep was lame. They followed him obediently, quickening their pace when he uttered his sharp "Brrr!" and turning off by twos or threes as they came to their own lanes or their own homesteads. The young people began to separate, but Lisa did not like to move, on account of Röschen, who still slept. The shepherd's note came with the soft distinctness of distant noises in the evening, and the grasshoppers close at hand seemed to mimic him with their smaller "Brrr! Brrr!"