was half restored, are described in a passage not to be recommended to sensitive readers.  M. About, uses the same general idea in the fantastic plot of his “L’Homme a l’Oreille Cassee,” and the risk of breakage was insisted on by M. About as well as by the inventive Australian reporter.  Mr. Clarke Russell has also frozen a Pirate.  Thus the idea of suspended animation is “in the air,” is floating among the visions of men of genius.  It is, perhaps, for the great continent beneath the Southern Cross to realize the dreams of savages, of seers, of novelists, of poets, of Yogis, of Plotinus, of M. About, and of Swedenborg.  Swedenborg, too, was a suspended animationist, if we may use the term.  What else than suspension of outer life was his “internal breathing,” by which his body existed while his soul was in heaven, hell, or the ends of the earth?  When the Australian discovery is universally believed in (and acted on), then, and perhaps not till then, will be the time for the great unappreciated.  They will go quietly to sleep, to waken a hundred years hence, and learn how posterity likes their pictures and poems.  They may not always be satisfied with the results, but no artist will disbelieve in the favourable verdict of posterity till the supposed Australian method is applied to men as well as to sheep and kangaroos.

BREAKING UP.

The schools have by this time all “broken up,” if that is still the term which expresses the beginning of their vacation.  “Breaking up” is no longer the festival that it was in the good old coaching days—­nothing is what it was in the good old coaching days.  Boys can no longer pass a whole happy day driving through the country and firing peas at the wayfaring man.  They have to travel by railway, and other voyagers may well pray that their flight be not on breaking-up day.  The untrammelled spirits of boyhood are very much what they have always been.  Boys fill the carriages to overflowing.  They sing, they shout, they devour extraordinary quantities of refreshment, they buy whole libraries of railway novels, and, generally speaking, behave as if the earth and the fulness of it were their own.  This is trying to the mature traveller, who has plenty of luggage on his mind, and who wishes to sleep or to read the newspaper.  Boys have an extraordinary knack of losing their own luggage, and of appearing at home, like the companions of Ulysses, “bearing with them only empty hands.”  This is usually their first exploit in the holidays.  Their arrival causes great excitement among their little sisters, and in the breasts of their fathers wakens a presentiment of woe.  When a little boy comes home his first idea is to indulge in harmless swagger.  When Tom Tulliver went to school, he took some percussion caps with him that the other lads might suppose him to be familiar with the use of guns.  The schoolboy has other devices for keeping up the manly character in the family circle.