This fishery is farmed out by the government. It yields a very large item of revenue. Sometimes in a hundred oysters one will not be found that has a pearl; so that, as it is such a lottery, they are made up into heaps, or lots, and sold by auction to the highest bidder. Superstition is blended with everything in India. The divers think that the Brahmans, or idols, can save them from being devoured by ground sharks; and the purchasers believe that by making offerings and prayers to the temples, they will get repaid in pearls, purchased with their fortunate lots. Such a place as the oyster auction market you never saw. To describe it is impossible. There are as deep speculators—as ardent a thirst for profit -as mad a risk of certainty on chance-as haggard-looking faces-as great a degree of bustle as much noise and seeming confusion --and as much distraction, disappointment, and anguish in this trade, as you will behold on the Stock Exchange in London, if ever you stare into the private room, as I have done with amazement. At the pearl auction you would hear fifty voices at once cry this!-a hundred roar that! You would see sharp, lean-faced, hollow-eyed, pale, shrivelled-up Hindoos, like roguish-looking stock-brokers, running about, seemingly wild with anxiety, and not only at war with the world, but at daggers-drawing with themselves. Such is the torture arising from the spirit of gaming, when it once takes possession of the human heart! The flames kindle there and spread over the whole man, till he appears one fearful volume of perturbation; crackling, and fretting, and wasting him, till at length he becomes a vapour of smoke, and deposits the grain of dust into which all his gold has changed under that great alkahest-that more certain destroyer than fire-Time.

We easily believe what we wish; and readily think ourselves favoured by the gods, because we are inclined to credit the flattery that we deserve special marks of protection and grace. Chunda Gopal, therefore, eagerly drank the tale of his Luxana's vision-ate a mango with uncommon satisfaction-expressed his conviction that somewhat of extraordinary good was about to happen to them; he felt so full of life, of hope, of joy, that he knew there was meaning in his wife's dream. How could the

man had been there. It was clear that they had been shaken out of Indranee's head, and gathered by Luxana in her sleep! Indra was smiling on his family. He would not now have to sell his beautiful daughters for dancing-girls, or his sons for slaves. No; he would part with his last cocoa-nut grove-go to the oyster auction, and purchase that lot in which Luxana should see the one with a black spot surrounded by an orange rim.

Well, we need not describe the journey of Chunda Gopal and Luxana, with all their children, to Condatchy Bay. I shall leave you to conceive how they journeyed along, with their little ones riding on bullocks, or carried by father and mother. It is sufficient for me to state that they arrived at the pearl auction mart in perfect safety; and that Luxana of course saw there, in a heap, the very oyster that Indra, or rather Hunnymaun, had shown her, which Chunda Gopal bought, after bidding up to his last rupee against a Brahman, who seemed to know that it was worth a Jew's eye.

When the black-spotted, orange-rimmed oyster was opened, to be sure, out dropped one of the largest, purest, roundest pearls that had ever been seen. It was a gem of light. You could see through it as Luxana saw the transparency of Indra's air-fabricated form. A shout of astonishment was raised. Wonder stood gaping on every face. Thousands of thousands were instantly offered for the pearl; but the agent or pearl merchant of the King of Candy bought it for two lacs of rupees, or about £25,000 of our money. Chunda Gopal and Luxana travelled back to their home, mounted on a pair of elephants in shining howdahs. Their sons all became great men, and their daughters were happy. At length they died, full of years; and I tell you this latter particular, because the philosophers say that no one is blessed till dead. Thus ends the story of the Oyster.

SUN OF THE SLEEPLESS.

Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!
Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far.
That showest the darkness thou canst not dispel,
How like art thou to joy remembered well!
So gleams the past, the light of other days,
Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays:
A night beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,
Distinct, but distant; clear, but, oh, how cold!

BYRON.

TWO-FOLD.

[Mrs. Adeline D. Train Whitney, born in Boston, U.S., 1824, has won reputation as a novelist and poet. Her principal works are: Footsteps on the Seas, a Poem; Faith Gartney's Girlhood: The Gayworthys; Hitherto, a Story of Yesterday; and Panzies, a volume of poems from which we quote]

A double life is this of ours;

A two-fold form wherein we dwell; And heaven itself is not so strange, Nor half so far, as teachers tell.

With weary feet we daily tread

The circle of a self-same round; Yet the strong soul may not be held A prisoner in the petty bound.

The body walketh as in sleep,

A shadow among things that seem; While held in leash yet far away,

The spirit moveth in a dream.

A living dream of good or ill,

In caves of gloom or fields of light; Where purpose doth itself fulfil,

And longing love is instant sight.

Where time, nor space, nor blood, nor bond
May love and life divide in twain;
But they whom truth hath inly joined
Meet inly on their common plane.

We need not die to go to God;

See how the daily prayer is given! "Tis not across a gulf we cry, "Our Father, who dost dwell in heaven!"

And, "Let thy will on earth be done,

As in thy heaven;" by this, thy child! What is it but all prayers in one,

That soul and sense be reconciled?

That inner sight and outer scene

No more in thwarting conflict strive; But doing blossom from the dream,

And the whole nature rise, alive?

There's beauty waiting to be born,

And harmony that makes no sound; And bear we ever, unaware,

A glory that hath not been crowned.

And so we yearn, and so we sigh,

And reach for more than we can see; And, witless of our folded wings, Walk Paradise unconsciously;

And dimly feel the day divine

With vision half redeemed from night, Till death shall fuse the double life,

And God himself shall give us light!

THE BAGPIPER.

BY W. BARRY.

One day in the leafy month of June an angler wandered by a brook-side in a deep glen. Tall rocks and trees rose at either side, and tinkling silver threads of water ran down to the bigger stream in many places. The spot was lonely but not savage. It was full noon, and so warm that after a while the fisherman left off work and found a moss patch to rest on. And as he rested he heard that native concert which is ever going on in due season and weather amongst birds, and bees, and grasshoppers, and other creatures that rejoice in the summer for the sun in their own language. But of a sudden, in the midst of the soft croon of pigeons, the occasional flute-call of that wonderful musician with the golden bill, the deep and always as it were distant bassoon of the flower-robber, there came the queerest, quaintest tangle of sounds, scarcely more rhythmical or measured than the performances of doves, honey-gatherers, gnats, or river. It mingled with them quite naturally. And when a wind swept for a moment down the glen, and the trees whispered to each other the singular tune, or as it seemed the odds and ends of a hundred tunes, combined also with that effect as if the breeze-sigh and leaf-flutter were part of the symphony. And the fisherman gets up to go in search of the accomplished elf who has come out of the hollow hills to practise the airs he must play for his gay companions under the stars by the haunted rath. And he follows the brook path, and the music becoming louder he knows he is approaching the source of it. And this he observed, that as the tune (and it now began to have a distinct or half-distinct outline) was less dispersed by distance, it was not altogether so magical in character, though yet strangely and sweetly becoming the scene over which it was rambling. And finally the angler is drawn by the ear to the very feet of his Orpheus. Think you he saw the ghost of an ancient harper in white, seated like a gray friar on a gray stone, or the fairy fiddler above mentioned, or beheld a figure blowing into a sheaf of reeds with the power of the great god Pan, or any other beautiful dæmon or sprite born of a poet's fancy, or of an artist's dream, or say of any ink-bottle (talk of your ocean being kind to us for casting up one Venus, how many as beautiful divinities have emerged from our oceans of ink?)-think you he saw-but this reads like a passage of the Critic-what he did see was an old man playing the Irish

pipes, with a dog for an audience, unless a goat is to be counted who has stopped munching bush-tops for a moment on the other side of the brook. An old man, obviously blind, dressed poorly but not raggedly. His hat, to be sure, has seen better days; but considered as a ruin, it has a picturesque appearance. And the angler quietly intended to listen to the music without announcing himself, but the dog would not permit such a liberty to be taken with his master's property, and so he barked a sentence of barks as who would say, Master, here is a scurvy fellow who has his ear cocked for the purpose of stealing our tunes; whereupon the pipes left off with a kind of snarl that had nothing at all pastoral or idyllic about it. The piper was on his way to a wedding and a christening in the neighbouring village. He was rehearsing for his performances. It was not difficult to set him going again. Well, he was not Pan, Orpheus, Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, or Virorum. He was a common piper, and yet the music he made amongst the rocks and trees sounded still far more sympathetically than I imagine the music of the best trained orchestra would. I, for I was the eavesdropping angler, dislodged the goat and sat thus some distance from the player. The tunes are all supposed to be cheerful. "The Foxhunter's Jig," listen to that for merriment! The tallyho, tallyho! quite plain on the tenor notes, the hound-music and its echoes, the call of the horn, the death of the modereen ruadh, and through it always the dance itself, to which these mimetic references are only asides, garnish. I encore the "The Foxhunter's Jig," and my ancient bard pumps away at it again with such renewed spirit that if he doesn't move the rocks he makes them speak, for they repeat many of the wild cadences, the dog gives an awakened bark of approval, and from behind a doomed shrub peers the big astonished eyes of the goat with his beard and horns, the very picture of a faun! And so again we join the chase, and do double shuffle in the jig besides, and then an end of the Foxhunter business, and we start with "Nora Creina." Nora Creina is not as successful a hit.

The musician employs his chanter with bad effect. "Oh my Nora Creina, dear," and similar affectionate passages, are not well translated into orchestral form when the phrase is expressed in hoarse asthmatic tones. You perceive I am candid as to the bagpipes, and no enthusiast about them when the measure of their function and capacity has been exceeded. And now we shall take our leave of the type of piper we have been describing, and sight one from another point of view.

There be pipers and pipers. There are fellows who could give the vagrant armed with the hurdy-gurdy or the leader of a street German band lessons on discord. These offensive pipers

Scotch, or Irish, or Italian-disgrace their craft, which is so ancient that, according to a Celtic legend, one of the fraternity had the honour of playing before Moses. The tradition is embodied to this day in a current form of Irish imprecation. A medal has been found of the Nero period with a representation of a bagpipe in the obverse, from whence it has been reasonably enough conjectured, that when the amiable Roman monarch desired to express his delight at the burning of his city and the roasting of his subjects, he did not employ the violin for that purpose, but poured out the joy of his soul through the cornamusa. The instrument, in some shape or other, turns up in every quarter of the globe. It was known in Greece as the askaulos, in Germany it is to be recognized as the sacpfeiff, in Norway jockpipe, in Italy cornamusa pira and zampogua, in France as the musette, in Wales the piban, in Lapland the walpipe, in Finland the pilai, in Persia the nei aubana, and in Arab-Egypt the zoughara. Sir Robert Stewart of Dublin, in a most interesting course of lectures on the " Bagpipes of Scotland and Ireland," gives these details and much more. He claimed superiority for the latter on account of superior sweetness of tone and its more extensive range. The Irish pipe, he said, possessed a perfect chromatic scale of twenty-five notes (C to C) upon the chanter. It also had three drone basses, violincello C, tenor C, and C below the treble clef. The Scotch pipe had but two drones, A and A, no tenor, and an odd scale of nine notes only consisting of G flat (the G clef note) and above, the eight notes of the scale of A major rather imperfect. Sir Robert was so far unfair to the Scotch instrument that he did not remind his hearers that, while it remains almost in its primitive form, the Irish bagpipe, which he compared with it, is almost a modern instrument. In its original form it had nothing like the range of capabilities which now enables Mr. Bohun to perform on it not only the "Humours of Ballynahinch," "Shaun Dheerig Lanagh," "Paddy Carroll," the "Foxhunter's Jig," and the "Blackbird," but such serious productions as Corentino's song from Dinorah, and Bach's Pastorale in F major. Look for instance at the piper whose picture Sir David Wilkie painted. He certainly is not provided with an instrument which would enable him to attack such a piece as the Pastorale. And yet, I warrant, in his time he made hearts now at