from the arms on the lid must have belonged to some Indian prince of
the days of Leo the Magnificent at the furthest.

The view to the Tweed from all the principal apartments is beautiful.
You look out from among bowers, over a lawn of sweet turf, upon the
clearest of all streams, fringed with the wildest of birch woods, and
backed with the green hills of Ettricke Forest. The rest you must
imagine. Altogether, the place destined to receive so many pilgrimages
contains within itself beauties not unworthy of its associations. Few
poets ever inhabited such a place; none, ere now, ever created one.
It is the realization of dreams: some Frenchman called it, I hear,
"a romance in stone and lime."

* * * * *



SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY

_Aerial Voyages of Spiders_.


The number of the aëronautic spiders occasionally suspended in the
atmosphere, says Mr. Murray, I believe to be almost incredible, could
we ascertain their amount. I was walking with a friend on the 9th, and
noticed that there were four of these insects on his hat, at the moment
there were three on my own; and from the rapidity with which they
covered its surface with their threads, I cannot doubt that they are
chiefly concerned in the production of that tissue which intercepts the
dew, and which, illuminated by the morning sun, "glitters with gold,