fixed among the camphor-trees for the places at each of the two longest ends. erection of a still, the former proceed To complete it, however, ten large to run up a shed or rough building, the earthenware jars are required. These, size of which depends on the number during the process of distillation, are of stoves it is intended to contain. If placed, inverted, on the top of the still ten are to be erected, the building immediately over the upper ends of the would be about twenty feet long by cylinders so as to form condensers. twelve or thirteen feet broad. In the To prevent the escape of steam from centre of the floor an oblong structure, the condensers bands of jute are fitted some four feet high, ten feet long, and firmly between their mouths and the six feet broad, is built of sun-dried mud top of the still. The pots are filled bricks, having five fireplaces or holes with water and the cylinders with at each side raised a foot or so above camphor-wood chips; the jars are in the floor of the room. The two ends position on the top of the still, and the of the structure are solid and without firewood is lighted under the pots. fireplaces. The latter are so built that When the water boils, the steam passes an earthenware pot can easily be in- up through the perforated wood into serted above the fire in each hole. An the cylinders, heats and moistens the earthenware cylinder connects the chips, and ascends to the condensers, mouth of each pot with the surface of carrying with it the camphor fumes the structure or still; between the pot which the chips have given forth. and the lower end of the cylinder there The steam then condenses on the inis a round, thin piece of wood fitting side of the jars, and when the latter both the mouth of the pot and the are removed, a layer of white camphor lower end of the cylinder, and perfo- crystals is found adhering to them. rated so as to allow the steam from the This is brushed off by hand and placed water in the pot to pass into the cyl- in baskets. The chips are then withinder during distillation. The top of drawn from the cylinders, fresh chips each cylinder is usually about a foot in take their place, water is added to the diameter, and is level with the surface pots, the condensers are again placed of the still. Such a still would present in position, additional firewood is to the eye a mud structure, with ten thrown into the fireplaces, and the round holes on the top and five fire-work of distillation re-commences.

DRAMATIC DISCOVERY UNDER A PARIS | told their employer what they had seen. SUBURB. The Paris correspondent of the Daily News forwards the following account of a strange discovery which was made at Nogent-sur-Marne by a Paris shopkeeper who lives there. He was clearing out a well which had been abandoned for twenty years, and had become full of sand, when he came upon a flight of steps hewn roughly in the chalk. His workmen found on the day following that the steps led into a gallery three feet wide and six feet high. They explored it, and coming to the other end they were startled with the sight of a man with his back against the wall, and wearing the uniform of a National Guard of 1870. The attitude and appearance of this human figure were so lifelike that the workmen, not knowing what to think, and thoroughly frightened, hastened out and

A search party went down into the gallery. They found that it led into an underground room. The body of a lieutenant of the old National Guard was sitting at a table upon which were a bottle and two wineglasses. Several rifles were stacked in a corner. The officer's attitude was that of a person dozing, the arms folded, and the head nodding. Several sheets of notes were found in the lieutenant's pockets. They will very likely afford a clue to the identity of the two men. How did they meet with their singular fate? A plausible conjec ture is that they took refuge from the Germans in the gallery, the sides of which fell in probably by accident, though the people at Nogent are convinced that the Germans knew of the two victims' hiding-place, and filled up the pit in order to bury them alive.

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We shall not forget the sweet watch by the And I know not to this day

Stately and sad it rests beneath the restless wave,

There, when the tropic calms lie still and brooding,

The mariner may lean and see the towers With glooming robes purpureal, cypress

From Temple Bar.

A WORD FOR HANNAH MORE.

HANNAH MORE enjoyed to its full the period of adulation which falls to the lot of most people of note. For goodness, wisdom, and genius she was long regarded as one of the world's wonders. Then a change came over society's dream. Saintliness, especially of the evangelical sort, fell into disrepute, along with eighteenth-century poetry. Sneers and taunts began to take the place of panegyric, and the once revered image of Hannah More was stranded high and dry on the shores of formalism and bigotry. In her case there has been no final settlement of claims, and there she still remains, her poetry a byword for all that is unpoetical in verse; her virtues accounted as of less worth than others' vices; her name never mentioned without some such jibing prefix as saintly," "holy," or "immaculate." Writing in her playful vein to Horace Walpole, "I shall become an adage of deceit," she says, "and if the next generation should ever hear of me at all, it will be because the present will have converted me into a proverbial phrase; and to say, as faithless as Hannah More, will sum up every idea of female fraud and duplicity,”-little guessing, poor woman, of the position she was actually to fill, that of the Pharisee of literature.

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Burke, and Reynolds, the succorer of the poor and helpless, as to make a man like Mr. Robert Buchanan prefer damnation to finding himself in Paradise in her company? How much of the repellent spirit of pharisaism did she in reality possess that her name should have come to stand as a synonym for all that is intolerant and illiberal?

In the first place she was no straitlaced, narrow-minded country dame, but a woman of the world, at home in all circles, in whose hospitable abode, up to the end of her life, were to be met, as De Quincey, a frequent guest, bears witness, those most noted in the world of literature, politics, and rank. Boswell, perhaps because she once snubbed him when, like Tony Lumpkin, he was "in spirits," contrives to give an ungracious aspect to her relations with Dr. Johnson. But from others' showing no less than her own we can see that, in return for the genuine affection she bore him, the old man enjoyed and courted her society and genuinely admired her sprightly wit, which often, indeed, served as a sharpener to his own. It was to her he made the memorable speech, "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve beads out of cherry-stones," - Milton being somewhat of a bone of contention between them, she, with a poetic instinct only equalled by her Mr. Robert Buchanan in, we believe, courage, defending the great bard's his article on the question, "Is Chiv-"Lycidas," "L'Allegro" and "Il alry still Possible?" after declaring Penseroso" against the critical Goliath that he would rather be Burns than of his day. It was Hannah who, Saint Simeon Stylites, adds that he seated next him once at dinner, pressed would prefer to be lost with Byron, him to take a "little wine," eliciting than saved with Mrs. Hannah More. from him the oft-quoted answer, Most would agree with him in the first can't drink a little, child, therefore I particular, and choose rather to be a never touch it. Abstinence is easy to live poet with all his human frailties me; temperance would be difficult.” thick upon him than a half-animate She, too, who evoked his self-gratulamummy self-perched upon the summit tory saying while showing her over his of a pillar. But what reason is there college at Oxford, his own room, Shenin the second? The presence of By- stone's, and those of the other poets ron might indeed to some people miti- whose memory reflected glory on it: gate the pains of perdition. But what" In short, we were a nest of singingwas there so horrible about Hannah birds." The only time the lenient old More, the friend of Johnson, Garrick, moralist was ever really angry with her

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little.

(and she loved him all the better for | Gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all, it) was when she presumed to quote And trembles then lest it has done too before him a too racy passage from that "vicious book," "Tom Jones." While, on another occasion, when he made use of an unconsciously equivocal expression in the midst of a fashionable company, she, with a frivolity worthy of Fanny Burney herself, slyly concealed her merriment behind some one's back.

When the power of writing and of active personal exertion on behalf of the poor failed her, she wrought in their interests at the humbler employment of fancy-work and knitting with such characteristic energy as to bring on an abscess in her hand.

Leigh Hunt, dipping into her writWe have no more charming picture ings for the first time, confesses himof Johnson than that afforded in one self "fairly surprised," not only at her of her letters home from London, by good sense, but with her liberal and the gay-hearted Sally More, with whom feeling sentiments. How," he exand Hannah the old doctor once came claims, "could a heart, capable of utto spend the evening, staying with tering such things, get encrusted with them till twelve, though, as Hannah Calvinism and that, too, not out of proudly remarks, it was "only a tea fear and bad health, but in full posvisit," and at that dissipated hour tak- session, as it should seem, both of ing leave of his fair hostesses with the cheerfulness and sensibility?" The enthusiastic outburst, "I love you both Calvinism, which never affected either I love you all five. I never was at her heart or her imagination, was the I will come on purpose to see result of circumstances, inheritance, What? five women all live hap- and education. The good heart — that pily together!" with perhaps an heart which, as Horace Walpole neatly uncomfortable consciousness of the put it, was always aching for others, as squabbles going on amongst his own her head was for herself women-folk. "I will come and see own. By how much Hannah More you. I have spent a happy evening. was better than her creed is shown by I am glad I came. God forever bless a thousand tokens, not only of her you; you live lives to shame duch- active, ceaseless charity, but of her esses." His reiterated promise of a genial bonhomie. On the occasion of visit he fulfilled though, unfortu- the procession to St. Paul's to return nately, during one of Hannah's ab- thanks for the king's restoration, "The sences from home-in company with poor soldiers," she writes to her sister, Boswell, who has left no record of it.

Bristol; you.

In the second place Hannah More took no credit to herself for her good deeds, and shrank from nothing so much as from undue praise on their account. "I am ashamed of my comforts," she once wrote, speaking of the sufferings of the poor during a fever, "when I think of their wants." And again, referring to the delight of her villagers at the present of a wagon-load of coal, "I feel indignant to think that so small a sum can create such feelings when one knows what sums one has wasted." She was filled, apart even from her sense of duty, with the very enthusiasm of humanity, with that spirit of love to her fellows which, to borrow her own words

was her

were on guard from three in the morning. I would willingly relinquish all the sights I may see this twelvemonth to have known they had each some cold meat and a pot of porter." The pipe of the Rev. John Newton, ex-sailor and captain of a slave-ship. hung, a cherished relic, on a blackcurrant-bush in her garden, " and that hand," she assures him, "would be deemed very presumptuous and disrespectful which should presume to displace it."

As to the imputation of bigotry, there is little trace of it in her memoirs. She sends a kind message to some poor emigrant priests, in whom she and her sisters were interested. And referring to certain French nobles and bishops,