absolutely wanting in others. The subterranean
sounds (bramidos) which at ordinary periods
accompany great earthquakes, cannot be said to be
essentially connected with them. There may
be earthquake without the peculiar rumblings,
and the peculiar rumblings without earthquake.
Thus, the earthquake of 4th February, 1797,
which destroyed Riobamba, and which
Humboldt called " one of the most fearful phenomena
recorded in the physical history of our planet,"
was unaccompanied by any subterranean noise
whatever. Again, in the elevated table-land
of Guanaxuato, subterranean thunderings began
about midnight of the 9th January, 1784,
and continued without intermission for the
space of a whole month, without any disturbing
motion of the earth. The city lies among some
of the richest silver mines in the world,
and large quantities of silver, in bars, were
stored within it. Nevertheless, the inhabitants
forsook all, expecting the earthquake to
be upon them every moment. But, within
the city, there was no earthquake; and, at the
bottom of the deepest mines, one thousand six
hundred feet under ground, no shock was felt.

The earth movement appears to vary
considerably. It has been already mentioned as
occurring from north to south, with quick
transverse jerks from east to west. But this is by
no means always the case. The movement
is sometimes upward, sometimes rotary. In
the earthquake near Quito, already referred
to, many bodies of inhabitants were thrown
into the air: some being found on the hill of
Cauca, several hundred feet in height, and on
the opposite side of the river. A sailor
in mid-ocean was violently flung into the rigging
from the deck, as if a mine had exploded
under the ship. In other instances, walls are
observed to be twisted, although not thrown
down; and rows of trees will be turned from
their previous parallel direction. Stranger still is
the facility with which objects on the surface of
the earth have been found to shift from one
place to another. The furniture of one house
has been found on the ruins of a neighbour's;
and, at Quito, the council of justice
had, in many cases, to decide on the ownership
of property, even including fields and growing
crops, which had thus shifted their positions,
without sustaining much apparent injury.

LEAVES PROM THE MAHOGANY TREE.

A BASKETFUL OF VEGETABLES.

A MAN cannot more thoroughly taste the
enjoyment of the country and the proud possession
of a rood of ground that well maintains its man,
than soon after a hearty breakfast—laughter
its sauce, and kindly sociability its perpetual
entremet—to toss on his deer-stalker, slip on
his stiff but friendly old garden gloves, snatch
up the big wooden basket (this is no bull,
for have we not brass shoeing-horns and English
China?), and, forgetting all about the curse of
Cain, fall hard at work in the garden, voluntarily
incurring its penalties. Then does he
beat soft green bundles of lettuces against the
bottom of his spade, till the friable chocolate
earth drops from the fine shallow thready
roots, as he chops off part of the milky and
narcotic stems; or, regardless that "all the
perfumes of Araby" will not for some time
sweeten his little hand, drag at the tuby stalks
of onions, whose globular roots, tired of
summer heat and confinement, have long since
worked themselves free of the soil, and now
lie rolling about outside their beds in lolling
laziness, their dry red skin hanging in odorous
shreds round their green-striped plump bodies,
which the Egyptians of the Pyramids once
worshipped as emblems of those concentric
rings of stars that gird our earth. Or, perhaps,
if it be earlier summer, he retires among
the green lanes of melting marrowfats, and
there, happy as Alcinous, whose crown was
of vine tendrils, plucks the dimpled pods,
tugging out the yellowing bines now and then
in his zeal for the kitchen, occasionally opening
a pod with a pop, and stripping off the
string of soft green beads. But the man who
really loves a garden will not rest satisfied with
merely persuading his scarlet-skinned tapering
radishes to rise earlier than they had intended,
or with plucking those great woolly-podded
broad beans with the black speckled flowers;
but will take a manlier pleasure in driving
his shining spade deep into the potato ground,
and loosening the green stalks with the night-
shade flowers of purple and yellow, to pick out
the clear-rinded kidney-shaped tubers that
judiciously applied hot water will turn to " balls of
flour." Not less pleasant is the honest delve
in the celery bed, down in the trenches,
digging up the great reddish-white fagots of
pleasant-smelling stalk and root; then hewing
them into shape with the big garden knife, lopping
off the lavish green plumes, and shredding
away all the coarser fluted pinkish folds that
envelop the savoury vegetable. And here, talking
of the pleasure of lopping with a garden knife
at creatures that do not feel pain, and are even
the better for being wounded, let us not forget
the innocent joy of cutting the first snowy cauliflower,
over which the younger leaves have been
aforetime bent with snapped stalks, to guard it
from the dangerous admiration of the too fervid
sun. How splendid the embossed flowery
surface! And in the morning how the dew pearls
the leaves, and runs in the sunlight into pools
of melting diamond. Very pleasant, too, as lord
of a garden, and therefore partner in the earth's
surface, on a May morning to take one's saw-
edged asparagus knife, and walk between the
high rounded beds, where the sharp green spears
are piercing through, and to stab down and
cut them with a slant pressure, and then go
over the field of battle and pick up the fallen!

Most people have experienced these tranquil
delights; all people like to have them recalled
in writing. Mr. Browning, in his highly
original poem of  "Fra Lippo Lippi," has well
shown, that objects which we pass daily with