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objects at a great distance, it is important to get as many rays of light as possible from that distant object,—therefore the larger the object-glass, the more rays of light will it collect, and the brighter will be the image formed.

The telescope which has been described is commonly known as the astronomical or night telescope. It causes objects to appear inverted. This matters very little in viewing the heavenly bodies; but when we look at distant objects by daylight, it is desirable that they should appear in their right position. This is accomplished by means of additional lenses, but we must be content to refer you to other books for fuller information.

We will finish our lesson with a short history of the telescope. The date of its invention can hardly be fixed, nor is it certain who has the best claim to be considered its inventor; but Galileo, in the year 1609, was the first to make any really important discoveries by means of the telescope.

In those, its early days, the telescope was afflicted with one very great fault, the image of the object which it gave was tinged with colour. It was found that the less curved the object-glass was, the less of this objectionable colour appeared. But such an object-glass would have its focus at a great distance, and therefore the telescopes of those days were often exceedingly lengthy and cumbersome. Indeed, telescopes were actually constructed in this manner: the object-glass was fixed to a tall pole, and adjusted by means of a string held in the hand; and the image thus formed (at a focal distance perhaps of 120 feet from the object-glass) was viewed by means of an eye-glass.

Sir Isaac Newton's discoveries respecting the laws of refraction led men to despair of improving this kind of telescope. A different kind of instrument was therefore invented,-which we cannot find room to explain, more than by saying that an image was formed by means of a mirror instead of a lens, and then this image was magnified

by an eye-glass. These are called reflecting telescopes, and the others refracting telescopes.

Herschel made a very large reflecting telescope, forty feet long, the mirror of which measured four feet across. But the largest in the world is Lord Rosse's, which is more than fifty feet long, and has a mirror measuring six feet in diameter.

Meanwhile, in 1757, Dollond, a London optician, had chanced to discover that if the object-glass be made of two lenses, of different kinds of glass, an image will be formed quite free from colour. Refracting telescopes which are made in this way are called achromatic (that is, colourless). Since then some very fine refracting telescopes have been made, notably one lately finished by Cooke and Son, of York, which is thirty-two feet long, the object-glass measuring more than two feet in diameter.

THE USES OF ADVERSITY.

Now my co-mates, and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

AS YOU LIKE It,

THE TWO HEROINES.

THE great revolution of 1789 in France was succeeded by a great war which ended only in 1815 with the battle of Waterloo. In the beginning of this war France was invaded by the Austrians and Prussians, and to resist the invaders the whole nation rose in arms. Women even accompanied their husbands to the seat of war, and daughters their fathers: all ages and both sexes wished to contribute, by their valour or their blood, to the maintenance of liberty and the safety of their fatherland.

Among the women who distinguished themselves at this extraordinary period were the two eldest daughters of M. de Fernig, an old officer who had retired to the village of Mortagne, on the frontier of France, touching Belgium. When the enemy threatened to invade his beloved country, this veteran soldier formed a corps of volunteers at Mortagne, and not only drilled the peasants in all the country round, but communicated to them his own military ardour and patriotism. He inured them to war by continual skirmishes with the enemy's horse that dared to cross the frontier to pillage and destroy. Night after night was he engaged in this perilous enterprise, his wife and children trembling for his life; at last, his two eldest daughters, Théophile and Félicité, formed the daring resolution of donning a soldier's dress and watching over their father's safety by fighting in the ranks near his person, but all unknown to him.

So well did they carry their resolution into effect, that for several successive nights they joined the column under the command of their father, fired with the rest upon the Austrian marauders, inured themselves to marching, fighting, and bloodshed, and electrified by their example the brave peasants of the hamlet.

Their secret was for a long time successfully kept. M. de Fernig, on returning to his home in the morning, and recounting at the breakfast-table the adventures, the perils, and the exploits of the previous night, never suspected for a moment that his own daughters had fought in the front ⚫rank and sometimes preserved his life.

Meanwhile, Beurnonville, who was in command of a French army posted near Mortagne, having heard of the heroic exploits of M. de Fernig's volunteers, came at the head of a troop of cavalry to review them. As he entered the village he met them returning from their night's expedition, bringing several of their wounded comrades and five prisoners. The general stopped M. de Fernig, thanked him in the name of France, and expressed a wish to honour his brave peasants by passing them in review as regular soldiers.

They were at once drawn up in line, and the French general dismounted from his horse to make an individual inspection. Beurnonville, having noticed two young volunteers keeping in the background and trying to elude observation, desired their captain to bring them forward. M. de Fernig ordered them to advance, the ranks opening for them to pass to the front. Their male attire, their faces discoloured with the smoke of the powder they had fired during the fight, their lips blackened in biting the cartridges, all served to conceal them from the knowledge of their own father. "Who are you?" he demanded, in a tone of surprise. Théophile and Félicité fell at his knees, and implored his pardon for deceiving him. The proud father, unable to restrain his tears, presented them to the general, who described this scene in a despatch to the Government. The names of these two heroines were re-echoed throughout France, and the Government sent to them horses and arms of honour in the name of the nation.

These two young girls, Théophile and Félicité, now openly followed the profession of arms, and won the admiration of their countrymen by their valour, and of their

enemies by their humanity. They combined the courage of a man with the tenderness of a woman. They were as forward in saving a wounded enemy after the battle, as in risking their own lives while the battle was raging. The great French general, Dumouriez, often set these two charming girls before his soldiers as a model of patriotism; not a soldier in the army dared to turn his back on an enemy when he knew that they were in the ranks fighting. Many instances of their bravery and humanity have been related, but none exceeds the following account in romantic interest.

In one of the encounters between the French advancedguard and the Austrian rear-guard, one of these young girls, Félicité, who was carrying the orders of Dumouriez to the officer in command of the advanced column, drawn on by her eagerness to deliver the general's despatch, found herself surrounded, with a handful of French hussars, by a detachment of the enemy's cavalry. Released with difficulty from the sabres which flashed in her face, she turned her horse with the hussars to rejoin the columns on the march in the rear, when she perceived a young Belgian officer who had taken service in the French army, thrown from his horse by a rifle-shot, and trying to defend himself with his sabre against some Uhlans on the point of killing him. Although this officer is unknown to the brave woman, the sight of his imminent danger brings Félicité to the spot: she kills two of the Uhlans with two pistol-shots, when the others withdraw; she dismounts, raises the wounded man, and puts him under the care of her hussars; she accompanies him to the ambulance, and recommends him to the special care of the surgeon.

This young Belgian officer was named Vanderwalen. Left, on the departure of the French army, in the hospital at Brussels, he forgot his wounds; but he could not forget the guardian angel he had seen on the field of battle. Her face was continually before him, whether awake or asleep:

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