to wit—­axes and bills and so forth of every calibre.  There is only one window pierced in a very thick wall, so that the place is rather sombre; the light tracery work of the gallery overhead harmonizes with the books well.  It is a very comfortable-looking room, and very unlike any other I ever was in.  I should not forget some Highland claymores, clustered round a target over the Canterbury people, nor a writing-box of carved wood, lined with crimson velvet, and furnished with silver plate of right venerable aspect, which looked as if it might have been the implement of old Chaucer himself, but which from the arms on the lid must have belonged to some Indian prince of the days of Leo the Magnificent at the furthest.

The view to the Tweed from all the principal apartments is beautiful.  You look out from among bowers, over a lawn of sweet turf, upon the clearest of all streams, fringed with the wildest of birch woods, and backed with the green hills of Ettricke Forest.  The rest you must imagine.  Altogether, the place destined to receive so many pilgrimages contains within itself beauties not unworthy of its associations.  Few poets ever inhabited such a place; none, ere now, ever created one.  It is the realization of dreams:  some Frenchman called it, I hear, “a romance in stone and lime.”

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SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY

Aerial Voyages of Spiders.

The number of the aeronautic spiders occasionally suspended in the atmosphere, says Mr. Murray, I believe to be almost incredible, could we ascertain their amount.  I was walking with a friend on the 9th, and noticed that there were four of these insects on his hat, at the moment there were three on my own; and from the rapidity with which they covered its surface with their threads, I cannot doubt that they are chiefly concerned in the production of that tissue which intercepts the dew, and which, illuminated by the morning sun, “glitters with gold, and with rubies and sapphires.”  Indeed, I have noticed that, when the frequent descent of the aeronautic spider was determined, a newly rolled turnip field was, in a few hours, overspread by a carpet of their threads.  It may be remarked that our little aeronaut is very greedy of moisture, though abstemious in other respects.  Its food is perhaps peculiar, and only found in the superior regions of the sky.  Like the rest of its tribe, it is doubtless carnivorous, and may subserve some highly important purpose in the economy of Providence; such, for instance, as the destruction of that truly formidable, though almost microscopically minute insect, the Furia infernalis, whose wounds are stated to be mortal.  Its existence has been indeed questioned, but by no means disapproved; that, and some others, injurious to man, or to the inferior creation, may be its destined prey, and thus our little aeronaut, unheeded by the common eye, may subserve an important good.