6

spring. Instantly all was darkness. Then he turned on the gas. The difference was quite perceptible. The light from the gas appeared in comparison tinted with yellow. In a moment, however, the eye had become accustomed to it, and the yellowish tint disappeared. Then the Professor turned on the electric light, giving the writer the opportunity of seeing both side by side. The electric light seemed much softer; a continuous view of it for three minutes did not pain the eye; whereas looking at the gas for the same length of time, caused some little pain and confusion of sight. One of the noticeable features of the light, when fully turned on, was that all the colours could be distinguished as readily as by sunlight. When do you expect to have the invention completed, Mr. Edison,' asked the reporter. The substance of it is all right now,' he answered, putting the apparatus away and turning on the gas. 'But there are the usual little details that must be attended to before it goes to the people. For instance, we have got to devise some arrangement for registering, a sort of meter, and again, there are several different forms that we are experimenting on now, in order to select the best.' 'Are the lights to be all of the same degree of brilliancy?' asked the reporter. All the same!' 'Have you come across any serious difficulties in it as yet?' 'Well no,' replied the inventor, 'and that's what worries me, for in the telephone I found about a thousand; * and so in the quadruplex. I worked on both over two years before I overcame them."

Other methods, as the Sawyer-Man system, and the Brush system, need not at present detain us, as little is certainly known respecting them. In the former it is said that the light is obtained from an incandescent carbon pencil, within a space containing nitrogen and no oxygen, so that there is no combustion. In the latter the carbon points are placed as in the ordinary electric lamp, but are so suspended in the clasp of a regulator, that they burn 14 inches of carbon without adjustment, the carbons lasting eight hours, and producing a flood of intense white light, estimated as equivalent to 3,000 candles.

We have no space to consider the cost of electric lighting, even if the question were one which could be suitably dealt with in these pages.

* The comments made by one of Mr. Edison's assistants on this point are interesting and instructive. "Mr. Batchelor, the Professor's assistant, who here joined in the conversation," proceeds the report of the Herald, "said, ‘Many a time Mr. Edison sat down almost on the point of giving up the telephone as a lost job; but at the last moment, he would see light.' 'Of all things that we have discovered, this is about the simplest,' continued Mr. Edison, and the public will say so when it is explained. We have got it pretty well advanced now, but there are some few improvements I have in my mind. You see it has got to be so fixed that it cannot get out of order. Suppose when one light only is employed it got out of order once a year, where two were used it would get out of order twice a year, and where a thousand were used you can see there would be much trouble in looking after them. Therefore, when the light leaves the laboratory, I want it to be in such a shape that it cannot get out of order at all, except of course by some accident.""

Opinions are very much divided as to the relative cost of lighting by gas and by electricity; but the balance of opinion seems to be in favour of the belief that in America and France certainly, and probably in this country, where gas is cheap, electric lighting will on the whole be as cheap as lighting by gas. It should be noticed, in making a comparison between this country and others in which coal is dearer, that the cheapness of coal here, though favourable in the main to gas illumination, is also favourable, though in less degree (relatively) to electric lighting. Machines for generating electricity can be worked more cheaply here than in America. Nay, it has even been found advantageous in some cases to use a gas engine to generate electricity. Thus Mr. Van der Weyde used an Otto gas engine driven at the cost of 6d. an hour for gas, to produce the light which he exhibited publicly on the night of November 9. So that the cheapness of gas may make the electric light cheaper. Then it is to be remembered that important though the question of cost is, it is far from being all-important. The advantages of electric lighting for many purposes, as in public libraries, in cases where many persons work together, under conditions rendering the vitiation of the air by gas lighting exceedingly mischievous, and in cases where the recognition of delicate differences of tint or texture is essential, must far more than compensate for some slight difference in cost. The possibility (shown by actual experience to be a real possibility) of employing natural sources of power to drive machines for generating electricity, is another interesting element of the subject, but could not be properly dealt with save in greater space than is here and now available.

173

Miss Morier's Visions.

I.

I was walking home one evening along an autumnal road, and hurrying, for I was a little belated, when I thought I heard a step following mine. I stopped, the step also stopped. I looked back, there was no one to be seen; but when I set off again I once more heard the monotonous footfall. Sometimes it seemed to miss a beat; sometimes it seemed to strike upon dead leaves, and then to hurry on again. This unseen march or progress was no echo of my own, for it kept an independent measure. The road was dull; twilight was closing in, the weather was dark and fitful; overhead the flying clouds were drifting across a lowering sky. All round about me the fogs and evening damps were rising. I thought of the warm fireside at Rock Villa I had left behind me; to be walking alone by this gloomy road was in itself depressing to spirits not very equable at the best of times, and this monotonous accompaniment jarred upon my nerves. On one side of the road was a high hedge ; on the other, a rusty iron railing with a ploughed field beyond it. A little farther away stood a lodge by two closed gates. The whole place had been long since deserted and left to ruin-one streak in the sky seemed to give light enough to show the forlornness which a more friendly darkness might have hidden. It is difficult to describe the peculiar impression of desolation and abandonment this place produced upon people passing along the high road. The place was called "The Folly " by the neighbours, and the story ran that long years ago some Scotchman had meant to build a palace there for his bride; but the bride proved false; the man was ruined. The house for which such elaborate plans had been designed was never built, although the gates and the lodge stood waiting for it year after year.

The lodge had been originally built upon some fancy Italian model, but the terrace was falling in, the pillars were cracked and weatherstained, the closed gates were rust-eaten; the long railings, which were meant to enclose gardens and pleasure-grounds, were dropping unheeded. In the centre of the field, a great heap showed the place where the foundations of the house had been begun, and on the mound stood a signpost, round which the mists were gathering.

Meanwhile I hurried along, trying to reason away my superstitious fears. The steps were real steps, I told myself; perhaps there was some one behind the hedge to whose footsteps I was listening. I thought of the old Ingoldsby story of the little donkey and the frightened ghostseer. I scolded myself, but in vain; a curious feeling of helplessness had

overcome me. I could not even summon up courage to cross the road and look. I felt convinced that I should see nothing to account for the step which still haunted me, and I did not want to be thrown into terrified intangible speculations, which have always had only too great a reality for me. I was still in this confusion of mind, when I heard a sound of voices cheerfully breaking the silence and dispelling its suggestions, a roll of wheels, the cheerful patter of a pony's feet upon the road. . . . I turned in relief, and recognised the lamps of my aunt's little pony carriage coming up from the station. As it caught me up, I saw my aunt herself and a guest snugly tucked up beside her, with a portmanteau on the opposite seat.

The carriage stopped, to exclaim, to scold, to order me in. After a short delay the portmanteau was hauled up on the box to make room; Mr. Geraldine, the arriving guest, gave up his seat to me. I did not like to tell them how grateful I was for this opportune lift, or for the good company in which I found myself. The pony was not yet going at its full speed when we passed the lodge.

"Why, that place must be inhabited at last! there is a light in the window," said my Aunt Mary, leaning forward as we passed the lodge.

As she spoke, a figure came out to the closed gate, and stood looking through the bars at the carriage. It was that of a short, broad-set man, with a wide awake slouched over his eyes, and a rough pea-jacket huddled across his shoulders. He seemed to be scanning the carriage; but when the lamps flashed in his face he drew back from the light. I just caught sight of a dull, sullen countenance; and as the carriage drove on, and I looked back, I saw that the solitary man was still staring after us, standing alone in the field where the streak of light was dying in the horizon, and the vapour rising from the ground.

"That is not a cheerful spot to choose for a residence," said Mr. Geraldine, deliberately. "What can induce anybody to live there?" "Something, probably, which induces a great many people to do very strange things," said Aunt Mary, smiling: "poverty, Mr. Geraldine." "That is an experience fortunately unknown to me," said Mr. Geraldine, tucking the rug round his legs.

Rock Lodge is at some distance from a railway; the garden is not pierced by flying shrieks and throbs; it flowers silently amid outlying fields, with tall elm-trees to mark their boundaries. The road thither leads across flat country; it skirts a forest in one place, and passes more than one brick-baked village, with houses labelled, for the convenience of passers-by: Villa, Post Office, Schools, Surgery, and so on. We saw Dr. Evans's head peeping over his wire blind as we passed through Rockberry, and then five minutes more brought us to the gates of Rock Villa, where my aunt has lived for many years.

My cousins came out to greet the new comer. "Aunt Mary's bachelor," they used to call him in private; in public, he was "Uncle Charles." The two little boys, my aunt's grandsons, appeared from their

nursery. There was a great deal of friendly exclaiming. The luggage was handed up and down. Little Dick seized Mr. Geraldine's travellingbag, and nearly upset all its silver bottles on to the carpet. My aunt, Mrs. Rock, began introducing her old friend.

"You see, we have Nora and her boys, and Lucy and her husband," said she, cheerfully ushering him in, "and my niece Mary you know, and Miss Morier I think you also know; she is in the drawing-room." And then Mr. Geraldine was hospitably escorted into a big room, with lights, and fire, and tea, and arm-chairs, and conversation, and flowers, and a lady in a shawl by the fire, and all the usual concomitants of five o'clock.

We had all been staying for some days at Rock Villa, and enjoying the last roses of summer from its warm chimney-corners. It is a comfortable, unpretending house standing in a pretty garden, which somehow seems to make part of the living-rooms, for there are many windows, and the parterres almost mingle with the chintzes; the drawing-room opens into a conservatory; there is also a bow window with a cushioned seat, and a tall French glass door leading into the garden. The conservatory divides the drawing-room from the young ladies' room or study, which again opens into the hall. The dining-room is on the opposite side and the windows face the entrance gates. Inside the house, as I have said, the fires burnt bright in the pretty sitting-rooms; outside, the glories of October were kindling in the garden before winter came to put them all out. The plants were still green and spreading luxuriantly, stretching their long necks to the executioner; a golden mint of fairy leaves lay thickly scattered on the grass; from every branch the foliage still hung, painting trees with russet and with amber. On the stable wall a spray of Gloire de Dijon roses started shell-like, pink against the sky. The guelder-rose tree by the hall door was crimson, the chestnuts were blazing gold.

The days passed very quietly; all the people in the house were very intimately connected with one another; married sisters are proverbially good company. The outside world was almost forgotten for a time in family meetings and greetings and personalities; Nora's husband, the colonel, was in India; Lucy's husband, the clergyman, came up and down from London twice a week; Clarissa, the only unmarried daughter of the family, made music for us, for Mr. Geraldine especially, who delighted in good music; Miss Morier was also a very welcome visitor in my aunt's house. For many years she had been too ill and too poor to leave her own home; but her health had improved of late, and a small inheritance had enabled her to mix with her friends again. She was a peculiar-looking woman, with dilating eyes under marked brows; she may have been pretty once, but illness had destroyed every trace of good looks. She was very delicate still, and on her way to the South for the winter; she