the alkali desert surveying a few withered stems of pumpkin vines and a dismantled wooden house, the late residence of General Sheldrake, who, as inquiries in the city had shown him, had been recalled by urgent business to America on the previous day. The Señor left his buggy and hammered at the door of the wooden house, with no avail. None answered. With a bar of the snake fence which had inclosed

the once verdant pumpkin patch he broke the poor lock. The room was as bare as the desert. It was not even relieved by cactus or mesquite scrub. Only behind the door was pinned a sheet of paper headed "To Señor Saloman Bensadi," and, underneath the legend, "Is it mockingbirds or shrikes?"-Macmillan's Magazine.

No one can read the Life of either Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle without being struck by the extraordinary genius for self-torment ing which both these remarkable persons possessed. Not that we mean to impute it to either of them that there was any superfluity of naughtiness in the torment inflicted. Neither of them could have given up the practice at will. The elements of which each alike was all compact, secured this self- tormenting as inevitably as an exposed nerve secures anguish, or a gouty constitution secures irritability of temper. It is quite a mistake to suppose that self-tormentors are usually at all more responsible for the misery the conflicting elements of their constitution entail upon them, than they are for the hardships inflicted by a severe climate or a revolutionary war. We might as well assume that a man who frets himself to fiddlestrings like Carlyle could, if he chose, be tranquil and placid, as that a man who has had curvature of the spine from his birth could, if he chose, be vigorous and athletic. Incompatible elements within the mind are no less involuntary, and often much more oppressive, than incompatible elements within the body. Carlyle had a powerful imagination, and a very impatient and fitful temper. He anticipated evil; his vivid imagination exaggerated it tenfold when it did come upon him; he wrestled with it with a fury that only made it a thousand times more galling. He could not bear to submit, and he dashed himself against the bars of his cage like an untamable hyena. It was not he that tormented himself so much as his irritable imagination which tormented him for not conquering an enemy whom he could only conquer by submitting to defeat, and reccg nizing that in submission was the true vie

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tory. Mrs. Carlyle had both the eager and proud temper of a man, and the fine and sensitive tenderness of a woman, indissolubly united within her, and the consequence was, that the man in her rebelled against that which the woman in her craved, while the woman in her shrank from that which the man in her resolved No mental constitution more happily adapted for self- torment could have been conceived. There was a constant struggle in her as of fire with water, the flame hissing against the stream which extinguished it, and the water drying up under the flame. No wonder that she was unhappy; the only wonder is, that she did not much sooner succumb to what St. Paul calls the war in her members. Neither of these skilful self-tormentors, who were always preaching renunciation, knew how to renounce, at least till they had striven fiercely against the bare idea of renunciation for many weary years. Yet they were not the worst of self-tormentors, for they did apparently both learn in the end something of the secret of resignation, and did not pass out of the world like mere helpless self-tormentors,-like Swift, for example, -with rage and despair in their hearts.

The popular notion of self-tormentors, namely, persons who really and truly, and of deliberate purpose, give themselves keen suffering because they intend to punish themselves for their sins and shortcomings, -concerns a class of persons very much less miserable; for the ascetic, however much he expatiates in penances, is, after all, only training himself to endure patiently what he thinks he ought to endure, and, like every one who puts himself to hard discipline for a purpose, he more or less enjoys the sense of self-mastery which gradually grows upon him, even if he does

"Yield not me the praise: God only thro' his bounty hath thought fit, Among the powers and princes of this world, To make me an example to mankind Which few can reach to. Yet I do not say But that a time may come,-yea, even now,

tion. But at least the working out of a deliberate purpose of slow and steady growth can never be the cause of that chaos and confusion which is the worst suffering of the involuntary self-tormentor, who very often does not doubt, it is evident that Mrs. Carlyle often did not doubt, that the whole life is a wreck, and a wreck that need not and should not have been made. The self-tormenting that is not deliberate, that is not the consequence of a fixed purpose, is accompanied

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Of life,-I say, that time is at the doors When you may worship me without reproach; For I will leave my relics in your land, And you may carve a shrine about my dust, And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones, When I am gathered to the glorious saints.' A man with such a fixed belief as that, whatever his bodily torture, is the subject of much less cruel mental torment than one who, instead of torturing himself, is tortured by himself, by the very nature which he cannot escape, and which yet humiliates him with a sense of loathing. There is a sort of satisfaction in the carry ing out of a deliberate purpose that answers to one's whole belief, which mitigates the suffering it causes. No doubt it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, for us in this age to believe that ascetic tortures, amounting, as we think now, to suicide, such as were very commonly inflicted on themselves by the early ascetics, can be according to God's will. We do not believe, hardly any of us, hardly even the most ascetic Trappist, we suppose, now be lieves,that it is pleasing to God to kill the body with torments in order to render the will supple and obedient. But those who did so believe, -and it was believed at one time,-could apparently reap a great deal of satisfaction from their own fixed determination. Far from feeling, as the involuntary self-tormentor does, that his whole life is an utter failure, they felt something of the inspiration of achieving a great victory over themselves Like the trainer who trains a horse to obey his will, they felt the pride in the victory, though they felt also, what the horse feels and what the horse-trainer does not feel, the suffering of the subjection. The subduing of the body by the mind is, of course, a very mixed sensation, the pain no doubt often greatly overpowering the satisfac

ness far more oppressive than the self-inflicted penance of clear purpose. If one had to choose between the gadfly and voluntary scourging, the man who chose the gadfly would deserve what he got. It is probably the worst of all torments to believe that your nature has been made, and is, so thoroughly awry, that nothing can relieve you from the anguish of a character at war with itself, and doomed to be at war with itself so long as it exists at all. That is the most terrible consequence of religious scepticism when combined with an ardent and restless nature so full of its own vitality that it can hardly ever throw off, much as it wishes to throw off, the conviction that it is immortal. There evidently are self-tormentors who believe in immortality without God, who cannot comfort themselves either with the hope of extinction or with the hope that their sufferings will end in peace. Mrs. Carlyle at times seems to us to have been plunged in this horror, though it is clear that she lost it in very great measure before the end. had, before her last and worst illness, all that vividness of life which regards even death as a positive and not a negative experience, and with it a passionate sense of the chaos within her which made the vividness of her very life a torment. She thought she had immolated herself to a man who was so wrapt up in his own moody thoughts that he could not care for her; she thought that if he could have cared for anybody, it was for a woman very different from herself; and she thought that in her own insane ambition she had sacrificed both a great capacity for love and a very original intellectual life to one who could not appreciate the sacrifice, and was, indeed, none the better for it. She was no doubt far from being wholly wrong in these impressions. Carlyle's love for her was cer ainly greater after her

She

death than it ever was before; and, so far as we can judge, her marriage was really a mistaken one, -a mistake due to too much deliberation, though it ended much better than at one time seemed at all probable. Still, her career teaches us that even for the most ardent and elaborate self-tormentors, there may be peace at the last, if they only keep true amid all confusions,

as she certainly did, to the leading purpose of their life. She sacrificed herself to Carlyle's genius; but she stuck to her purpose, and in the end she attained something like peace, and, though this mattered much less, she borrowed from that genius a halo of reflected light.— Spectator.

EVERYBODY knows mountain flowers are beautiful. As one rises up any minor height in the Alps or the Pyrenees, below snow-level, one notices at once the extraordinary brilliancy and richness of the blossoms one meets there. All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great belts of blue gentian hang like a zone on the mountain slopes: masses of yellow globeflower star the upland pastures: nodding heads of soldanella lurk low among the rugged boulders by the glacier's side. No lowland blossoms have such vividness of coloring, or grow in such conspicuous patches. To strike the eye from afar, to attract and allure at a distance, is the great aim and end in life of the Alpine flora.

Now, why are Alpine plants so anxious to be seen of men and angels? Why do they flaunt their golden glories so openly before the world, instead of shrinking in modest reserve beneath their own green leaves, like the Puritan primrose and the retiring violet? The answer is, Because of the extreme rarity of the mountain air. It's the barometer that does it. At first sight, I will readily admit, this explanation seems as fanciful as the traditional connection between Goodwin Sands and Tenterden Steeple. But, like the amateur stories in country papers, it is founded on fact," for all that. (Imagine, by the way, a tale founded entirely on fiction! How charmingly aerial!) By a roundabout road, through varying chains of cause and effect, the rarity of the air does really account in the long run for the beauty and conspicuousness of the mountain flowers.

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For bees, the common go-betweens of the loves of the plants, cease to range about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below snow-level. And why? Because it's too

cold for them? Oh, dear, no; on sunny days in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the honeybees and the great black bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember, have heavy bodies and relatively small wings in the rarefied air of mountain heights they can't manage to support themselves in the most literal sense. Hence their place in these high stations of the world is taken by the gay and airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and a much bigger expanse of wingarea to buoy them up. In the valleys and plains the bee competes at an advantage with the butterflies for all the sweets of life but in this broad sub-glacial belt on the mountain-sides, the butterflies in turn have things all their own way. They tit about like monarchs of all they survey, without a rival in the world to dispute their supremacy.

And how does the preponderance of butterflies in the upper regions of the air affect the color and brilliancy of the flowers? Simply thus. Bees, as we are all aware on the authority of the great Dr. Watts, are industrious creatures which employ each shining hour (well-chosen epithet, "shining") for the good of the community, and to the best purpose. The bee, in fact, is the bon bourgeois of the insect world he attends strictly to business, loses no time in wild or reckless excursions, and flies by the straightest path from flower to flower of the same species with mathematical precision. Moreover, he is careful, cautious, observant, and

steady-going-a model business man, in fact, of sound middle-class morals and sober middle-class intelligence. No flitting for him, no coquetting, no fickleness. Therefore, the flowers that have adapted themselves to his needs, and that depend upon him mainly or solely for fertilization, waste no unnecessary material on those big flaunting colored posters which we human observers know as petals. They have, for the most part, simple blue or purple flowers, tubular in shape and, individually, inconspicuons in hue; and they are oftenest arranged in long spikes of blossom to avoid wasting the time of their winged Mr. Bultitudes. So long as they are just bright enough to catch the bee's eye a few yards away, they are certain to receive a visit in due season from that industrious and persistent commercial traveller. Having a circle of good customers upon whom they can depend with certainty for fertilization, they have no need to waste any large proportion of their substance upon expensive advertisements or gaudy petals.

It is just the opposite with butterflies. Those gay and irrepressible creatures, the fashionable and frivolous element in the insect world, gad about from flower to flower over great distances at once, and think much more of sunning themselves and of attracting their fellows than of attention to business. And the reason is obvious, if one considers for a moment the difference in the political and domestic economy of the two opposed groups. For the honey-bees are neuters, sexless purveyors of the hive, with no interest on earth save the storing of honey for the common benefit of the phalanstery to which they belong. But the butterflies are full-fledged males and females, on the hunt through the world for suitable partners they think far less of feeding than of displaying their charms a little honey to support them during their flight is all they need "For the bee, a long round of ceaseless toil; for me," says the gay butterfly, a short life and a merry one. Mr. Harold Skimpole needed only "music, sunshine, a few grapes. The butterflies are of his kind. The high mountain zone is for them a true ball-room: the flowers are light refreshments laid out in the vestibule. Their real business in life is not to gorge and lay by, but to coquette and display themselves and find fitting partners.

So while the becs with their honeybags, like the financier with his moneybags, are storing up profit for the composite community, the butterfly, on the contrary, lays himself out for an agreeable flutter, and sips nectar where he will, over large areas of country. He flies rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty and when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the sun-suitten slopes, he sails off toward them lazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plodding through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him: what he wants is brilliant color, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to search. Who wants his favors must make himself conspicuous.

Now, plants are good shopkeepers; they lay themselves out strictly to attract their customers. Hence the character of the flowers on this beeless belt of mountainside is entirely determined by the character of the butterfly fertilizers. Only those plants which laid themselves out from time immemorial to suit the butterflies, in other words, have succeeded in the long run in the struggle for existence. So the butterfly-plants of the butterfly-zone are all strictly adapted to butterfly tastes and butterfly fancies. They are, for the most part, individually large and brilliantly colored: they have lots of honey, often stored at the base of a deep and open bell which the long proboscis of the insect can easily penetrate; and they habitually grow close together in broad belts or patches, so that the color of each reinforces and aids the color of the others. It is this cumulative habit that accounts for the marked flowerbed or jam-tart character which everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora.

Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity and the high life of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants and animals of the butterfly-zone belong to a special group which appears every where in Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether northward or upward. For example, I was pleased to note near the summit of Mount Washington (the highest peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of the flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains of Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps are found also, as a rule, not only on the High Pyrenees, the Car

Let me give a single instance which strikingly illustrates the general principle. Near the top of Mount Washington, as aforesaid, lives to this day a little colony of very cold-loving and mountainous butterflies, which never descend below a couple of thousand feet from the windswept summit. Except just there, there are no more of their sort anywhere about and as far as the butterflies themselves are aware, no others of their species exist on earth they never have seen a single one of their kind, save of their own little colony. One might compare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South Seas an isolated group of English origin, cut off by a vast distance from all their congeners in Europe or America. But if you go north some eight or nine hundred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a certain point the same butterfly reappears, and spreads northward toward the pole in great abundance. Now, how did this little colony of chilly insects get separated from the main body, and islanded, as it were, on a remote mountain-top in far warmer New Hampshire?

The answer is, they were stranded there at the end of the glacial epoch.

A couple of hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts-don't let us haggle, I beg of you, over a few casual centuries-the whole of northern Europe and America was covered from end to end, as everybody knows, by a sheet of solid ice, like the one which Frithiof Nansen crossed from sea to sea on his own account in Greenland. For many thousand years, with occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheet brooded, silent and grim, over the face of the two continents. Life was extinct as far south as the latitude of New York and London. No plant or animal survived the general freezing. Not a creature broke the monotony of that endless glacial desert, At last, as the celestial cycle came

Not only has the glacial epoch left these organic traces of its existence, however; in some parts of New Hampshire, where the glaciers were unusually thick and deep, fragments of the primeval ice itself still remain on the spots where they were originally stranded. Among the shady glens of the White Mountains there occur here and there great masses of ancient ice, the unmelted remnant of primeval glaciers ; and one of these is so large that an artificial cave has been cleverly excavated in it, as an attraction for tourists, by the canny Yankee proprietor. Elsewhere the old ice-blocks are buried under the débris of moraine-stuff and alluvium, and are only accidentally discovered by the sinking of what are locally known as ice-wells. No existing conditions can account for the formation of such solid rocks of ice at such a depth in the soil. They are essentially glacier like in origin and character: they result from the pressure of snow into a crystalline mass in a mountain valley; and they must have remained there unmelted ever since the close of the glacial epoch, which, by Dr. Croll's calculations, must most probably have ceased to plague our earth some eighty thousand years ago. Modern America, however, has no respect for antiquity and it is at present engaged in using up this palæocrystic deposit-this belated storehouse of prehistoric ice-in the manufacture of gin slings and brandy cocktails.

As one scales a mountain of moderate height-say seven or eight thousand feet in a temperate climate, one is sure to be struck by the gradual diminution as one goes in the size of the trees, till at last they tail off into mere shrubs and bushes.