opening of the sixteenth century. Spain imme- | commercial treaties were framed with foreign diately offered terms of peace, and France, weary of civil war, sheathed the sword with joy. Now that Henry had rest from war, he gave himself to the not less glorious and more fruitful labours of peace. France, in all departments of France, in all departments of her organization, was in a state of frightful disorder-was, in fact, on the verge of ruin. Castles burned to the ground, cities half in ruins, lands reverting into a desert, roads unused, marts and harbours forsaken, were the melancholy memorials which presented themselves to one's eye wherever one journeyed. The national exchequer was empty; the inhabitants were becoming few, for those who should have enriched their country with their labour or adorned it with their intelligence were watering its soil with their blood. Some two millions of lives had perished since the breaking out of the civil wars. Summoning all his powers, Henry set himself to repair this vast ruin. In this arduous labour he displayed talents of a higher order, and a more valuable kind than any he had shown in war, and proved himself not less great as a statesman than he was as a soldier. There was a debt of three hundred millions of francs-equivalent, according to the relative value of money, to about thirtytwo millions sterling-pressing upon the kingdom. The annual expenditure exceeded the revenue by upwards of one hundred millions of francs. The taxes paid by the people amounted to two hundred millions of francs, but owing to abuses of collection, not more than thirty millions found their way into the treasury. Calling Sully to his aid, the king set himself to grapple with these gigantic evils, and displayed in the cabinet no less fertility of resource and comprehensiveness of genius than in the field. He cleared off the national debt in ten years. He found means of making the income not only balance the expenditure, but of exceeding it by many millions. He accomplished all this without adding to the burdens of the people. He understood the springs of the nation's prosperity, and taught them to flow again. He encouraged agriculture, promoted industry and commerce, constructed roads, bridges, and canals. The lands were tilled, herds were reared, the silk-worm was introduced, the ports were opened for the free export of corn and wine, countries; and France, during these ten years, showed as conclusively as in a recent instance how speedily it can recover from the effects of the most terrible disasters, when the passions of its children permit the development of the boundless resources which Nature has stored up in its soil and climate. Henry's views in the field of foreign politics were equally comprehensive. He clearly saw that the great menace to the peace of Europe and the independence of its several nations was the Austrian power in its two branches, the German and Spanish. Philip II. was dead; Spain was waning. Nevertheless that ambitious power waited an opportunity to employ the one half of Christendom, of which she was still mistress, in crushing the other half. Henry's project, formed in concert with Elizabeth of England, for humbling that power, was a vast one, and he had made such progress in it that twenty European states had promised to take part in the campaign which Henry was to lead against Austria. The moment for launching that great force was come, and Henry's contingent had been sent off, and was already on German soil. He was to follow his soldiers in a few days and open the campaign. But this deliverance for Christendom he was fated not to achieve. queen, Marie de Medici, to whom he was recently married, importuned him for a public coronation, and Henry resolved to gratify her. The ceremony, which was gone about with great splendour, was over, and he was now ready to set out, when a melancholy seized him, which he could neither account for nor shake off. This pensiveness was all the more remarkable that his disposition was naturally gay and sprightly. In the words of Schiller, in his drama of "Wallenstein":— "The king Felt in his breast the phantom of the knife And still with boding sense he heard the tread His When the coming campaign was referred to, he told his queen and the nobles of his court that Germany he would never see-that he would die soon, and in a carriage. They tried to laugh away these gloomy fancies, as they accounted them. "Go to Germany instantly," said his minister Sully, "and go on horseback." The 19th of May 1610 was fixed for the departure of the king. On the 16th May, Henry was so distressed as to move the compassion of the attendants. After dinner he retired to his cabinet, but could not write; he threw himself on his bed, but could not sleep. He was overheard in prayer. He asked, "What o'clock is it?" and was answered, "Four of the afternoon. Would not your Majesty be the better of a little of the fresh air?" The king took the hint and ordered his carriage. He went out, accompanied by two of his nobles. He was talking with one of them, the Duke d'Epernon, his left hand resting upon the shoulder of the other, and thus leaving his side exposed. The carriage was in the narrow Rue de la Ferroniere, when, stopped by the accidental meeting of two carts, it drew up close to the curbstone. A monk, François Ravaillac, who had followed the royal cortège unobserved, stole up, and mounting on the wheel, and leaning over the carriage, struck his knife into the side of Henry. "I am wounded," faintly uttered the king. The monk struck again, and this time reached the heart. The king fell forward in the carriage and expired. The monk made no attempt to escape. He stood with his bloody knife in his hand till he was apprehended; and when brought before his judges and subjected to the torture, he justified the deed, saying that the king was too favourable to heretics, and that he had purposed making war on the Pope, which was to make war on God, seeing the Pope is God, and God is the Pope. Years before, Rome had launched her excommunication against the "two Henries," and now both had fallen by her dagger. On the character of Henry IV. we cannot dwell. It was a combination of great qualities and great faults. He was a brave soldier and an able ruler; but we must not confound military brilliance or political genius with moral greatness. Entire devotion to a great cause-the corner-stone of greatness-he lacked. France-in other words, the glory and dominion of himself and house-was the supreme aim and end of all his toils, talents, and manoeuvrings. The great error of his life was his abjuration. The Catholics it did not conciliate, and the Protestants it alienated. It was the Edict of Nantes that made him strong, and gave to France almost the only ten years of real prosperity and glory which it has seen since the reign of Francis I. Had Henry nobly resolved to ascend the throne with a good conscience, or not at all-had he not paltered with the Jesuits— had he said, I will give toleration to all, but will myself abide in the faith my mother taught me— his own heart would have been stronger, his life purer, his course less vacillating and halting; the Huguenots, the flower of French valour and intelligence, would have rallied round him and borne him to the throne, and kept him on it, in spite of all his enemies. On what different foundations would his throne in that case have rested, and what a different glory would have encircled his memory! He set up a throne by abjuration, to be cast down on the scaffold of 1793! department where her services may be required. | with the lime. She takes him into her embrace, It will do your heart good to mark how cleverly and completely she accomplishes, in the service of her chosen master, whatever she undertakes, or he requires at her hand. as who should say, Let us now unite for better or for worse. He, poor simpleton, imagines they shall never part; he believes his bliss will last for ever. Instead of the dry, hard, burning, miser and luscious. He is a new man. She has been Here is a group of masons employed in throw-able life he led alone before, he is fresh and cool ing an arch over the gateway. The stones are ready-cut into shape, and lying at hand. The wooden frame is erected as a temporary support. Lay the stones, now gently, each in its place, and close them with the keystone. But here a grand difficulty meets us. The stones are cut either too exactly into shape, or not exactly enough. They are not so exactly fitted as to stand and keep their places, stone upon stone, hard and dry; and yet, on the other hand, they are so nearly fitted -and for permanence must be so nearly fitted-dry as he was when water met him-left precisely that no hand, no tool can be introduced between them for the purpose of adjusting their bed, and packing in the interstices. You cannot reach the spot to give the joint its final fastening. Here is lime, the very thing that is fitted to fasten them, if we could bring it to the spot; but the stones lie so close, that no instrument can penetrate to lay the mortar in its place. Bring water; pour it into the lime until it become of the consistency as well as the colour of milk. Pour this liquid now over the seam, and it will percolate into the smallest crevice, until it has occupied absolutely all the space. But this is not enough; at this stage you are no nearer your object than at first. The lime, mixed with water, will indeed go into the place; but lime mixed with water will do no good there. This soft cream between stone and stone would be worse than nothing; instead of the binding to hold them together, it would become the lubrication which would enable them to slip. The joints would gradually open, and the whole structure fall. After the water has carried the lime into the crevice, her next care is to come out again herself, leaving the lime behind. This, accordingly, she does; but she is not able to do this unaided. She is obliged to summon back her old ally, Heat. By help of heat, the water takes to herself wings and flies away. There is an aspect of cunning and cruelty, not pleasant to contemplate, about our clever handmaid's conduct in this transaction. She goes into loving partnership because when alone he is hard and dry, to lie there for ever, or at least till some catastrophe overturn the structure. It was after this manner that the genii in Eastern tales led fair princesses into prison; and then, turning themselves into smoke, escaped by the keyhole. The two processes resemble each other, with this difference, that the one is a play of the human fancy, and the other, though stranger of the two, is a solid fact accomplished daily before our eyes by the forces of Nature. As shown in this example, the value of water as an agent in human art lies not all in its capa city of going into a narrow place with its burden, but partly, and even mainly, in the adroitness with which it comes out again leaving the burden behind. The water that is employed in any process is not needed permanently in the product. Its presence indeed would be a blemish. It is accordingly dismissed as quickly as possible. The dyers who dip their web in a running stream at the commencement of the process, hang it in a kiln to dry at the close. They call the water in to help with the operation; but as soon as the operation is completed, they dismiss it Nor is it, when so dismissed, cast away s waste. It is all quickly purified and gathered again, and made ready for another task, as the help-mate of man. The story of a drop of water, if it could be truly written, would turn out a sensational biography. That same portion, for example, that betrayed the lime into a useful position, was that same night on wing again, ready for another call. Falling on the mountaintop and sinking through a seam of the rock, it may have risen through a well's eye near the city, and been carried in a golden cup to a lady's lip, the next articulate service it may have performed after doing the needful to the mason's mortar. no further reply; but stands silent, expectant. For a few moments no effect is visible, and you begin to think his water has been spilt in vain upon the ground. The stones are stones still, after his empiric baptism. But, as you prepare to mock the credulity of the labourer, you perceive a slender white mist ascending straight and pure like a pillar of incense from the summit of the heap. You next hear a slight hum among the stones, as if bees were hiving in the interThe hum increases, and breaks into a quick crackling, like platoon firing from a regiment of volunteers under review. Meantime the column of incense grows broader and denser, and streams more swiftly upward. At its base, hidden under the cloud, the stones may be heard as they sink and melt away into dust. The baptism by water has prevailed, and the great shaggy mass is completely subdued. To the simple sprinkling of water they yield wholly; but to nothing else will they yield at all. Nor is she dainty in her tastes, this creature of God-this servant of man. She will operate in clean places or in unclean with equal willing-stices. ness. Like holy angels sent to haunts of sin, water will swoop down to grasp any kind or degree of impurity that defiles the earth; and when her task is done, she shakes herself, and ascends to heaven again as pure as she came. The identical portions of water that are told off to do duty in the grand new sewers of London, burst away from their impure burden when they have deposited it in a safe place, and rise to the upper strata of the air, where they lie like white ships in the offing, waiting for another order, and another errand of mercy to a needy earth. That same lime that keyed the arch did not then and there for the first time become acquainted with water. At an earlier stage of its own career, it felt and owned the sway of the softer element. If it had not come in contact with water at an earlier epoch of its own development, it could not have been made useful in the later stages of industrial art. Here is a heap of rugged, hard, heavy stones of a whitish-blue colour that have been brought in carts and thrown down on the ground where a house is in process of erection. A man in the employment of the contractor approaches and sprinkles a quantity of water over the jagged, ungainly heap. You, an ignorant spectator, demand the meaning of his uncouth act. He replies that he has poured water on the stones in order to reduce them to a small, soft, white powder, which his employer requires as a constituent of his fabric. You smile-perhaps you sneer. Soft water poured over these stones, and that to convert them into a white, dry, impalpable powder! Stones not so hard as these have resisted yonder cataract since the world was made, and they are not softened yet; will the rock melt when you baptize it from your pail? The workman deigns A baptism by fire, it is true, had preceded the baptism by water; otherwise no effect would have been produced. This leads us up one step further into the mysteries of nature,-mysteries that lay themselves willingly open, as far as is necessary for the use of man, and then draw the curtain round to keep prying eyes at a distance. On the other side, in the moral hemisphere of our world, a parallel phenomenon has been sometimes observed. The hardest and roughest of the race, lewd fellows of the baser sort, like those whom the first missionaries met in the purlieus of Thessalonica, abandoned professionals in the darkest vice,—have bent when the story of the Cross has been poured upon their heads, and crumbled and melted into a soft, deep repentance while the incense of new-born trustfulness rose from broken hearts to heaven. By turning here but a very little to the side from the plain prosaic path of our observations, we find ourselves suddenly thrown into a great deep. These are waters in which the foot can find no bottom-yet waters in which we would gladly swim. We return to the beaten highway. Water in alliance with heat does yeoman service in the kitchen of the human family. She takes a large share of the labour involved in the preparation of our food. But observe at this point how all the elements of nature and all the orbs of space are nicely balanced for the best, and how living creatures would suffer on every side if the cosmical relations were materially changed. The use of water in cooking, for example, depends on the depth of the atmosphere over our heads. If the girdle of air that encircles the globe had been a little thinner, and so a little lighter than it is, there would have been no boiling in this world for hungry men. You say, How not? Put plenty of fire beneath the kettle, and the water must boil, whatever the depth of the atmosphere may be. Yes; it will boil, all too easily and too soon; and when it has boiled for half a day, your beef will be as raw when you take it out as it was when you put it in. Pascal was surprised when the monks of St. Bernard told him they could not boil their venison, and were obliged to roast it always. The monks supplied the philosopher with the fact; and the philosopher thereafter gave the reason of the fact to the world. The monks had built their kitchen so high in the strata of the atmosphere that there was not a sufficient weight of air resting on the water in their pot to keep it down till it was hot enough. It boiled too soon and too furiously; it boiled readily, but it never became hot; and so the venison came out raw. Just think of itwhat a world to live in, if no soup had been possible, and no tea. Let us remember as we sip these beverages, each delicious after its kind, that we could not have procured them for love or for money in a world that wore a thinner atmosphere than ours. Water at the Hospice of St. Bernard will boil at a temperature several degrees lower than that of boiling-water on the sea-shore. We sta measure the altitude of that spot; and when we climb another mountain of height unknown, we shall kindle a fire, boil some water, and by the temperature of the boiling point we shall determine how far the spot is elevated above the level of the sea. Thus the fruits of science grow in clusters; and he who finds one rich, ripe sphere will probably find others in the neighbourhood ready to drop into his palm at a touch. Besides its serviceableness, in the simplest form as a running stream to drive a mill-wheel, and as steam, more ubiquitous and more swift, to relieve mankind of all their hardest tasks, water has been pressed into the service in modern times, in the form of the Bramah press, with even more marvellous results. If hot water produces the most rapid motion, cold water puts forth the most gigantic power. For raising the greatest weights slowly, water is the force employed-water cold and quiescent. With proper appliances and a supply of cold water, one man, by driving a pump handle, may raise a ship with her cargo sheer of the water, and poise it in the air. Thus water in man's service can become a giant for strength as well as a fairy for lightness. LOUISE, QUEEN OF PRUSSIA. FROM THE GERMAN OF SCHUPP. CHAPTER III. IN 1769, the year before Frederic William was born at Berlin, Napoleon Buonaparte first saw the light in Corsica. Who would then have thought that by a native of this insignificant island great peril was to arise to the Prussian state and to the powerful house of Hohenzollernso great as to bring both to the very brink of destruction? Frederic the Great was still in life, and no one dreamed that what he had defended against most of the powers of Europe combined, would be lost in a single battle. Yet all this came to pass on the day of the disastrous engagements of Jena and Auerstädt. On the other hand, who could have foretold that after Napoleon had, by his genius and rare tact in turning the events of the times to his own advantage, rais. himself step by step to the imperial throne of France. Prussia was to play among Continental powers the ch part in casting down the usurper, and giving the deat,blow to his arrogant and unbounded pretensions? The Almighty often accomplishes his high designa towards mankind by mysterious means. Happy they who, submitting themselves with lowly and believing minds to the frequently dark and incomprehensible leadings and decrees by which God sees fit to govern |