5. The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed as though it had been molded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference.

6. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions that Dame Nature, with all her sex's ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone, just between the shoulders.

7. His body was oblong, and particularly capacious at the bottom, which was wisely ordered by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to the idle labor of walking. His legs were short, but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain, so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer barrel on skids.

8. His face that infallible index of his mind-presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a Spitzenburg apple.

9. His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours; and he slept the remaining twelve of the four and twenty. Such was the renowned Walter van Twiller-a true philosopher, for his mind was either elevated above or tranquilly settled below the cares and perplexities of this world.

10. He had lived in it for years without feeling the least curiosity to know whether the sun revolved round it or it round the sun; and he had watched for at least half a century the smoke curling from his pipe to the ceiling without once troubling his head with any of those numerous theories by which a philosopher would have perplexed his brain in accounting for its rising above the surrounding atmosphere.

WASHINGTON IRVING.

JOHN RUSKIN.

LXXIII. THE CLOUDS.

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900) was born in London, and educated at Oxford. He was a man of instinctive artistic tastes, and has done more than any other one man to foster modern art. Ruskin may be called a realist in art, and his system of art development is founded upon the notions of discovering and presenting the beauty that is, not the ideal beauty that may only be dreamed of. Ruskin was an ardent student of social problems, and a broad Christian socialism infused itself into his teachings. His influence upon his age was uplifting and sympathetic. His best-known writings are: Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, and Crown of Wild Olives.

1. Ir is a strange thing how little, in general, people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

2. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of

man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered if, once in three days or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with, perhaps, a film of morning and evening mist for dew.

3. And, instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain that it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly.

4. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence; he ceases to feel them if he be always with them. But the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not "too bright nor good for human nature's daily food"; it is fitted, in all its functions, for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart; for soothing it, and purifying it from its dross and dust.

5. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful; never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential.

6. And yet we never attend to it; we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to

brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew, which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration.

7. If, in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that gilded the horizon at noon yesterday? who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits, until they melted and moldered away in a dust of blue rain? who saw the dance of the dead clouds, when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?

8. All has passed unregretted or unseen; or, if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross or what is extraordinary. And yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning.

9. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty; the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally; which

are never wanting and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once-it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given.

JOHN RUSKIN.

LXXIV. NIAGARA FALLS.

1. HOW MANY cataracts does the habitual tourist visit at which the waters fail him! But at Niagara the waters never fail. There it thunders over its ledge in a volume that never ceases, and is never diminished; as it has done from times previous to the life of man, and as it will do till tens of thousands of years shall see the rocky bed of the river worn away, back to the upper lake.

2. This stream divides Canada from the States; the western or farthermost bank belonging to the British Crown, and the eastern or nearer bank being in the State of New York.

3. The falls are, as I have said, made by a sudden breach in the level of the river. All cataracts are, I presume, made by such breaches; but generally the waters do not fall precipitously as they do at Niagara; and never elsewhere, as far as the world yet knows, has a breach so sudden been made in a river carrying in its channel such, or any approach to such, a body of water.

4. Up above the falls, for more than a mile, the waters leap and burst over the rapids, as though conscious of the destiny. that awaits them. Here the river is very broad and comparatively shallow; but from shore to shore it frets itself into little. torrents, and begins to assume the majesty of its power.

5. Looking at it even here, in the expanse which forms itself