baggage; we appease their rivalry with our best patience, and follow them down the narrow street. We have but walked some two hundred yards when we come to a low wharf or quay, at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us-it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually_beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy. It is something clearer than any water we have seen lately, and of a pale green; the banks, only two or three feet above it, of mud and rank grass, with here and there a stunted tree, gliding swiftly past the small casement of the gondola, as if they were dragged by upon a painted scene. Stroke by stroke, we count the plunges of the oar, each heaving up the side of the boat slightly as her silver beak shoots forward. We lose patience, and extricate ourselves from the cushions; the sea air blows keenly by, as we stand leaning on the roof of the floating cell. In front, nothing to be seen but long canal and level bank; to the west, the tower of Mestre is lowering fast, and behind it there have risen purple shapes, of the colour of dead rose-leaves, all round the horizon, feebly defined against the afternoon sky-the Alps of Bassano. Forward still the endless canal bends at last, and then breaks into intricate angles about some low bastions, now torn to pieces and staggering in ugly rents towards the water -the bastions of the fort of Malghera. Another turn, and another perspective of canal, but not interminable. The silver beak cleaves it fast,-it widens; the rank grass of the banks sinks lower and lower, and at last dies in tawny knots along an expanse of weedy shore. Over it, on the right, but a few years back, we might have seen the lagoon stretching to the horizon, and the warm southern sky bending over Malamocco to the sea. Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it; this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. Four or five domes, pale, and apparently at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line; but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church. It is Venice. In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset, hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent; in those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder, there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning seabirds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa; but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St. George of the Seaweed.' As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows; but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north-a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets were entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces-each with its black boat moored at the portal-each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tesselation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moon-like circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry Ah, Stalè!' struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild and mercilesstime and decay, as well as the waves and tempests-had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea. And although the last eventful years, fraught with change to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are little to be envied in whose hearts the great charities of the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES. (1) Find the cost of covering with gravel at 74d. per square yard, a path 3 ft. wide round the outside of a circular bed whose diameter is 9 ft. (2) A square, whose side is 300 ft., has a circular garden within it 400 ft. in diameter; what will it cost to pave the part outside the garden, at 2s. per square yard? (3) The interest on a certain sum for 85 days at £4 6s. 8d. per cent. per annum was £3 13s. 3d.; what was the principal? (4) If the Three per Cents. are at 921, at what price should the Four per Cents. be to pay the same interest on a given investment? (5) If Ì gain £10 per cent. by selling tea at 6s. per lb., what do I gain or lose per cent. by selling it at 5s. 10d. per lb. ? THE INFLUENCE OF THE TIMES' NEWSPAPER; AND THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. A.D. 1854. (From the Invasion of the Crimea,' by A. Kinglake.) dis-sem'-i-nate, to spread, to scatter as seed ap-pel'-lant (n.), one who appeals co'-gen-cy, force, strength ex-po'-nent, index, that which points out sen'-ti-ent, having feeling per'-ma-nent, durable, lasting ac-cel-er-a'-tion, the act of hastening tech'-ni-cal, specially belonging to a pro- FOR a long time there had remained to the general public a vestige of their old custom of thinking for themselves; because in last resort they were privileged to determine between th rival counsels pressed upon them by contending journalists; but several years before the outbreak of the war there had come yet another change. The apparatus provided by the constitution for collecting the opinions of the people was far from being complete; and, notwithstanding the indications afforded by Parliament and by public writings, the direction which the nation's opinion had taken was a matter which could often be called in question. Some could say that the people desired one thing, and some with equal boldness that the people desired the contrary. Thence it came that the task of finding out the will of the nation, and giving to it a full voice and expression, was undertaken by private citizens. Long before the outbreak of the war there were living in some of the English counties certain widows and gentlemen, who were the depositaries of a power destined to exercise a great sway over the conduct of the war. Their ways were peaceful, and they were not perhaps more turned towards politics than other widows and country gentlemen, but by force of deeds and testaments, by force of births, deaths, and marriages, they had become the members of an ancient firm or company which made it its business to collect and disseminate news. They had so much good sense of the worldly sort, that instead of struggling with one another for the control of their powerful engine, they remained quietly at their homes, and engaged some active and gifted men to manage the concern for them in London. The practice of the company was to issue a paper daily, containing an account of what was going on in the world, together with letters from men of all sorts and conditions who were seeking to bring their favourite subjects under the eye of the public, and also a few short essays upon the topics of the day. Likewise, upon paying the sum required by the company, any person could cause whatever he chose to be inserted in the paper as an 'advertisement,' and the sheet containing these four descriptions of matter was sold to the public at a low rate. Extraordinary enterprise was shown by the company in the gathering of intelligence; and during the wars following the French Revolution they caused their despatches from the Continent to reach them so early that they were able to forestall the Government of the day. In other countries the spectacle of a government outdone in this way by private enterprise would have seemed a scandal; but the Englishman liked the thought that he could buy, and bring to his own home, as much knowledge as was in the hands of a Minister of State, and he enjoyed the success of his fellow-countrymen in their rivalry with the Government. From this time the paper gathered strength. It became the foremost journal of the world; and this was no |