Rosewarne merely that it should be transferred by her to her husband, who would forthwith embark in speculation with it. Well, he was not prepared to do that off-hand.

They went into the club, which was near the corner of St. James's Street, and Mr. Roscorla ordered a quiet little dinner, the menu of which was constructed with a neatness and skill altogether thrown away on his guest. In due time Master Harry sat down at the small table, and accepted with much indifference the delicacies which his companion had prepared for him. But all the same he enjoyed his dinner-particularly a draught of ale he had with his cheese; after which the two strangers went up to a quiet corner in the smoking-room, lay down in a couple of big easy-chairs, and lit their cigars. During dinner their talk had mostly been about shooting, varied with anecdotes which Mr. Roscorla told of men about town.

Now, however, Mr. Roscorla became more communicative about his own affairs; and it seemed to Trelyon that these were rather in a bad way. And it also occurred to him that there was perhaps a little meanness in his readiness to give 5,000l. direct to Wenna Rosewarne, and in his disinclination to lend the same sum to her future husband, whose interests of course would be hers.

"Look here, Roscorla," he said. "Honour bright, do you think you can make anything out of this scheme; or is the place like one of those beastly old mines in which you throw good money after bad?"

Roscorla answered, honestly enough—but with perhaps a trifle unnecessary emphasis, when he saw that the young man was inclined to accept the hint that he believed the project to be a sound one; that his partners were putting far more money into it than he would; that the merchants who were his agents in London knew the property and approved of the scheme; and that, if he could raise the money, he would himself go out, in a few months' time, to see the thing properly started.

He did not press the matter further than that for the present; and so their talk drifted away into other channels, until it found its way back to Eglosilyan, to the Rosewarnes, and to Wenna. That is to say, Mr. Roscorla spoke of Wenna; Trelyon was generally silent on that one point.

"You must not imagine," Roscorla said, with a smile, "that I took this step without much deliberation."

"So did she, I suppose," Trelyon said, rather coldly.

"Well, yes. Doubtless. But I dare say many people will think it rather strange that I should marry an innkeeper's daughter-they will think I have been struck with a sudden fit of idiotic romance."

"Oh no, I don't think so," the lad said, with nothing visible in his face to tell whether he was guilty of a mere blunder or of intentional impertinence. "Many elderly gentlemen marry their housekeepers, and in most cases wisely as far as I have seen."

"Oh! but that is another thing," Roscorla said, with his face flushing

slightly, and inclined to be ill-tempered. "There is a great difference: I am not old enough to want a nurse yet. I have chosen Miss Rosewarne because she is possessed of certain qualities calculated to make her an agreeable companion for a man like myself. I have done it quite deliberately and with my eyes open. I am not blinded by the vanity that makes a boy insist on having a particular girl become his wife because she has a pretty face and he wants to show her to his friends."

"And yet there is not much the matter with Wenna Rosewarne's face," said Trelyon, with the least suggestion of sarcasm.

"Oh! as for that," Roscorla said, "that does not concern a man who looks at life from my point of view. Certainly, there are plainer faces than Miss Rosewarne's. She has good eyes and teeth; and besides that she has a good figure, you know."

Both these men, as they lay idling in this smoking-room, were now thinking of Wenna Rosewarne, and indolently and inadvertently forming some picture of her in their minds. Of the two, that of Mr. Roscorla was by far the more accurate. He could have described every lineament of her face and every article of her dress, as she appeared to him on bidding him good-bye the day before on the Launceston highway. The dress was a soft light-brown, touched here and there with deep and rich cherry colour. Her face was turned sideways to him, and looking up; the lips partly open with a friendly smile, and showing beautiful teeth; the earnest dark eyes filled with a kindly regard; the eyebrows high, so that they gave a timid and wondering look to the face; the forehead low and sweet, with some loose brown hair about it that the wind stirred. He knew every feature of that face and every varying look of the eyes, whether they were pleased and grateful, or sad and distant, or overbrimming with a humorous and malicious fun. He knew the shape of her hands, the graceful poise of her waist and neck, the very way she put down her foot in walking. He was thoroughly well aware of the appearance which the girl he meant to marry presented to the unbiassed eyes of the world.

Harry Trelyon's mental picture of her was far more vague and unsatisfactory. Driven into a corner, he would have admitted to you that Wenna Rosewarne was not very good-looking; but that would not have affected his fixed and private belief that he knew no woman who had so beautiful and tender a face. For somehow, when he thought of her, he seemed to see her, as he had often seen her, go by him on a summer morning on her way to church; and as the sweet small Puritan would turn to him, and say in her gentle way, "Good morning, Mr. Trelyon," he would feel vexed and ashamed that he had been found with a gun in his hand, and be inclined to heave it into the nearest ditch. Then she would go on her way, along between the green hedges, in the summer light; and the look of her face that remained in his memory was as the look of an angel, calm, and sweet, and never to be forgotten.

"Of course," said Mr. Roscorla in this smoking-room, "if I go to Jamaica, I must get married before I start."

403

The Sun a Bubble.

AN American astronomer of great eminence has recently suggested a very startling theory respecting the Sun, presenting that orb to our contemplation as, literally, a mere bubble, though a splendid one and of stupendous dimensions. If this theory were only advanced as a speculation, a crude notion as to what might be, we should not care to discuss it in these pages. But the hypothesis has been based on a very careful discussion of facts, and affords, on the whole, a readier explanation of certain observed appearances than any other which has been suggested. We propose, therefore, briefly to describe the phenomena on which, the theory is founded, and then to sketch the theory itself, and some of the most remarkable consequences which must be accepted along with it, should it be admitted.

But first, we shall present some of the ideas which very eminent astronomers have entertained respecting the condition of that glowing surface which astronomers call the Solar Photosphere. It will be seen that the bubble theory of the sun has been far surpassed in audacity by former speculations respecting the great central luminary of our system.

Sir W. Herschel, during the whole course of his observations of the sun, proceeded on the assumption, which perhaps appears a natural one, that the sun has a solid globe around which lies an atmosphere of a complex nature. We shall presently describe his strange ideas respecting the nature of the solar globe; but it will be well to quote first his views as to the atmosphere of the sun, and the analogies he recognised between the sun's atmosphere and the earth's. "The earth," he said, in a passage explaining his view as to the solar spots, "is surrounded by an atmosphere composed of various elastic fluids. The sun also has its atmosphere, and if some of the fluids which enter into its composition should be of a shining brilliancy, while others are nearly transparent, any temporary cause which may remove the lucid fluid will permit us to see the body of the sun through the transparent ones. If an observer were placed on the moon he would see the solid body of our earth only in those places where the transparent fluids of the atmosphere would permit him. In others the opaque vapours would reflect the light of the sun without permitting his view to penetrate to the surface of our globe. He would probably also find that our planet had occasionally some shining fluids in its atmosphere, as, not unlikely, some of our northern lights might attract his notice, if they happened in the unenlightened part of the earth, and were seen by him in his long dark night." He goes on to show how the various phenomena of sun spots can be explained

L

by the theory that they are due to the occasional and temporary removal of the shining atmosphere from parts of the sun. "In the year 1791," he proceeds, "I examined a large spot in the sun, and found it evidently depressed below the level of the surface; about the third part was a broad margin or plain of considerable extent, less bright than the sun, and also lower than its surface. This plain seemed to rise, with shelving sides, up to the place where it joined the level of the surface. How very ill would this agree with the old ideas of solid bodies bobbing up and down in a fiery liquid, with the smoke of volcanoes, or scum upon an ocean; and how easily is it explained upon our foregoing theory. The removal of the shining atmosphere, which permits us to see the sun, must naturally be attended with a gradual diminution on its borders. An instance of a similar kind we have daily before us, when, through an opening of a cloud, we see the sky, which generally is attended by a surrounding haziness of some short extent."

He was led by considerations such as these to conceive that the real body of the sun is neither illuminated nor heated to any remarkable degree, and may, in fact, be habitable. "The sun, viewed in this light," he said, "appears to be nothing else than a very eminent, large, and lucid planet, evidently the first, or, in strictness of speaking, the only primary one of our system, all others being truly secondary to it. Its similarity to the other globes of the solar system with regard to its solidity, its atmosphere, and its diversified surface; the rotation upon its axis, and the fall of heavy bodies, lead us on to suppose that it is most probably also inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe. Whatever fanciful poets may say in making the sun the abode of blessed spirits, or angry moralists devise in pointing it out as a fit place for the punishment of the wicked, it does not appear that they had any other foundations than mere opinion and vague surmise; but now I think my self authorised, upon astronomical principles, to propose the sun as an inhabitable world, and am persuaded that my observations, and the conclusions I have drawn from them, are fully sufficient to answer every objection that may be made against it."

Before passing from the views of the greatest observational astronomer that ever lived, we shall venture to quote yet another passage, to show on what feeble arguments he was content to rely, when this favourite theory of his was in question. He pictures to himself and his readers how the inhabitants of our moon, and of the moons circling around Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, considering the offices discharged by those planets, might be led to regard their primaries as "mere attractive centres, to direct their revolutions, and to supply them with reflected light in the absence of direct illumination." "Ought we not," he proceeds seriously to demand, "to condemn their ignorance as proceeding from want of attention and proper reflection? It is very true that the

earth and those other planets that have satellites about them, perform all the offices that have been named for the inhabitants of these little globes; but to us who live upon one of these planets, their reasonings cannot but appear very defective, when we see what a magnificent dwelling-place the earth affords to numberless intelligent beings. These considerations ought to make the inhabitants of the planets wiser than we have supposed those of their satellites to be. We surely ought not, like them, to say 'The sun,' (that immense globe, whose body would much more than fill the whole orbit of the moon), 'is merely an attractive centre to us.' From experience we can affirm that the performance of the most salutary offices to inferior planets, is not inconsistent with the dignity of superior purposes; and in consequence of such analogical reasonings, assisted by telescopic views, which plainly favour the same opinion, we need not hesitate to admit that the sun is richly stored with inhabitants."

Sir John Herschel went far beyond his father, however, in dealing with the question of the sun's habitability. He adopted a totally different view. Admitting the possible coolness of the real solar globe, and the consequent possibility of the existence of ordinary forms of life upon it, he nevertheless preferred to regard the true inhabitants of the sun, not simply as capable of bearing an intense heat and light, but as themselves emitting the chief part of the light and heat which we receive from the sun! This may appear altogether incredible, and, in fact, the terms in which Sir John Herschel expressed the opinion were not quite so definite as those which we have just used. Nevertheless, we believe our readers, after considering the passages we shall quote from Sir John Herschel's statement of his views, will perceive that there can be very little doubt as to his real opinion.

The surface of the sun, when examined with very powerful telescopes, shows a multitude of bright granulations, which, according to Nasmyth, are due to the existence of very bright objects shaped like willow-leaves. We do not here discuss the question whether these solar willow-leaves have a real existence or not. Suffice it that the evidence on the subject appeared to Sir John Herschel to be demonstrative. "The leaves or scales," he said, "are not arranged in any order (as those of a butterfly's wings are), but lie crossing in all directions like what are called spills in the game of spillikins; except at the borders of a spot, where they point, for the most part inwards, towards the middle of the spot, presenting much the sort of appearance that the small leaves of some water-plants or sea-weeds do at the edge of a deep hole of clear water. The exceedingly definite shape of these objects; their exact similarity one to another; and the way in which they lie athwart and across each other (except where they form a sort of bridge across a spot, in which case they seem to affect a common direction, that namely of the bridge itself), all these characters seem quite repugnant to the notion of their being of a vapourous, a cloudy, or a fluid nature. Nothing remains but to consider them as separate and independent sheets, flakes, or scales, having some