who once seemed funny, was now tedious, or she teased like a persistent pin-pricking. While against cousin Emma's unvarying attitude of thankfulness Valley felt actual irritation, which was a diversion; she resented it in view of her pledge never to forgive God the disappointment. But through all the dissonance there was one tone of sweetness. It was the thought, carefully tended, that had William Castle known the truth, he might have cared for her, had he known that her part in the matter of the letter was not only innocent, but noble, for Valley was conscious of having acted nobly by May.

In a few weeks after this it came out that May had been meddling in another way with Valley's literary matters. She had sent off a poem of Mr. Castle's as Valley's, and it had been accepted. The door being thus

open, Valley's own poems had been sent in and had been declined.

May had kept all

SHE WAS HIDING AWAY IN THE GROVE."

this engineering from her sister, hoping by a pleasant surprise to start Valley out of a listlessness which she referred to literary disappointment. Valley was startled,-so pained that she could hardly forbear reproaches, in spite of May's kind motives.

"Well, Valley, I was just tired hearing you find fault with editors. You must be satisfied now, that the trouble is with the poems."

"How did you get that poem of Mr. Castle's?" Valley was entering upon an investigation which was destined to lead up to a revelation.

"Why, I borrowed it of him, of course. you think I stole it ?" May said.

"Why, yes; I told him all about my plan at the first, when I borrrowed his name to sail your poem, you know."

"Did he know about your using his name?" How eager poor Valley was!

"Why, Valley! of course he knew. You don't think I would have dared use it without his permission."

Then he knew her innocent; he knew that she had sought to shield May; she was cleared in his judgment!

And yet Valley's heart drooped. Alas, for the flickering hope she had been fanning! He knew her innocent; he knew her noble in purpose, and yet, and yet, he did not love her!

"You needn't have taken all this trouble, May," Valley said, a new smart at her heart's core. "I knew without demonstration that God hasn't anything good for me. He picks out some people and pets them and coddles them. May, you would have hated dear papa, if he had cherished you in his heart and left me unloved. God tempers the wind not to the shorn lamb, but to the other, that has its own and the shorn lamb's fleece."

"Why, Valley," May cried, in a tremor, "you are talking profanity or blasphemy or sacrilege or something. If you can't be reasonable, I'll call cousin Emma in to you; she can give all the Bible arguments. You are like a child crying for the moon."

"But who can help crying?" Valley said, with a little lip quivering. "That's the sad thing about it, that he wants the moon, that is forever beyond his reach, instead of a cracker."

she was quite well; how had he been? He made some health reports, etc., when May said he should have his cracker, and went out to get an early

tea.

"I have something to show you," he said, when alone with Valley.

He took a magazine from his breast pocket, turned to the table of contents, and pointed to her name, and then he moved his finger across the page to the left, and there was the title of her last poem.

Valley was greatly excited. "I do not believe it," she said, the color growing in her face; "let me see it. This very magazine refused this once. How did you get possession of it?"

"You handed it to me with the editor's letter; don't you remember? I read it, and saw at once his objection to it. So I gave it a touch or two and sent it back to him. And here is Mr. Longfellow's name, and here is mine in the same table with yours, and now are you happy enough to die ?"

Valley saw that his poem was "The Face at the Office Window." She was quivering with desire to read that, but could scarcely trust herself to do this at once. She turned to hers and read. She finished with a smile of bitterness.

"You wanted to give me one more lesson in humility. My poem was the slatternly ash-girl, your wand has made it the triumphant Cinderella."

In vain Mr. Castle protested that he had done nothing of account. Valley declined to accept the money for the poem.

"Take a part of it, then. You will acknowledge to some interest in this production," he said.

Had it been any man but this one, she would have made business terms with him and accepted a part of the pay; she needed it, Heaven knows, but she could not accept the semblance of a favor from him. Love will have everything or nothing. "But what shall I do with the money ?" he asked. "Give it to some beggar?"

"How disdainful you are! Is it Kohinoor or nothing? You have your gifts, Valley. I have known you delight a church full of people with your sweet singing. You read 'Dora' that evening with exquisite appreciation, and you can write -better, perhaps, than any girl in this great new State."

While he was saying these things Valley had turned to his poem, "The Face at the Office Window." Its reading had wrung her heart dry of the last of that great hope-flood which had swept in on that certain day. The face at the window was not hers, or May's. It was that of an aged father, anxious for word from his corporal son in the army.

"You need not despair of happiness," Mr. Castle went on, "if writing good magazine poetry will make you happy.'

In her greater heart-needs Valley felt that Milton's power and Milton's fame would be stone for bread. She said not this, but something like

He said they brightened and gladdened the more they were divided-turning mills and creating industries. And it was by no means proved that she was not a poet; the 'prentice-hand seldom achieves great results. Tennyson's first book was not a shining success. "Mrs. Browning, at your age, wrote poorer things than this poem, even before it had been touched by my magic wand. As for me, I should be ashamed to tell you how I scratch out and interline and rewrite. I am not conscious of any genius, except a capacity for work. I work hard, and I make my bread. But I did not make any money or any reputation on the first nine poems I turned off. Mr. Bryant's first collection of poems did not fill his youthful pockets. He declares that he did not receive five dollars on the whole first edition."

tone of hopeless surrender.

The changed sentiment, the note of pain struck with sudden meaning to his heart. With eager impulse he bent toward her; he looked with keen search in her eyes; in one electric moment there was a revelation; he saw her heart and his own illumined.

"Valley," he cried, "we love each other!"

It might have proved an awkward thing to continue this chronicle beyond this point, but that May now appeared and announced that Mr. Castle's cracker was ready.

That night Valley told May all about it. "And he has loved me all along, ever since I tried to take the censure from you, he said."

"And he just found it out to-day! Well, he must be a gifted idiot or poet or something."

It is not so many years since I was a child that I have forgotten my boyish interest in a magnetized jack-knife. My early experiments were, for the most part, confined to the attraction by it of needles, tacks, and small pieces of iron and steel, and I very well remember that my first attempted explanation of the attraction of the knife-blade was that it was sticky, and so lifted the needle or tack. But stickiness, I knew, could have no influence except by contact, and I observed that my knife exerted its attractive power through a considerable space, readily drawing to itself needles

or tacks or bits of iron while held some distance from them, and that intervening substances were no obstacle to its attraction.

I was not long in experimenting with pins, bits of wood, and various things, over which I found that my knife, even by contact, had no attraction. Thus speedily discovering that my explanation was untenable, I abandoned it.

I believe my experiments at the time did not go much farther, though my knife magnet was, for a long time, an interesting plaything, and somewhat of a wonder to me. I inferred the

existence of a power that I failed at all to comprehend, and was told that it was called magnetism. I presume that most boys of a dozen years who have ever given the subject thought have rushed to the same conclusion that I did, have made the same experiments, have had their interest and wonder excited as mine were, have inferred a strange influence beyond their understanding, have learned its name and stopped there for the time as I did. Yet the profoundest scientist, after a life of study and experiment, comes hardly nearer to answering the question, What is magnetism? than the child who plays with his knife and needles and wonderingly questions the subtle influence which he perceives but can in no wise comprehend. It is not my purpose in this article to do much more than indicate a few simple experiments which almost any one, with a few cents' expense, can easily make, yet some of which, I venture to say, many of my readers have never seen performed, and with which, I am sure, not all of them are acquainted even theoretically. They are so simple, so easily made, so beautiful and interesting, so entirely satisfactory in their results, and yet so wonderful and so suggestive, that I hope to induce many of my readers to verify my descriptions by actual experiment, and even to extend their experiments beyond what it is possible for me here to indicate. By this means they will familiarize themselves, as they can in no other way, with results which must stimulate interest and inquiry.

Let me present the experiments substantially as I have made them:

Take first a common horse-shoe magnet, with which all my readers are familiar. The marked end is its north, and the opposite end its south magnetic pole. Doubtless what will most naturally occur to you will be to apply the magnet to needles, tacks, pieces of iron and steel in a manner similar to the experiments I made when a boy with the magnetized knife-blade. Make the experiment, and you will find exactly the same attractive influence. Apply each pole of the magnet; they attract alike. Make the experiment more thorough by suspending by a loose untwisted fibre of silk one of the needles as nearly balanced as possible, and bring the magnet near. You will observe the same effect,-each pole of the magnet exerting an indiscriminate attractive power over both ends of the suspended needle.

Now take the needle and pass one pole of the magnet over it a few times from end to end, using, if you please, the north pole of the magnet, and drawing it over the needle from the point toward the eye. Again suspend it, and bring the magnet near it. The north pole of the magnet attracts the eye of the needle and repels the point, and its south pole attracts the point and repels the eye.

Remove to a distance of several feet the magnet and any iron or steel. See to it that your needle is carefully balanced, so that it may swing freely in any direction. Observe its oscillations as they become less and less, till it finally settles nearly north and south, with its point to the north. Reverse it, and it swings back to the same position.

Vary your experiment with another needle, passing the same pole of the magnet in an opposite direction,-from the eye toward the point. Suspend it and bring the magnet near, and you find the result of your first experiment reversed; each pole of the magnet repelling where it before attracted, and attracting where it before repelled. Remove all attractions as in the last instance, and the needle settles into position as before, but with its eye to the north.

Again vary your experimen', magnetizing another needle with the south pole of the magnet, drawing it over the needle as in the first experiment, and you obtain attraction where there was first repulsion, and repulsion where there was first attraction. Remove all local attraction, and it settles with its eye to the north.

You have then in your suspended needles so many compasses, the ends pointing north having north polarity, those pointing south having south polarity. Can we reverse the polarity of the needles? Take one of them and pass the end of the magnet which you first used in magnetizing it over it in an opposite direction, and you will find its polarity reversed; or, take the opposite pole of the magnet and pass it over it in the same direction, and its polarity will be reversed.

Suppose now you approach one of the magnetized needles to the others, you will notice repulsion between like poles and attraction between unlike poles,-north attracting south and repelling north, and south attracting north and repelling south. Your experiments continued will convince you that the relation is reciprocal.

We are now enabled to deduce from these facts: First, that each pole of the magnet produces in the end of the magnetized needle which it leaves last an opposite polarity to itself; and secondly, that like magnetic poles repel, and unlike poles attract each other. You may naturally infer, too, some magnetic influence beyond what we have employed that causes the magnetic needle to point in a northerly and southerly direction. Let me suggest an experiment or two which will induce further thought in this direction.

Take a strip of steel several inches in length, a knitting-needle will answer the purpose admirably, suspend it as you suspended the needles before, and balance it as perfectly as possible. (In my own experiments I have found a bit of wax convenient for attaching the needle to the silk fibre). Now magne ize it and readjust it exactly as before, and you will notice a very decided dip or inclination of its north pole to the earth. Your trial is indeed confined to a single locality, but experiments, a thousand times repeated, show a greater dip or inclination of the needle as we proceed north, and as we go south, less and less dip; not far from the earth's equator, none whatever; beyond, an inclination of the needle's south pole to the earth, increasing gradually as we continue farther south.

The inference is natural that there exists a terrestrial influence similar to that of the magnet, having like polarity somewhere in the region of the north and south poles of the earth.

A very simple experiment affords fullest indication of the earth's magnetism, and of the facility with which it is imparted.

If you take a rod of soft iron-a fire-poker will answer the purpose very well-and apply either end to a magnetized needle, you will notice that its ends are attracted indiscriminately by each end of the rod. If you place it at right angles to the length of the needle, pointing toward its centre, the needle will not rotate. (A pocket-compass, on account of its. being confined by a stationary pivot, will be more convenient in your experiments than the magnetized needle. If you have no compass, the suspended needle will do very well. For convenience I will assume that you use as your test needle the one which you first magnetized, to the point of which you gave north polarity).

Now place your rod in an early vertical position,

inclining the lower end to the north. Bring your test needle near its lower end. The rod has acquired a powerful attraction, for the eye (south pole) of the needle turns suddenly to it. Approach the rod from every side, and always the needle responds quickly as in the first instance. Raise it slowly along the side of the rod, and you notice by the shifting of the needle that the magnetism of the rod apparently decreases as you recede from the end. At the middle it ceases to attract. Raise the needle farther and notice its gradual reversal. Before you reach the top of the rod, it has swung round with its point toward the rod, to which it is vigorously attracted. Repeat the experiment, raising and lowering the needle from end to end of the rod, bringing it toward the rod from all directions till you shall have thoroughly satisfied yourself. Has the position simply of your rod made it a magnet with its north pole towards the earth and its south pole opposite? It would indeed seem so.

Reverse the rod, end for end, and bring the needle again near it. You will observe that in reversing the rod you have changed its magnetism. The end toward the earth attracts the eye of the needle; the opposite end attracts its point. Repeated experiments repeat the same results.

Resting the lower end of the rod on the floor, with the test needle in close proximity, incline the upper end in different directions, north, south, east, west, and at various angles, all the way between a horizontal and vertical position, and you will be greatly interested in observing its varying attractive power, according to the direction and extent of its inclination.

When you withdraw the rod, if you will place it in a horizontal position, your test needle will show you that it has parted with its polarity, for its influence is precisely that shown in your first experiment with it. Now apply either end of the rod to some fine iron or steel filings. It has no attraction. Replace it in its inclined position in contact with the filings and you will notice some of the filings adhering to it. Change its position and they drop off, thus affording another illustration of the temporary magnetism which position induces in the rod.

Your inference regarding the earth's magnetism and its polar location is so far strengthened. You observe, too, how easily it is imparted.

Practical investigation has taken up our experi