volved upon her the whole management of his concerns." It is not so easy to understand how the sturdyminded woman was the sister of a man who had made an arrangement with a personal friend that which ever of them died first should in the spirit visit the other in a certain garden; and the lady's brother, being the survivor, was deeply disappointed and provoked that the ghost of his friend did not fulfil the promise made in the flesh.* Mrs Calderwood's estimate of the plebeianism of the Dutch is measured by elements long forgotten,-hoops, fans, powder, and pomatum on the female side; periwigs and smallclothes on the male. The Dutch are a signally conservative people, with little of the social restlessness of our own race, ever rising and falling. Their " common people" grow rich without altering their ways or abandoning their peasant costume. In Rotterdam last year I had a good opportunity of seeing crowds of peasant women in costume, for it was the time of the fair. There stood before me a considerable phalanx of these nymphs, just deposited by train or steamer. I was about to ask the way to the fair; but I bethought me that these women are going thither, and I may follow them. They were not corpulent, but certainly large, with a deal of "wecht," as we say in Scotland -thoroughly clean and respectablelooking, both young and old. But it was destined that they were not to guide me. They stopped suddenly, grunting away to each other with great power and rapidity in their rough Teutonic, and, I regret to say, the end of their conference was that they suddenly turned to the left and were all engulfed in a body into a gin- palace. That they are not above the pomps and vanities of this wicked world I had further evidence at the fair, where I saw the exact duplicates of those I had left behind mounted on merry-go-rounds, and solemnly enjoying themselves in all their finery of golden blinkers, and those mysteriously projecting horns in the shape of screws. In a I hope I am not given to any irreverent amount of inquisitiveness about feminine costume, but I certainly have felt a mechanical curiosity as to the means by which those blinkers and screws are affixed to the head; and it was my fortune, on the eve of the fair, to have that curiosity gratified. steamer close to the quay about a dozen of them were sitting with their heads not two feet from my eyes. The sun was shining full on these heads, so as to penetrate the gauze of their large caps, and then I perceived that each head was encased in a glittering brazen helmet. What will not the female frame endure for fashion's sake! Sir John Skene, the great lawyer, alike the Coke and the Lyttleton of Scotland, was called by his friend Sir James Melville a "stout manlike a Dutchman.' But why this should have been, as Sir James urged, a reason for sending him as ambassador to Denmark, seems about as illogical as the celebrated equivalent about speaking French and playing on the German flute. I never saw any corpulent people among the Dutch-none of the leviathan conglomerates of turtle and turbot to be beheld in Londonnot even the abdominal globularity The brother was Sir James Stuart of Coltness, sometimes called "The father of political economy." The book called 'The Coltness Collection' was edited ly a genial scholar, whose too early death left a blank in the world-James Dennistoun of Dennistoun, the author of 'Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino.' VOL. CXX.-NO. DCCXXXI. U been waiting for him, I had run back to the cabin and got my rosary, which I put round my neck, and seized a pair of blankets. We made our way to the companionhatch, but it was partly fastened up, so I was forced to drop my load of blankets, and creep through the small aperture which was left. Arm in arm, and followed by Miss Henderson and her brother, we walked to where some sailors were endeavouring to launch a boat. Charlie noticed to me that generally in shipwrecks the first boat launched is lost; and though I heard "Sails's" voice cry out, "I'll shoot any man who gets in before the women," I said to Charlie, "Don't go in that boat; remember wherever we go if there is not room for you there is not for me." He replied, "No, mother, we will live or die together." We passed the Joselyn boys. Percy, the eldest-a fine fellow-I heard say to his younger brother, "We will stick together, old boy, whatever happens.' I saw poor Captain M'Donald at the rigging, and would have spoken to him, but I knew he was a broken-hearted man, and, like myself, preparing for eternity. I had not the least hope of being saved. Just then I heard Mrs Walker, who unfortunately had got separated from her husband and child, ask Charlie to look for him, but he did not hear her; he was considering how I could be got into the port lifeboat. "Can you get on the bridge, mother?" he asked. I said "Yes"-though it was a place I dared not have attempted in daylight on a calm day. I got into it, I know not how. Charlie, and a sailor named Jack Wilson, pulled me up into the boat by the hands. The moment I was lifted from the quarter-deck a sea swept over it, some of the water splashing on my face. That sea washed Miss Henderson from her brother's arms down to the main deck, and so the poor child was lost. Her brother told me afterwards that all she said to him was, "Oh Tom! we did not think it would end this way." In the meantime the sailors were doing everything to have the boat ready, on the very slight hope of her floating clear of the ship, which we thought then was rapidly settling down. We sat awaiting our fate. A few farewells were exchanged. I said good-bye to my dear boy, and a pang of anguish went through me for his young life, so soon to be taken. It passed in a moment, and we were preparing ourselves as well as we could to meet our God when, wonderful to relate, a heavy sea came sweeping along over the poop, carrying everything with it to destruction; but instead of dashing our boat to pieces, or tumbling it from the beams on which it stood down to the deck, it caught it up and miraculously floated us between the main and mizzen rigging into the sea. I thought at the time we were going quietly into eternity. I felt Charlie's grasp tighten, and with a prayer on my lips I think I almost was gone. We had hardly breathed when Charlie suddenly almost threw me from him, and wrenching an oar out, shouted, "Saved! saved! by a miracle. Up, lads, and keep her off the ship!" It was pitch-dark, in the dead of a winter night. We had few clothes, and the boat having been stove in on its passage across the deck, we were sitting almost up to our waists in water. Huge sprays washed over our shoulders; and so, surrounded by breakers and sharp rocks, we did not know which way to turn for safety. By dint of hard labour, and great caution, we managed to keep clear of every obstacle, and the boat was constantly baled to lighten her, but with little success. Indeed, had she not been a splendid lifeboat we should very soon have sunk. I sat silent in my corner, trying to comfort and warm poor Spencer Joselyn, who had hurt himself jumping into the boat. Percy, poor fellow, fell short in his leap, and was drowned. Charlie gave me his coat to hold whilst he pulled an oar, and I think that £155, which was in a pocketbook that he had saved, must then have been lost by dropping out of one of his pockets into the water in the boat, and then being baled overboard. We beat about all night, not knowing where we went, afraid of being drifted out to sea without food or water. Breakers ahead! and Land, ho! was the cry all night. Once, in the grey of the morning, we got a glimpse of the ship. She was leaning over a good deal, and looked very helpless and forlorn, and so sad. A little after day broke I was the first to see another boat. I gave a joyful scream, and the second mate, Mr Peters, with some passengers and sailors, came to us and towed us to land. When we came to the landing-place I gave up in despair, for I saw nothing but a high perpendicular rock before me, impossible almost for a goat to find footing on. You know I am not very clever at climbing at the best of times, but weak and ill, stiff with cold, and dripping wet, I felt I had no life in me, and could not do it. I said, "Charlie, I can't do it; you must leave me." "Nonsense," he said; and one of the seamen, Jack Wilson, added, "If there is anybody to be saved you will be." The sailors who had already mounted the rock soon managed to lower a rope with a loop in it, in which I sat, and was pulled up, assisted by Charlie and young Mr Keith on either side. I was stunned with cold, and almost fainting, so that it seemed only a few minutes to me till Charlie came with the reeking-hot skins of two albatrosses and wrapped my feet in them. Oh, how delightful it was! Some one knocked down a white pigeon, which was cooked on some sticks and given to me. I thought I had never tasted anything so good. Mr Peters, who all along had behaved with great presence of mind and gallantry, had been backwards and forwards to the wreck and brought off several boatfuls of people. He also picked up some wine, spirits, &c.-in fact all that was portable and useful. It soon got dark, and we were obliged to move higher up the rock, where a slight tent was erected and a plank was placed on the rock for me to lie upon. Some of the sailors covered me with their coats, but they were taken from me during the night by some of the passengers, and then, Oh the agony I suf fered in my limbs! Mr Keith and Charlie had to move my feet and hands, and when I could bear it no longer I went outside and sat by a small fire they had lit. Black Jack gave me his own stockings, which were warm, for I had none,—the crew were all so kind to me. The next day Mr Peters brought the remainder of the survivors from the rigging of the wreck. The noble captain had been washed overboard shortly after Miss Henderson and the man at the helm, a bright-eyed little fellow called Darkey on account of his gypsylike complexion, who was washed away from his post with a part of the wheel in his hand. He had refused to leave it till the word to save himself was given; but the captain never lived to give it. There was a very interesting newly-married couple called Mr and Mrs Riddle. Mrs Riddle had waited for him for eight years, and the poor man was frantic at the prospect of losing his the Germans got possession of the equipments of the defeated French, they found an ample supply of maps, plans, and directions for penetrating into Germany, but none to give any aid in a retreat back through France. With us the corresponding characteristics take an opposite character. How often do we hear of the possibility, or even probability, of Hermann marching to London? but who gives utterance to a whisper of Britannia marching to Berlin ? Of course there is nothing further from our thoughts than any attempt to perform such a feat as a spontaneous act. The man who should contemplate it would be socially adjudged to be a lunatic. But a war is that great exterminator of all prejudices and traditions and general ideas, that renders all things that are physically possible also morally possible. It will not fit us in projecting a journey to the moon, but it may render a march to Berlin an act of wise precaution or even a necessity. wars In Queen Anne's soldiers had as easy access to Gerour many through Holland as any one province of Germany had to another, They were as much at home among the Dutch as among their own countrymen. Then perhaps Denmark is not so much beholden to Prussia that she would sternly refuse us a path through her territory. The path that way is still more open-in fact there is scarce a hedge or ditch to interrupt an army marching to Berlin. defenceless nature of those plains The makes one absolutely nervous as in sympathetic interest about some one in peril; and you are ever reminded by the strong barns of the granges and the heavily-stanchioned windows, that the soldier has already been an unwelcome guest there. One would scarcely desire the thing to come to pass; but there is no doubt that fighting in our enclosed grounds on any great scale would afford a new precedent in warfare, and an opportunity for original tactics. battle of Waterloo the contest round Even in the great the small chateau of Hougomont is full of intense separate interests. We have had at home some instances of fighting among enclosures, but of small dimensions. at Worcester, and two at Preston, There was one upwards of sixty years separated from each other-Cromwell gaining the one, and the army sent from England to suppress the affair of the '15 the other. In the affair at Clifton, in their retreat from Derby, the Highlanders of the '45 escaped apparently by less than half an hour-escaped absolute extinction, by getting among enclosures. On the other hand, the English troops at Prestonpans mismanaged the possession of enclosures. They got entangled among them, so that they could not form for charging, and were pushed against the walls and the same kind on a larger scale by slaughtered. It was a mistake of the French and Bavarians that made our victory at Blenheim so complete. More than twenty thouinto a village where they effectually sand men were comfortably packed barricaded themselves, waiting in safety for their opportunity. At a moment preposterously unconformable to the calculations of a commander trained in all the rules of war, they found themselves sursuccess in other parts of the field. rounded by an enemy flushed with They could neither assail that enemy nor could they get out, Having a prejudice against being whether to fight or to run away. pounded to a jelly by cannon-balls and crashing houses, there was conbut an unconditional surrender. sequently no alternative for them SPECULATIVE INVESTMENTS. WE are safe in saying that speculative investors have seldom had more disastrous experiences than lately, and we should be sorry to hazard any reassuring predictions as to what may be awaiting them in the immediate future. We are aware that it is the habit to speak of them as a class who are entitled to little sympathy; as publicans who were born to point a moral for the satisfaction of moneyed PhariWhenever they are caught in a squall on the stream as the tide of fortune sets against them while they are tossing their damaged property overboard, or clinging to its dangerous dead-weight in imminent peril of swamping altogether -they are howled at by the onlookers who are standing safe on the shore or have been paddling ankledeep in the shallows. That the old proverb of "Fools and their money" is perpetually finding fresh illustrations is a fact we are not concerned to deny; and we should be glad if the offenders who hastened to be unrighteously rich came more swiftly and invariably to well-merited retribution. But we have at least as little sympathy with the uncharitable denunciation of those who have been removed beyond reach of temptation, or who pride themselves virtuously on the unreasoning timidity that would be the bane of all action and enterprise. The parable of the talent in the napkin applies as forcibly to commercial and financial Europe in the nineteenth century as to agricultural Syria in the beginning of the first. The rayah of Hindustan who builds his rupees into the mud walls of his hovel; the French peasant who invests his five-franc. pieces in the thatch of his cottage or among the roots of his cabbagebeds, may live on rice or maize, as the case may be, and go jogging along from the cradle to the grave as mildly useful members of society. But what would become of the movement of the world if everybody were to imitate their passive prudence? and we should remember in fairness that there are conditions of existence where bare necessities are only to be obtained by running a risk of falling back on charity. There are men who delight in excitement for its own sake, and who would never be content in the repose of the lotus-eater, for all the lusciousness of the insidious fruit or the soothing languor of the drowsy atmosphere. But most people, if they might choose their lots, would undoubtedly elect to be landed to the lips or "consolled up to the eyes;" to be blessed with such a superabundance of riches, that they should be practically relieved of their accompanying cares. There are very few who are so fortunate, and perhaps the number is relatively diminishing. For although great fortunes are becoming far more common, and although they are rolled up with a rapidity which would have seemed fabulous to the plodding toilers of former generations, yet habits of profuse expenditure have been increasing even faster. Great noblemen, with half-a-dozen costly seats or as many domains, in as many counties, unless they are happy enough to be the possessors of deposits of coal or veins of metal, find themselves eclipsed in display by ostentatious nouveaux riches. They may despise these new men, and yet all the same they are goaded on to a race of competition in which the pace every year becomes more |