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course, they do not unclothe. The pallid light on their faces, haggard and worn as so many of them are, gives them a death-like look. You could

dantly pathetic. A doddering old man | the appearance of the interior of the is seen sitting with his back to a cow- barns when the hands are all asleep. shed. With him is a middle-aged They usually lie on their backs. Of woman, his daughter. Heaven knows how she managed to bring the paralytic old fellow with her; but the woman is not slow to tell of the anxiety she feels. Here they continue to sit until bed-readily fancy they were SO many time, which, in their case, is rather corpses. early. Of sucking children there seem a score or two, judging by the firelight pictures.

A little later, towards eight or nine o'clock, some of the barns are half full. The older women seem to like to sit crooning over the embers of their fire. Besides, there is rumor of free distribution of cider by and by. The younger men await the cider with some impatience. They accost the "gaffer" on the subject with scant show of politeness, and grumble loudly if their requests are vain. However, they soon find solace again in their pipes, and in ribald tales and songs, delivered in effective chiaroscuro..

This is an important time for the farmer. He will not think of going to bed until he has seen his hands nested, and taken every possible precaution against fire. At eleven or half past eleven, the lingerers have to be urged into their quarters. Like as not, they demur. They didn't come, they say, to be ordered about; and, further, they arn't used to retiring until they please. The women are the worst offenders in this matter. The farmer, however, knows his subjects. They are, he tells them, quite at liberty to draw their earnings and be off in the morning; but until then, since they use his barns for a dormitory, they must submit to his wishes in a measure.

CHARLES EDWARDES.

From The Standard.

A PLAGUE OF WASPS.

A " GREAT deal of inconvenience," a correspondent informs us, is at present caused by a plague of wasps infesting the coast between Hythe and Dungeness, and extending through the counties of Huntingdon and Cambridge. "Inconvenience" is, indeed, scarcely the term applicable to this pest. They attack the teamsters in the field and the housekeepers at home. The agricultural laborers, apparently under the belief that the venomous insects are in some way under the farmers' control, have all but struck. Flocks are stung so persistently that two sheep have died from swellings in the throat caused by the wasps' attack, and at Ramsay an unlucky householder had to evacuate his bedroom, and almost throw his children out of doors, to prevent them being stung to death. Several cases in which serious injury has been caused by nervous shock due to the same cause are reported, and altogether the inhabitants of these districts are beginning to find that a warm summer is not without its aftermath. For, undoubtedly, the swarm of wasps may be traced to the hot, dry weather of the last few months. The nests have enormously increased in number.

Binnacle lamps are slung in the barns, one to each room, and left burning all night. So reckless are the pick-In one field forty have been ploughed ers, they will set an open lamp against a dry beam of wood, sew and talk by it, and go to sleep with it still there, a menace. It is to make sure that this sort of thing is not being done that the farmer patrols his premises until a late hour.

There is something uncanny about

up and destroyed, with cyanide of potassium, which, by the by, is a dangerous drug to be employed by the ordinary farm laborer. Even then, the clouds of irate insects which descend upon the disturbers of their haunts are a peril not to be despised. Hornets also are adding their fury to their kin

dred's onslaught. At present, there is | are they without their use in keeping plenty of food for them in the fields, down the caterpillars. Still, on the and the ripening plums are succumbing whole, wasps, like mosquitoes and ratto their ravages; but we are assured tlesnakes, are things we could very that later on they will "certainly invade the towns," though why, except to prey on the contents of grocers' and confectioners' shops, it is hard to say. Meantime, prudent folk will be wise to get a supply of carbolic acid laid in, and to keep a cut onion at hand, against the stings which, unless a spell of cold weather settles the insects for good and all, may at an early date be their lot. In a warm season, when food is plentiful, a nest may contain many thousands of cells, full of insects in all stages of development. Each of these cells is occupied several times in the course of a summer. Hence, a vast swarm may proceed from a single hive, to the "inconvenience" of an entire neighborhood and the loss of the market gardener and fruit grower.

well dispense with. The least truculent of zoophilists kills them without remorse, though, unless the nest is taken, the annihilation of stray insects does little to rid a district of a pest which sends out thirty or forty thousand from every hive. Though the seeking out and destruction of nests in summer are not without effect on the prevalence of the wasps, this form of insecticide does not prove so effectual as attacking them earlier in the season. For it may happen that the death of a few wasps in spring will prevent the formation of a nest later in the year, and the production of a family whose members

may before October be counted by tens of thousands. Cyanide of potassium, we have said, is not quite the best substance to employ for During summer, the wasps, of which disposing of wasps. A much safer, there are seven species in Great Brit- and quite as effectual, method of comain, live almost exclusively upon the passing their destruction is to blow up sweet juices of ripe fruit, occasionally the nest by a charge of mixed sulphur carrying off small particles of the flesh, and gunpowder, fired by a piece of the traces of one of these insect con- touch-paper, after a turf has been noisseurs having attacked a pear being dropped on the top of the nest. Or if an unfailing proof of its quality. Yet a bottle of spirits of turpentine, with even then the wasps are not without the cork out, is laid in the nest over carnivorous tastes, though the dam- night, the fumes will have suffocated age they do to the meat in butchers' the entire community before morning. shops butchers' "inconvenience "At all events, some means ought at being left out of the reckoning once to be taken to get rid of the presis amply compensated by the num- ent swarms. For, if next summer ber of blow-flies which they kill and should be warm, the nuisance will be carry off to feed their grubs. Nor well-nigh unendurable.

--

FOSSIL FLOUR. A large deposit of fossil | to place the fingers upon its upper part flour of remarkable purity has been discov- without suffering inconvenience from the ered in the State of Maine. The properties of this earth are its wonderful faculty for resisting the action of acids, alkalies, and oils, and its remarkable quality as a nonconductor of heat. As a test of the last named quality an inch cube of the material was placed on a bar of iron, which was then put in a blacksmith's forge and heated until it melted away from the cube of earth. So slightly did the heat penetrate the cube that it is stated that it was found possible

heat. Fossil flour is almost as white as oxide of zinc. It is so light in weight that a flour-barrel of it in its natural condition does not weigh more than fifty pounds. It is absolutely unaffected by any kind of mechanical manipulation. As mined, it is a pure white powder, so fine that it is incapable of further fining. A careful analysis of the substance shows about ninety-five per cent. of pure silica.

Iron.

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For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO.

Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

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And your speech- -we strive and toil, We poor men, yet leave unuttered Half we'd say, and then recoil

With a wasted effort" muttered: Little wonder you spoke true, 'Twas Truth herself that spoke through you.

"But the sun has set, you know;

All's dark now!" Nay, pause a minute; Mark you, friend, yon afterglow,

How each tree, shrub, flower in it Stands clear-cut, distinct, defined! Has noon aught fairer, to your mind?

My sun's set! But yet there stays

Such a light! To me all's clearer; Courage nobler for her gaze,

Freedom for her brows the dearer, Truth, because she spoke, more bright – Well, that will last me till the night. Temple Bar.

H. C. MINCHIN.

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How fair is her awaking- green, beneath The snow-fringed blue of April's canopyStill lovely through all growth, till that first wreath

Is turned to gold by true life's alchemy;
Most glorious in the vestments of her
death.
Academy.

R. F. Towndrow.

THE WIND'S GUEST.

"O WHERE shall I find rest ?" Sighed the Wind from the West,

"I've sought in vale, o'er dale and down, Through tangled woodland, tarn and town, But found no rest."

"Rest, thou ne'er shalt find,"

Answered Love to the Wind;

"For thou and I, and the great grey sea,

May never rest till eternity

Its end shall find."

FENIL HAIG.

From Macmillan's Magazine.
GEORGE FOX.

enriched humanity by many capable and some eminent citizens, remain a respected if a diminishing body.

their loins for the conversion of the world was provocative of nothing ex"ENGLAND," wrote Voltaire, in cept laughter; just as Pope Leo, sur1731, is properly the country of sec- rounded by all the art and culture of tarists. An Englishman, as one to the Renascence, could dismiss the whom liberty is natural, may go to theses on the church door at Wittenheaven his own way." The epigram berg as the drunken frolic of a German is a curious commentary upon the friar, so no doubt to the sober Englishfutility of attempting to enforce uni- men of the Protectorate, the rant of formity in religion. Barely fifty years the Independent, the rhodomontaile before the great Frenchman took up of the "prophet who damned," and his residence at Wandsworth, Jeffreys rhapsodies of the "man in leather had sent Baxter to prison and set Mug- breeches," represented nothing but gleton in the pillory; and already if a folly varying in degree. Yet, after the man were willing to forego the material lapse of several centuries, while the advantages of State employment, he Ranters have vanished into space, was at liberty to riot in what the while Muggletonianism, after dragging Church termed schism. In no circum-out a sordid and obscure career, is stances is it likely that Nonconformity probably extinct, the Quakers, having could ever have been rendered nugatory; but had the Church shown more wisdom it might have been reduced to a minimum. Men are so constructed The fact of Fox's success is suffiintellectually that so long as they con- ciently plain; the reason of it is by no tinue to think they will continue to means equally superficial. There was differ; and the expression of their dif- nothing in his conception which seemed ferences will not assume its least color- to entail what the devout would have able aspect under the influence of a described as an especial blessing; violent spiritual upheaval. It is then there was, on the contrary, a multitude that sincerity tends to bigotry and of tiresome and perplexing detail. Its formality stiffens itself by a nicer re- fundamental principles were as ancient gard for ceremony, that the sceptic as Christianity itself; its peculiar bulgrows bitterly contemptuous, while for warks an outrage on human intellithe hysterical nothing is too outrageous gence. If it contained nothing so provided it is only sufficiently incom- comically extravagant as the Muggleprehensible. To separate at such a tonian revelation of a transparent deity, moment the permanent from the eva- it contained much that was sufficiently nescent, in other words to be wise wild and incoherent to supply Macaulay before the event, is always a task of with an excuse for a famous and charsupreme difficulty; and probably, in acteristic antithesis. England has now the whole range of religious contro- grown so familiar with the decorous versy in this country, there never was life and gentle courtesy of the modern a time when prescience was less easy member of the Society of Friends, as than during the period known as that to have forgotten that Quakerism in of the Puritan revival. Just as to the its militant epoch was by no means satirist Lucian watching in pagan Rome always either gentle or decorous. The the growth of the manifold illusions fanaticism which sent George Fox fostered by Grecian scepticism and Ara- trudging over hill and moor in the bebian philosophy, Christianity appeared lief that he was at once a prophet and remarkable merely on account of the a miracle-worker, which urged him to simplicity of its delusions; just as to disturb public worship, and drove him the banqueters in Mahomet's house at barefooted through Lichfield crying Mecca the suggestion of an elderly mer-aloud, "Woe to this bloody city!' chant and a boy of sixteen girding up found its inevitable corollary in the

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