We were allowed to look upon them no longer. Suddenly jerked upon our backs, our wrists were once more staked to the ground, and we were left in our former recumbent attitudes. Painful as were our reflections, we were not allowed to indulge in them alone. The mulatto continued to stand over us, taunting us with spiteful words, and, worse than all, making gross allusions to my sister and Viola. Oh, it was horrible to hear! Molten lead poured into our ears could scarcely have tortured us more. firmly around us. More was added, until our shoulders were covered up, and only our heads appeared above ground. The position was ludicrous enough, and we might have laughed at it, but that we knew we were in our graves. The fiendish spectators regarded us with yells of laughter. What next? Was this to be the end of their proceedings? Were we to be thus left to perish miserably and by inches? Hunger and thirst would in time terminate our existence, but oh, how many It was almost a relief when he desisted from speech, hours was our anguish to last! Whole days of and we saw him commence making preparations for misery we must endure before the spark of life should our execution. We knew that the hour was nigh-forsake us-whole days of horror and Ha! they for he himself said so, as he issued the orders to his have not yet done with us! fellows. Some horrible mode of death had been promised; but what it was, we were yet in ignorance. Not long did we remain so. Several men were seen approaching the spot, with spades and pickaxes in their hands. They were negroes-old field-handsand knew how to use such implements. They stopped near us, and commenced digging up the ground. O God! were we to be buried alive? This was the conjecture that first suggested itself. If true, it was terrible enough; but it was not true. The monster had designed for us a still more horrible death! No-a death like that we had been fancying appeared too easy to the monster who directed them. The resources of his hatred were far from being exhausted--he had still other and far keener pangs in store for us. ⚫ Carajo! it is good!' cried he, as he stood admiring the work done. Better than tie to tree-good fix, eh? No fear 'scape-carrai, no. Bring fire!" Bring fire! It was to be fire then-the extreme instrument of torture. We heard the word—that word of fearful sound. We were to die by fire! Our terror had reached its highest. dry wood catching the flame; it rose no higher as the blaze grew red and redder, and we felt its angry glow upon our skulls, soon to be calcined like the sticks themselves. It rose no higher when we saw fagots brought Silently, and with the solemn air of grave-diggers, forward, and built in a ring around our heads; it the men worked on. The mulatto stood over direct-rose no higher when we saw the torch applied and the ing them. He indulged in high glee, occasionally calling to us in mockery, and boasting how skilfully he should perform the office of executioner. The women and savage warriors clustered round, laughing at his sallies, or contributing their quota of grotesque wit, at which they uttered yells of demoniac laughter. We might easily have fancied ourselves in the infernal regions, in the midst of a crowd of gibbering fiends, who every moment bent over, grinning down upon us, as if they drew delight from our anguish. We noticed that few of the men were Seminoles. Indians there were, but these were of dark complexion-nearly black. They were of the tribe of Yamassees a race enslaved by the Seminoles, and long ingrafted into their nation. But most of those we saw were black negroes, zamboes and mulattoes - descendants of Spanish maroons, or 'runaways' from the American plantations. There were many of the latter, for I could hear English spoken among them. No doubt, there were some of my own slaves mixing with the motley crew, though none of these came near, and I could only note the faces of those who stood over me. In about half an hour the diggers had finished their work. Our stakes were now drawn, and we were dragged forward to the spot where they had been engaged. As soon as I was raised up, I bent my eyes upon the camp, but my sister was no longer there. Viola too was gone. They had been taken, either inside the tents, or back among the bushes. I was glad they were not there. They would be spared the pang of a horrid spectacle-though it was not likely that from such motive the monster had removed them. No-we could suffer no more. Our agony had reached the acme of endurance, and we longed for death to relieve us. If another pang had been possible, we might have suffered it on hearing those cries from the opposite side of the camp. Even in that dread hour, we could recognise the voices of my sister and Viola. The unmerciful monster had brought them back to witness the execution. We saw them not; but their wild plaints proved that they were spectators of the scene. Hotter and hotter grew the fire, and nearer licked the flames-my hair crisped and singed at the fiery contact. Objects swam dizzily before my eyes-the trees tottered and reeled-the earth went round with a whirling motion. My skull ached as if it would soon split open-my brain was drying up-my senses were forsaking me! PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF AUGUSTE COMTE. As through the narrow portal, the poet approaches the Elysian fields, so in seeking to give a slight sketch of one of the greatest intellects of his generation, the writer is forced to refer to circumstances of his own insignificant existence. In 1836, when the world was still young to me, or I Two dark holes yawned before us, deeply dug into to it-algebraically if not otherwise identical positions the earth. They were not graves; or if so, it was-fretting under the fancied insufficiency of private intended our bodies should be placed vertically intuition in England, with hard prayers I wrung from them. But if their shape was peculiar, so too was the my parents permission to continue the studies prepapurpose for which they were made. It was soon explained. We were conducted to the edge of the cavities, seized by the shoulders, and plunged in, each into the one that was nearest. They proved just deep enough to bring our throats on a level with the surface, as we stood erect. The loose earth was now shovelled in, and kneaded ratory to going to the university, in Paris. Here, in each branch of the education sketched out for me with no sparing hand, I was consigned to the care of the first professors of the day. Long afterwards, I learned with what difficulty the lessons of one of these had been obtained, but youth though I then was, I still felt, indistinctly indeed, their value. This tutor, whose last mathematical pupil I was, was Auguste Comte. coat. Daily as the clock struck eight on the horloge of the Luxembourg, while the ringing of the hammer on the bell was yet audible, the door of my room opened, and then entered a man, short, rather stout, almost what one might call sleek, freshly shaven, without vestige of whisker or moustache. He was invariably dressed in a suit of the most spotless black, as if going to a dinner-party; his white neckcloth was fresh from the laundress's hands, and his hat shining like a racer's He advanced to the arm-chair prepared for him in the centre of the writing-table, laid his hat on the left-hand corner, his snuff-box was deposited on the same side, beside the quire of paper placed in readiness for his use, and dipping the pen twice into the ink-bottle, then bringing it to within an inch of his nose, to make sure that it was properly filled, he broke silence: We have said that the chord AB, &c.' For three-quarters of an hour he continued his demonstration, making short notes as he went on, to guide the listener in repeating the problem alone; then taking up another cahier which lay beside him, he went over the written repetition of the former lesson. He explained, corrected, or commented, till the clock struck nine; then, with the little finger of the right hand, brushing from his coat and waistcoat the shower of superfluous snuff which had fallen on them, he pocketed his snuff-box, and resuming his hat, he as silently as when he came in, made his exit by the door, which I rushed to open for him. This man of few words was the Aristotle or Bacon of the nineteenth century. Thus for a year I daily sat a listener, not always attentive, and to the last but dimly conscious of the value of lessons which I can never forget in their higher meaning, though the angles and curves which they explained have long since become to me more meaningless than hieroglyphics. One would think that such a teacher, gliding in and out like a piece of clock-work, without an interchange of any of the gentle courtesies of life, would raise only a repulsive feeling in his pupil. It was in vain I tried to break through the coldness of our relations, to establish that little preliminary gossip in which I have found some teachers too ready to employ all the time of their lesson; he seemed to say that he had nerved himself to a disagreeable duty, and that nothing should turn him from it. Only twice did I even succeed in gaining proof that he had something mortal in his composition. I had been six weeks under his tuition, and still persisted, with more, perhaps, of malice than of ignorance, in using the most abominably ungrammatical French in my written repetitions of his lectures. One morning he lost patience at some solecism more excruciating than usual; and laying down his pen, he turned to me, and said: Why do you persevere in writing such barbarisms?' 'You know I am a foreigner,' said I; 'how should I do better?' 'You can at least do better than this: write as you speak;' and he resumed his pen, correcting every fault of language. From that day, there were few grammatical blunders in my papers. Once again, and this time less wilfully, I encountered the same mild anger. I was at the time studying very hard, generally thirteen hours a day of book-work-a folly bitterly expiated and repented since-and I was seldom in bed till after midnight. One black wintry morning, after harder work than usual, I nodded over the lecture. With no straining of the ears, could I drink in the sense; with no forcing of the eyelids, keep them open. I dared not rise and take a few turns in the room, for this would have been a violation of our habits. So I sat till the humming of the voice, and the scraping of the pen, acted like a lullaby, and I was already three parts asleep, when suddenly a change of tone aroused me, and the words, 'But you sleep,' recalled me to myself, only to see my tutor stalking out of the room, while I vainly tried to catch and appease him. The next day, he resumed the lesson where he had left off on the one previous to my nap, but not a word of reproach was uttered, or of apology allowed, by the insulted sage. From that day, I began to love him. Cold or abstracted as he seemed, the intellectual giant henceforth won almost imperceptibly on the youth. I could not feel, much less measure his greatness, but I acquired an interest in the dry science he taught me ; and had I continued under his charge, I might have become a mathematician. I had been taught to fear, not to revere my masters; if I had a liking for any, it had been in proportion to his laxness; and I now found myself half unconsciously, and quite unaccountably, gliding into a sort of affection for the most unapproachable, the most uncongenial of them all. I was then the most unreasonable of boy-mortals. I cannot, therefore, suppose that this feeling was due to the sway of pure reason over my mind; I can only think that it arose from an instinctive perception of the smothered kindliness which entered so largely into his composition. I returned to England to 'keep halls,' and devote myself to a new range of studies-stigmatised, I believe, by my masters and pastors as pure idleness, because not set down in their books; and it was two years before I was again in Paris. By that time I had become acquainted with what was published of the Philosophie Positive. From its pages I had learned that my old tutor was a great man, though hardly yet a celebrated one. I had learned to contrast his earnestness with the laissez faire of others; and a visit to him was one of the first pleasures which I promised myself in the capital most fertile in pleasure to youthful visitors. Mindful of the showers of snuff which had too often attacked my sternutatory muscles, I carried him a Cumnock snuff-box, with delighted to find it graciously accepted. He put it one of our Ayrshire pebbles in the lid, and was at once into a drawer of his writing-table, and then told me that he had given up the use of snuff. He said that he had withdrawn entirely from the world, to devote himself without distraction to the politics of his philosophy-that he no longer even read the newspapers, and had weaned himself from every superfluity. then the acknowledged chief of a school, and renowned, The change in his appearance intimidated me, and which had come over his expression since we had last met. He now reminded me of one of those medieval pictures which represent St Francis wedded to Poverty. There was a mildness in those attenuated features that might be called ideal rather than human; through the half-closed eyes there shone the very soul of him who had doubted whether he had anything more than intellect. I did not recognise you,' he said, opening a drawer; but I think of you almost daily. See, I still have your box, and I keep my seals in it, so that I am often reminded of you.' He spoke unreservedly of the honourable poverty to which the last revolution, in depriving him of his modest competence, had reduced him, and he told me how the generous sacrifices of some of his disciples had relieved him of the cares of material existence. He indulged me with a long conversation, every word of which filled me with fresh wonder. He was no longer the rigid thinker, regular and passionless as mechanism; he seemed to have renewed his youth, to have added something to his former self, but how or what, I could not at the time imagine. In terms unintelligible to me, he referred to relations which had given impulse to his affections; he spoke with enthusiasm of the Italian poets, and of Shakspeare and Milton, whose works he had learned to read in the original; and-O surprise!-taking from his chimney-piece a well-thumbed copy of the Imitation, he said: 'I read some pages of this book every morning.' I already had had cause to suspect that under that frigid mask which he wore in earlier years, an impulsive nature and warm affections were concealed; I had heard at the time that the little keepsake I had brought had pleased him so much, that in speaking of it a few days afterwards his eyes glistened; I understood, therefore, that far within him was a loving soul; and I now learned, from a book which he gave me, the story of how he had found and lost the counterpart, the other half, which he had so long sought. The history of the platonic love to which he owed the late development of his affections, is a strange one, and the story of its heroine one of the saddest in the history of crime. Madame Clotilde de Vaux was the wife of a man whose misconduct had brought upon him a condemnation to the galleys for life. If not the original of the Maitre d'Ecole in the Mysteries of Paris, his career had been too similar to the one so hideously drawn by the novelist. This lady united to youth and an unspotted reputation, a poetic temperament and literary talents of a high order. She was pining in cheerless solitude, neither wife nor widow, a state void of hope, and incapable of forgetfulness, when she met Auguste Comte, the man of austere morals and unengaging manners, but towards whom she felt the secret attraction I have spoken of. The acquaintance quickly ripened into a friendship, which before long became an absorbing though platonic passion. It was she who had opened to him the treasures of poetry, she was the Beatrix who awoke in him the feelings of affection, and under whose guidance he trod the ideal world of Shakspeare and Dante. So greatest and most glorious things on ground days, nothing can be more striking than the terms in which he writes of all these in the preface to his Po tivism; his self-reproaches for his want of tenderness he had never failed in duty-towards his mother his unbounded veneration for his St Clotilde, and hi respect for the enlightened ignorance of his unlettered : servant, afford a psychological study as curious as i is touching. In the beginning of last September, I was again in Paris. As soon as I had fixed myself in lodgings in the same studious quarter in which I had first known him, I sought out the abode of my old master. It was an autumn evening when I stumbled into the gloomy porte cochère of his house. The porter was sitting on the sill of his lodge, knitting a worsted stocking in the twilight. Is it here that Monsieur Comte lives?' was my question. Yes, sir,' answered the man without rising or lifting his eyes from his work. Is he at home?' 'He was buried this afternoon.' I never received a greater or more unexpected shock. His temperament and his healthy habits seemed to promise a long career; and the last time I had talked with him, he had been speaking of the employments he had marked for his old age, when he should be no longer capable of working at hi philosophy, for he had rigorously determined the period when he should retire from what he considered his apostolate. I shall neither defend nor criticise his system. It is a subject too abstruse for these pages, and to which I could not do justice. That it contains many truths, that it is a wonderful monument of a wonderful mind, few or none will deny, but fewer still will be found to accept his philosophy as a whole. He looks only on the positive, that is, the material side of nature, he has no tolerance either for spiritual weaknesses or spiritual aspirations. He is a system-maker, and his love for his system, he is unjust both to his kind and to himself. A true child of the Revolution, the qualities which he possesses and which he wants are equally striking; but I do not fear to say that what ever pure morality and true conceptions abound in his works are the genuine productions of Auguste Comte, while the childishness and pedantry which also distinguish them may be laid at the door of the conventional Frenchman. SNOW-DRIFT. WINTER'S White banner waves on every bough, And hopes and joys, sweet blossoms of the heart, I would not sing of these; my cheerful verse Methinks, there springs no root of bitterness,' It was a friendship late found and early lost, for the lady was cut off in the prime of her years. But her influence did not cease with life; her image haunted him like a celestial vision for the remainder of his days. In her he imagined that he had seen humanity carried to that highest perfection which he believed to be the end of our destiny, and he united her in his prayers with his mother and a female servant who Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster waited on him to the last. To one who had known Auguste Comte in former J. J. Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH. Also sold by WILLIAM ROBERTSON, 23 Upper Sackville Street, DrBLIN, and all Booksellers. OF POPULA LAR LITE Science and Arts. RATURE CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS. No. 234. SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 1858. THE GENTLE READER. HAVING written a good deal for the general public without receiving any acknowledgment from that particular member of it, the Gentle Reader, I, for one, am not going to flatter him any longer. It is my private belief that he never purchased a book in his life. I doubt whether he ever even went so far as to subscribe to a library. I believe him to be a sort of person who borrows volumes from the book-shelves of his friends, and writes in pencil his idiotic remarks upon the margins of them. It is exceedingly improbable, if he does buy books, that he ever bought any of mine, because, in plain truth, the Gentle Reader is unavoidably a fool. Otherwise, would authors, who are conscious of having been insufferably stupid and prosy, or of being about to become so in their next chapter, so unanimously appeal to his good-nature and foolish forbearance? They take such liberties with him, and place him in such positions as would be resented by any person of proper sense and feeling. When a love-scene is about to be described at any intolerable length, the Gentle Reader is commonly lugged in as a third party, and made a confidant of, whether he will or no, by the two silly young folks. It is, first of all, fawningly insinuated that he, the Gentle Reader, knows all about it, being, as he is, so fascinating an individual, and having been the object of adoration of so many hearts; and then the whole tedious matter is laid before him in all its turtle-dove monotony, while the melancholy details are dwelt upon with a sentimental distinctness, to which impropriety itself would be almost preferable. In descriptions of scenery especially, this patron of the novelists has to go through a very great deal for their sweet sakes; he has to accompany them, if he will be so good, to inaccessible heights, where the foot of man has never before trodden, and where the shriek of the goshawk, or other bird unknown except to ornithologists, alone is heard; or he has to wander among hanging woodlands, hand in hand with the writer, until he is deposited upon a dampish bank, by the side of a stream, whose course is presently compared, at prodigious length, to the life of man. When the novelist, indeed, is inclined to moralise, the Gentle Reader is apostrophised as though he were Lord Bacon, or Dr Paley, and made accessory to the most uninteresting and illogical sentiments of the author's, respecting being and human responsibility. If religion be the subject, the Gentle Reader is made a party to the strangest'views,' and that sometimes by no means in the pleasantest manner; his opinions being taken to be identical with those of the writer, not as PRICE 1d. a matter of course, but as one about which, on the contrary, there existed no little suspicion he is regarded with an eye not so much of respect as of a certain affectionate watchfulness, and his supposed scruples are combated with a sort of tender authority, as though the author were his father-in-law, and an archbishop. In battle-scenes, again, and stirring incidents of that kind, this slave of literature is commonly carried to a slight acclivity, commanding not only a good general view of what is going forward, but—to judge by what he is made to see a very particular one also; and I have even known the Gentle Reader, upon one occasion, to have been shamefully inveigled into a tree, under promise of becoming spectator of a deadly combat, only to be compelled to listen to some heroic verses of the seducer, who, taking advantage of the poor fellow's stationary position, inflicted a good three dozen. Nobody but a very weak-minded person, indeed, would suffer himself to be treated in this manner more than once, whereas there is no more cessation than limit to the persecution of the Gentle Reader. That he is put upon thus remorselessly, and attacked with this impunity, that every scribbler hails him as his friend, and leads him through all the stupidest scenes by the button-hole, is, no doubt, because of his gentleness. The Gentle Reader is unable to say no, or bo to a goose-quill. No author dares to treat the Reader-pure and simple in any such way. On the contrary, his connection with that gentleman is wholly of a business character, and no obligation is supposed to be upon either side. The Courteous Reader, even, is not so great a ninny as the subject of this paper, and is addressed, with hat in hand, indeed, but yet as a reasonably ill-tempered individual with whom absurd liberties are not to be taken. Our Fair Readers-who are always in the plural, and, I think, supposed to be the sharers of an eternal friendship which has lasted thirteen weeks at a boarding-school, and who lean over the same pages with arms round each other's necks, and in mutual tears-are trifled with somewhat, and not set at a very high intellectual estimate; but still they have not that catholicism of character which admits of their being so continuously ill-treated as the Gentle Reader. The Dear Reader is only apostrophised by female writers, who endeavour by that unjustifiable emollient to blind the judgment and enlist the affections on their side. The General Reader is at the head of a totally different class. He is, in the author's eyes, the ringleader of the unappreciating and illiterate mob; of that faction-and it is sometimes considerable-which is sure to decline to read, and far more to buy, his book. When a chapter is about to be devoted to a subject which the writer does not quite understand, or is about to be filled with got-up and unnecessary technical expressions, the General Reader is warned off in the opening sentences, as by a trespass-board. He is recommended, in a foot-note, to buy another "THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS.' work of the author's, written in a more popular style, THE eager craving after knowledge evinced by all and not to read any more of that which he has in his classes of the community, has, in these latter days hand, because he won't understand it. The Intelligent of the world's history, summoned into existence an Reader, and the like, are, at the same time, flatteringly immense number of books treating of every science beckoned on, it is true; but everybody knows pretty and art, from astronomy to angling, in what is generwell what is coming, and skips the chapter. This ally termed a popular manner. A popular work on notice to the General Reader is the first open declara- science, however, is not the one thing new under the sun. A certain Antonio Torquemada wrote and tion of that contempt which the author secretly enter-published a book of this description in Spain, as far tains for many even of his own clients. A sneering back as the middle of the sixteenth century; and it reference to the Casual Reader speedily follows. The achieved a very widely extended popularity for itself. Casual Reader will not peruse, and will not understand It was translated into nearly, if not quite, all of the if he does peruse; will not be entertained, and if he European languages; bibliographers reckon its ediis entertained where no entertainment is meant, tions by hundreds. Nor need we be surprised at the ought to be ashamed of himself; will fail to mark, or, general favour in which it was held. To an attractive having marked, will not be able to carry it in his title, The Garden of Flowers, it added about six hundred of the most marvellous stories, selected from mind to the place where it will be useful to him; will the various authors then considered the standards of skim too hastily-in fact, the Casual Reader is peri- scientific knowledge. These metaphorical flowers of phrastically informed that he had better shut up the the garden of science are pleasingly and appropriately book, go home, and get to bed. Having thus lashed introduced to the reader as the conversation of three himself into fury, and the worst passions of his pro- friends-Antonio, Bernardo, and Ludovico-in a real fessional nature being fully aroused, the author garden decorated with natural flowers. In most throws aside the last rag of courtesy, and falls tooth-instances, each speaker, as he adds his flower or story to the collection, assigns his authority, saying-as and-nail and steel-pen upon the Vapid and Irreflective Pliny hath it,' 'as it is written in Solinus,' as it may Reader himself. He has been waiting for him for be seen in Olaus Magnus,' and so forth; the fathers some considerable time. The bonds of sympathy of the Church, too, are frequently quoted in a similar between the writer and the public have been long fashion, and the whole forms a very remarkable reflex gradually loosening, and are now utterly dissolved. of the state of general and natural science at the Scarcely anybody is ignorant that, under the name of period in which it was compiled. the Vapid and Irreflective Reader, the author is, in reality, anathematising everybody. Upon that unfortunate subject he avenges himself, with a hideous malice, for the servile adulation which he has lavished, in other places, upon the Gentle Reader, and others of that kidney. The slave, as generally happens, is now become the tyrant. Growing duller and duller in the matter of the work he is composing-and what is more, being well aware of it himself-he waxes fierce and more intolerant against that increasing majority of the reading public who are unlikely to read him. The only person, indeed, who can be compared to the Vapid and Irreflective Reader as a type of all that is base and foolish, is that equally denunciated individual, the Sinner, who is the target of the divines. In the latter case, by some fortunate arrangement of our ideas, we rarely associate the object of so much invective with ourselves; but, in the former, we cannot fail to recognise some of our own familiar lineaments. Still, there is in this an honest outspeaking and an acknowledged misunderstanding between the author and his unappreciators, which is to me infinitely preferable to that hypocritical deference he pays to the Gentle Reader. Any allusion to him—and, indeed, to any Reader-only helps to destroy what little reality the writer may have had the good-fortune to invest his scenes with, and to break that web of fancy which, Apollo knows, it is hard enough for him to weave. Moreover, as I have said—and this consideration has much weight with me-there is little or nothing to be got out of the Gentle Reader. The very mention of him, indeed, is a literary toadyism; from the practice of which, as of all other toadyisms, no true benefit can be ever possibly derived. Therefore, though my brethren of the pen may tremble at my audacity, and the unaccustomed public knit its indignant brows, I hereby declare that I do not care three halfpence-the absurdly ridiculous price of this superlative periodical-whether this paper of mine shall please the Gentle Reader or not. the world's advance in knowledge can only be Like the progress of an explorer of a new country, correctly estimated by looking back to the landmarks left on the ground already passed over. Than the Garden of Flowers, we could not have a better landmark for this purpose. It was long the companion of the grave and learned, and was dedicated to a ripe scholar, Sarmento de Soto Mayor, bishop of Astorgas, rejoicing in as many other names, designations, and titles as none other than a Spaniard could possibly possess. Let us then, hand-in-hand, friendly reader, enter this antique garden, and discover what was the general knowledge among men of learning about three hundred years ago. The three friends, having met in the garden, sit down, under the shade of a tuft of trees, on the bank of a river; and soothed with the pleasing sound of the clear stream and murmuring of the green leaves, contemplate the flowers-'so diverse in form, so dainty in colour, as if nature had used her extreme industry to shape, paint, and enamel them.' This naturally leads the conversation to the works of nature in general, which forms the first day's discourse or chapter, entitled, 'Many things worthy of admiration, which nature hath wrought, and daily worketh in men, contrary to her common and ordinary course of operation.' Here we read of whole nations having heads like dogs, and feet like oxen; of a tribe of one-footed people, and of several varieties of tailed men-some having tails like those of peacocks; others whose vertebral terminations resembled those of horses; while a third had thick bushy tails like foxes. Indeed, there could be no doubt about the latter, for Bernardo speaks of a race of fox-tailed men that then existed in Spain. Their ancestors had offended a certain St Torobius, who thus punished them in secula seculorum. It may not be generally known that a similar story is still told of |