down at him. Their eyes met; she coloured, and
he saw that she had recognised him; she called
to some one in the room, and a stern, sad-
visaged old woman came to the window. About
half an hour afterwards, his nosegay of lilies
of the valley was returned to him.

The evening was oppressively hot, and
Edward Saville was in a fever; his little stuffy
lodging with its dingy drab moreen curtains,
saturated with dust and smoke, seemed to stifle
him. The front room was a tolerably pleasant
apartment, of fair size; but the back drawing-
room, which was about a quarter as large,
entirely overlooked the neighbouring garden, and
of course it was here that he took up his
residence. He threw open the narrow windows as
wide as they would go, and looked out. It
was ten o'clock then, and a lovely moonlight
night. From the next house he could hear the
sound of music; the exquisite slow movement of
Chopin's second sonata in B minor was wafted
over the wall to him, and the young man, melted
by the soft air, and by the tenderness of the
music, and by the tenderness in his own soul,
leaned his arms upon the window, and listened
with his eyes full of tears.

Suddenly a loud slam, as if the piano had
been violently shut down, broke the silence, the
door of the drawing-room, which gave upon the
garden, was thrown wide open, and out rushed
the pale lady with a sheet of music in her hand,
followed by the man he had knocked up against
in the morning. She flew round and round the
garden in the moonlight, dodging in and out
among the trees and bushes with the young
man in full chase after her, while their peals of
laughter echoed through the still air. Edward
Saville stood motionless watching them, glued
to the window, and devoured by jealousy. At
last the young man doubled adroitly round one
of the bushes, and caught her full in his arms.
They had a sharp struggle for the music, during
which her comb tumbled out and all her hair
came down, covering her to her very feet: she
was beaten at last, and he got the music.

"Ach lieber Wilhelm," she sighed, "Ich
bin so müde, lass mich ruhen!"*

Close by them was a bench, under one of the
large trees on the lawn. They both sat down.
Presently she fell asleep. How lovely she looked
lying there cradled in his arms! The moonlight
touched her pale face and the rose in her bosom,
and fell upon the clouds of her fair hair, while
little dark tremulous shadows of leaves, thrown
by a swaying branch, flickered here and there
across her white dress. Once or twice he softly
moved back her hair from off her face, and
once Edward saw him stoop his head and kiss
her forehead.

"Come in! come in!" cried a harsh
woman's voice from the house; "you'll catch your
deaths of cold!"

She did not wake, and he carried her, all
sleeping as she was, like a baby into the house.
Soon after Edward heard the front door shut,
and saw the young man walk down the road,
humming a contented little tune to himself.

LEATHER GUNS.

WE have been thickening the plates on the
sides of our iron-clads only to find that there is
no iron-side so stout that a shot cannot be made
to crash through it. One well-planted shot
from a six-hundred pounder would make an
end of our iron Warrior. So the age of iron
in ship-building seems to be already on the wane,
and the builders of ships of war not meant as
stationary harbour defences, begin to think of
giving up the vain contest of weight between
ships' sides and guns, and to suspect that they
had better cultivate lightness and manageableness,
with the utmost speed. As knights of the
middle ages threw off the plating with which
they endeavoured in vain to protect their flesh
and blood against an improved artillery, and
resolved to fight unencumbered, save with perhaps
a helmet or a breastplate, so the iron ships
of our own day are beginning to content
themselves with a moderate breastplate above
watermark, and somebody has started the notion that
even here paper will give better defence than
steel. M. Szerelmy declares that paper may be
made into boards far less penetrable than the
hardest oak, and cotton is threatening to come
into its promised honours as of sixfold greater
force than gunpowder. It will take, says
Mr. Scott Russell in the Quarterly Journal of
Science, twenty-four ounces of gunpowder to
break, in mining, a mass of rock that can he
broken by four ounces of gun-cotton. But
the glory of gun-cotton has hitherto been
confined to its achievements as a burster. For
the moderated service of propelling a shot, it
has been tamed but lately by Major- General
Lenk, of the Austrian service, who has produced
it in a safe form, not six, but three, times more
powerful than gunpowder.

Thus used in war, the advantages of gun-
cotton over gunpowder are said to be many.
A third of the weight suffices; it does not
foul the gun, but leaves only a slight dew
of condensed steam; and it explodes without
smoke. Thus, that the smoke of battle will
become a tradition of the past, when gun-
cotton shall have been generally adapted to
the use of armies. The smoke of gunpowder
not only obscures sight, but it is a compound
of noxious fumes that make their effects felt in
casemates of fortresses, or between decks of
ships. To get rid of the smoke and of the
excessive heat of quick firing in such situations,
is to double the force of the fighting men by
doubling their power of standing unexhausted
by their guns. You must keep your powder
dry, but you may wet your gun-cotton; for
when dried it is undamaged. Major-General
Lenk has perfected the mechanism for
producing gun-cotton in several forms. The
simple form is that of a continuous straight

*"Ah, dear William," she sighed, "I am so tired!
Let me rest."