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Huntley, who had no particular interest and ignorant, not knowing what to do. where they went, turned as he was desired, am closely connected with Mr. Crediton," and was just debating with himself whether, he said; nobody can have a better right all the due courtesies having been attended to look after his affairs; and he is away to, he might not go into his hotel as they from home. Get us ladders, and don't let passed it, and leave John at peace to pur- us stand parleying here." sue his sullen way. But it occurred to him that John made a half-perceptible pause at the door of the “Greyhound," as if inviting him to withdraw, and this movement decided the question. "Confound the fellow! I'm not going to be dismissed when he pleases," Fred said to himself; and so went on, not knowing where he went.

- don't lose a moment. Fire! fire!

The policeman looked at him for a moment, and then moved leisurely across the street to seek the ladders, while in the mean time the two young men stood in front of the blind house with all its shuttered windows, and the closed doors which echoed hollow to John's assault. The dark front so jealously bolted and barred, all dangers "I thought so!" cried John, suddenly, without shut out, and the fiery traitor within in the midst of some philosophical talk, in- ravening at its leisure, drove John wild, exterrupting Fred in the middle of a sentence, cited as he was to begin with. "Good and he rushed across the street to the bank, heavens! to think we must stand here," he to his companion's utter consternation. said, ringing once more, but this time so "What is the matter?" cried Fred. John violently that he broke the useless bell. dashed at the closed door, ringing the bell They heard it echo shrilly through the violently, and beating with his stick upon silent place in the darkness." Mr. White the panels. Then he called loudly to a pass- the porter's gone out for a walk-I seed ing policeman-"Knock at the house!" him," said a boy; "there aint no one he cried. "Fire! fire! Huntley, for heav- there." "But I see no signs of fire," cried en's sake, fly for the engines! - they will Fred. Just then there came silently through let me in and not you, or I should go myself the night air a something which contradicted him to his face-a puff of smoke from somewhere, nobody could tell where, and all at once through the freshness of the autumn night the smell of fire suddenly breathed round them. Fred uttered one sharp exclamation, and then stood still, confounded. As for John, he gave a spring at the lower window and caught the iron bar and swung himself up. But the bar resisted his efforts, and there was nothing for it but to wait. When the ladders were at last visible, moving across the gloom, he rushed at them without taking time to think, and snatching one out of the slow hands of the indifferent bearers, placed it against the wall of the house, while Fred stood observing, and was up almost at the sill of an unshuttered window on the upper floor before Huntley could say a word. Then Fred contented himself with standing outside and looking on. One is enough for that sort of work," he said half audibly, and fell into conversation with the policeman, who stood with an anxious countenance beside him.

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"But stop a little," cried Huntley in dismay, plucking at John's arm; and what with the sound of the knocking and the peals of the bells which sounded sepulchrally in the empty place, he scarcely could hear his own voice. Stop a moment you are deceiving yourself; I see no signs of fire." "You run!" cried John, hoarsely, turning to the policeman, or you-five pounds to the man who gets there first! Signs! Good God! the wretches are out. We must break open the door." And he beat at it, as if he would beat it in, with a kind of frenzy; while Huntley stood stupefied and saw two or three of the bystanders, who had already begun to collect, start off with a rush to get the fire-engines. "There's nobody in the house within, sir, or else I can't make 'em hear," said the policeman, coming up to John for his orders. Then we must break in," cried John. "There's a locksmith in the next street: you fly and fetch him, my good fellow. And where shall we get some ladders? There is a way of getting in from the house if we were once in the house."

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"Not to make too bold, sir," said the policeman, "I'd like to know afore breaking into folks' houses, if you had any title to do the like. You're not Mr. Crediton, and he aint got no son."

John drew himself to his full height, and even then in his excitement glanced at Huntley, who kept by his side, irresolute

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I hope as the gentleman won't hurt himself," said the policeman. "I hope it's true as he's Mr. Crediton's relation, sir. Very excited he do seem, about not much, don't you think, sir? And them engines will be tearing down, running over the children before a man knows."

"Do you think there is not much danger, then?" said Fred.

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Danger!" cried the man "Lord bless you! if it was a regular fire don't ye

think as I'd have noticed it, and me just finished my round not half an hour since? But it's hawful negligent of that fellow White. I knew as he'd been going to the bad for some time back, and I'm almost glad he's catched; but as for fire, sir

At this moment another puff of smoke, darker and heavier, came in a gust from the roof, and the policeman putting his eye to the keyhole, fell back again exclaiming vehemently," By George! but it is a fire, and the gentleman's right," and sprang his rattle loudly. The crowd round gave a half-cheer of excitement, and up full speed rattled the fire-engines, clearing the way, and filling the air with clangour. At the same moment arrived a guilty sodden soul, wringing his hands, in which was a big key. "Gentlemen," he cried, "I take you to witness as I never was out before. It's an accident as nobody couldn't have foreseen. It's an accident as has never happened before." "Open the door, you ass!" cried Huntley; and then the babel of sounds, the gleams of wild light, the hiss of the falling water, all the confused whirl of circumstance that belongs to such a moment swept in, and took all distinct understanding even from the self-possessed perceptions of Fred.

upon the mind in moments of supreme danger. He thought only of the papers in Mr. Crediton's room. Unconsciously he formed an idea of the origin of the fire, as, panting, choked, and scorched, he gathered, without seeing them, into his arms the box of papers, and seized upon everything he could feel with his hands upon the table. He could see nothing, for his eyes were stinging with the smoke, and scorched with the flames. When he had grasped everything he could feel, with his senses failing him, he pushed blindly for the door, hoping, so far as he had wit enough to hope anything, that he might reach the front of the house, and be able to unloose its fastenings before he gave way. By this time there was a roaring of the fire in his ears; an insufferable smell of burning wood and paint; all his senses were assailed, even that of touch, which recoiled from the heated walls against which he staggered trying to find the door. At last the sharp pain with which he struck violently against it, cutting open his forehead, brought him partially to himself. He half-staggered half-fell into the passage, dropping upon his knees, for his arms were full, and he had no hand to support himself with. Then all at once a sudden wild gust of air struck him in the face from the other As for John, when he found himself in the side; the flames, with (he thought) a cry, silent house which he had entered from the leaped at him from behind, and he fell proswindow, he had no time to think of his sensa-trate, clasping tight the papers he had retions. He had snatched the policeman's covered, and knew no more. lantern from his hand ere he made his as- It was half an hour later when Fred cent, and went hastily stumbling through the unknown room, and down the long, echoing stairs, as through a wall of darkness; projecting before him the round eye of light, which made the darkness if possible more weird and mystical. His heart was very sore; it pained him physically, or at least he thought it did, lying like a lump of lead in his breast. But he was glad of the excitement which forced his thoughts away from himself. To unbolt the ponderous doors at either end of the passage which led into the bank, took him what seemed an age; but at last he succeeded in getting them open. A cloud of smoke enveloped him as he went in, and all but drove him back. He burst through it with a confused sense of flames and suffocation, and blazing sheets of red, that waved long tongues towards him to catch him as he rushed through them; but, notwithstanding, he forced his way into Mr. Crediton's room, where he knew there were valuable papers. He thought of nothing as he rushed through the jaws of death; neither of Kate, nor of his past life, nor of his home, nor of any of those things which are supposed to gleam

Huntley, venturing into the narrow hall of the burning house after the first detachment of firemen had entered with their hatchets, found some one lying drenched with water from the engines, and looking like a calcined thing that would drop to powder at a touch, against the wall. The calcined creature moved when it was touched, and gave signs of life; but every one by this time had forgotten John in the greater excitement of the fire; and it had not occurred to Huntley even, the only one who knew much about him, to ask what had become of him. He was dragged out, not very gently, to the steps in front; and there, fortunately for John, was the porter who had been the cause of all the mischief, aad who stood outside wringing his hands, and getting in everybody's way. "Look after him, you!" cried Fred, plunging in again to the heart of the conflict. Some of the clerks had arrived by this time, and were anxiously directing the fire-engines to play upon the strong room in which most of the valuables of the bank were placed. Fred Huntley was not noticeably destitute of courage, but he was more ready to put himself in the front when

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the pioneers had passed before, and there was the pain which kept him in full posseswere plenty of followers to support him sion of his faculties for all the rest of the behind. He took the command of affairs night. Then he felt it was not the fire he while John lay moaning, scorched, and had cared for, nor the possible loss, but only drenched on the wet step, with people rush- the pure satisfaction of doing something. ing past him, now and then almost treading When they told him the fire was got under, on him, and pain gradually rousing him into the strong room saved, and that nothing consciousness. They had tried to take his very serious had happened, the news did charge from him and he had resisted, show-not in the least excite him. He had asked ing a dawn of memory. When the water as if he was profoundly concerned, and he from the hose struck him again in the face, was scarcely even interested. · Pain has he struggled half up, and sat and looked often that effect," he heard the doctor say. round him. Good Lord, Mr. Mitford!" "This kind of irritating, ever-present sufsaid Mr. Whichelo, the chief cashier, dis-fering, absorbs the mind. Of course he covering him with consternation. "Take cares. Tell him again, that the news may me somewhere," gasped John;" and take get into his mind." And then somebody care of these," holding out his innocent told him again, and John longed to .cry, booty. Mr. Whichelo rushed at him eagerly. What the devil is that to me! but restrained God bless you!" he cried; "it was that himself. It was nothing to him; and the I was thinking of. How did you get it? burning on his skin was not much: it was have you been in the fire and the flames to nothing indeed to the burning in his heart. fetch it, and saved my character?" cried She had discussed with another matters the poor man, hysterically. Hold your which were between themselves. She had tongue, and take me somewhere!" cried sent another to report on his looks and his John; and the next moment his senses had state of mind; there was between her and once more forsaken him, and he knew noth- another man a secret alliance which he was ing about either blaze or flame. not intended to know. The blood seemed to boil in John's veins as he lay tossing through the restless night, trying in vain to banish the thought from him. But the thought, being intolerable, would not be banished. It lay upon him, and tore at him as the vultures tore Prometheus. She had discussed their engagement with Fred Huntley; taken him into her confidence — that confidence which should have been held sacred to another. John was thrown back suddenly and wildly upon himself. His heart throbbed and swelled as if it would break, and felt as if hot irons had seared it. He imagined them sitting together, talking him over. He even framed the account of this accident which Huntley would give. He would be at her ear, while John was banished. He denied that it had been a shock to his nerves; and yet his nerves had received such a shock as he might never recover in his life.

The after incidents of the night, of which John was conscious only by glimpses, were - that he was carried to the inn opposite, his treasures taken from his arms and locked carefully away, and the doctor brought, who examined him, and shook his head, and said a great deal about a shock to the nerves. John was in one of his intervals of consciousness when this was said, and raised himself from the strange distance and dreaminess in which he seemed to be lying. "I have had no shock to my nerves," he said. I'm burnt and sore and soaking, that's all. Plaster me or mend me somehow." And this effort saved him from the feverish confusion into which he was falling. When he came to himself he felt that he was indeed sore all over, with minute burns in a hundred places about his person; his hair and his eyelashes scorched off, and his skin all blistered and burning. Perhaps it

DR. ANGUS SMITH has read a paper "On the Organic Matter in the Air," before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, with reference to the recent lecture of Prof. Tyndall; and from this paper it appears that Dr. A. Smith has laboured incessantly upon the subject since 1846, and was the first to discover much of what is known on the question.

PROF. W. S. JEVONS lately read, at Manchester, a paper "On the so-called Molecular Movements of Microscopic Particles." He is inclined to consider the motion due to electricity, by the close analogy with the circumstances in which electricity is produced by the hydro-electric machine of Armstrong and Faraday.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

MISS AUSTEN AND MISS MITFORD.

seen only now and then on a splendid expedition which counted like an era in a life; and theirs was the highly concentrated, intensified existence of a very small family living entirely for each other, and exhibiting between themselves that ecstatic adoring love which it is so difficult for the more sober portions of the world to understand, and which outsiders are so apt to smile at.

The education of the two young women of genius was thus different. Jane Austen grew up to womanhood in a gentle obscurity, one of many her individual existence lost in the more noisy claims of the brothers, whose way in the world has to be the subject of so much thought; while the boys' settlement in life, their Oxford successes, their going to sea, their early curacies, and prize-money, filled everybody's mind. Jane, it is evident, gave nobody any trouble. Even her elder sister, Cassandra, to whom she was specially devoted, had a story which must have thrilled the quiet vicarage. She was betrothed to a lover who was poor, and who went to the West Indies to push his fortune "to make the crown pound," and there died. No doubt the maiden widow, who remained faithful to him all her life, filled up every corner vacant from the boys in the tender heart of Steventon vicarage; and Jane, fair, sprightly, and sweet, with no story, no grief, no unfortunate lover or unsettled position to give her affairs a factitious interest, was only Jane in the affectionate house -a bright-eyed, light-footed girl -one of the creatures evidently born to marry and be the light of some other home.

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In the beginning of last century, two young women bearing names which are now as familiar as the greatest to English readers, were making themselves very pleasant to their surroundings in the very heart of all the stillness and decorum of rural gentility. They both belonged to that class of English gentry with a clerical tinge, which is in some respects the pleasantest class to be met with in the little hierarchy of country life. They were well born and well connected, with a modest position which not even poverty could seriously affect, and the habit from their childhood of meeting people of some distinction and eminence, and of feeling themselves possessed of so much share in the bigger business of the world as is given by the fact of having friends and relations playing a real part in it. No educational process is more effectual than this simple fact, and Jane Austen and Mary Mitford were both within its influence. They were both well educated, according to the requirements of their day, though the chances are that neither could have passed her examination for entrance into any lady's college, or had the remotest chance with the University Inspectors; and it is not unconsolatory to find, by the illumination which a little lamp of genius here and there thus throws upon the face of the country, that women full of cultivation and refinement have existed for generations before ladies' colleges were thought of, notwithstanding the universal condemnation bestowed upon our old-fashioned canons of feminine instruction. Miss Austen was a little girl in Nothing can be more amusing and attracthe parsonage of Steventon in Hertfordshire tive than the glimpses, very brief and slight when Miss Mitford's mother lived in the as they are, of this girl, through the much parsonage of Ashe close by. There was trellis-work and leafage of her nephew Mr. thus even a link of local connection between Austen Leigh's biography of her. It has them. The Mitfords were the finer of the not, indeed, any right to be called a biogratwo families, boasting higher connections on phy; and were not the writer so frank and both sides of the house; but the Austens humble in his consciousness of the fact, the were of irreproachable gentility, with off- critic might be tempted to certain hackneyed shoots that kept continually increasing the comments on the common blunder of bookconsequence of the original stem, adding making. But Mr. Austen Leigh is aware other names and new estates to the well-to- of his imperfections and disarms us. What do numerous affectionate race. It became he does is to paint for us somewhat heavily a kind of clan as years went on, a thing the outside of the house in which she lived, which not unfrequently happens in the with the honeysuckle and the roses climbing second or third generation to the descend-in at the windows; and, as we look, someants of a considerable family. Austens times a pretty shadow will cross the curtain, and Leighs and Knights, all originally a pleasant face look out, a voice quite unAusten, there were so many brothers and pretending in its sweetness be heard singing sisters, and cousins and uncles and nephews within. That is all: hazel eyes and natural among them, that ordinary society became curls of brown hair-round cheeks, a trifle almost unnecessary to the prolific race. too round, but all aglow with the clear, The Mitfords were different - their rela- sweet colour of health and youth a figure tions were grand and distant ones, to be" rather tall and slender," a step light

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and firm." Not Jane Austen only, but occur to the emulous mind of a school-girl; hosts of sweet women besides her, might and in the midst of her little struggles and have sat for the picture. She took long triumphs appears to us in her schoolroom walks with Cassandra, sometimes in pattens, writing such letters as an elderly friend between the double hedgerows through the might have written to the "dear darlings," green Hertfordshire lanes. If Cassandra who are her father and mother, letting loose had been condemned to have her head cut her youthful opinion, and giving her advice off, their mother thought, Jane would have in the most astonishing way. The Mitfords offered to share the punishment; and next were rich in those days, or at least they had to Cassandra, the sailor-boys of the family not yet finally left off the habit and sense seem to have filled her heart. She was of being rich; and their daughter did everyfond of knowing all about her neighbours, thing and learned everything which was of hearing their gossip, and noting their considered right for a young lady of ways, and laughing at them softly with that family and fashion to do. And the perfect delicate fun which dull people never find out freedom of the intercourse between herself or understand. She was an accomplished and her parents, joined, no doubt, to a needlewoman, great in satin stitch, giving certain youthful confidence in her own judgher friends pretty presents of fairy house- ment and wisdom, give a curious independwives, filled with needles and thread, and a ence and air of maturity to what she says. little copy of verses in the tiny pocket At fifteen she announces her preference of and was not ashamed to spend a day, as Pope's translations of Homer to Dryden's, young ladies in the country sometimes have with all the energy and promptitude of her to do, over some piece of dressmaking, ac- age. "Dryden is so fond of triplets and companying it with the merriest talk. How Alexandrines, that it is much heavier readpleasant is the picture! She read, too, ing; and though he is reckoned a much whatever was going, with a young woman's more harmonious versifier than Pope, some natural universal appetite, and was delight- of bis lines," says the young critic, are ful to the eye and dear to the heart of all so careless, that I shall not be sorry when I the Austens, and all the Leighs, and all have finished it. I am now read-. Steventon. When the years went on, and ing that beautiful opera of Metastasio, this sweet young woman became aunt Jane,Themistocles;' and when I have finished the change was so soft and slight as scarcely that, I shall read Tasso's 'Jerusalem Delivto count. She wore a cap over the pretty ered,'" she adds. "How you would dote brown curls not that she had any occasion on Metastasio, my sweet Tod!" (one of to do so, for her pleasant life was only forty years long altogether, and such bright-eyed souls in the soft serenity of maidenhood do not grow old. But in youth and in maturity she was alike fenced from the outer world by troops of friends, called only by names of love-sister, daughter, aunt- - all her life surrounded by every kind of relationship, and with no inducement to come down from her pedestal and go out into the bitter arena where the strong triumph and the needy struggle, except that prick of genius which is like the rising of the sap in the trees, or the bubble of the water at the spring, and must find utterance somehow in sparkle, or in foliage, or in song.

Mary Mitford was a very different being. She was an only child, the apple of their eye to her father and mother-infinitely precocious, and encouraged in her precocity -set up between the two admiring foolish people who had given her birth as an idol to be worshipped, an oracle whose utterances were half inspired. Her education was the best that, according to ordinary rules, could be procured. She was sent to school in London, and encouraged in every attempt to distinguish herself which could

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her names for her father.) "I am much flattered, my darlings," she writes, a little later, to both her parents, "by the praises you bestowed on my last letter, though I have not the vanity to think I deserve them. It has ever been my ambition to write like my darlings, though I fear I shall never attain their style."

This amiable, confident, affectionate, warm-hearted, self-assured girl, thus enter- ́ ing the world with many of the faults incident to the dangerous position of an only child, was born a letter-writer. For half a century after this she continued to pour out her rash, sudden judgments, opinions sometimes sound and sometimes superficial, and outbursts of exaggerated fondness chiefly addressed to her father, whom she continued until his death to address in the same undignified way. He was her sweet Tod," her best-beloved darling," her "ittey boy," the recipient of a great deal of good advice, and now and then some admonition, but always the object of a gushing fondness, which even at fifteen must have concealed some unconscious half-contempt. Her letters are often amusing, and they are the kind of reading which quantities of peo