in a disc of metal, in a spiral form, which enters the ground on the principle of the screw, and when it has entered a clay or sandy bottom, resists alike upward or downward pressure.

We appeared to be about thirty or forty feet above the then level of the tide; the sea was intensely green. There is something singularly beautiful in that peculiar colour-rightly called 'sea-green:' as we looked down, it was like a mass of emerald quartz, so bright, clear, and crystalline. There is always a fascination in gazing upon the mysterious sea, and its restless motions and throbbing tide-pulses. It would be difficult to say what pantheistic dreams we might not have indulged in, in our human sympathy for the ocean, had we not been startled out of all sentimentality by the thundering approach of a train, which made the whole place tremble, and ourselves likewise, so near it seemed to be upon our heels. We had no intention of disputing the order of precedence, so drew aside while the heavily laden trucks, and lastly, the engine, passed us by.

We saw other trains advancing in rapid succession, and we followed to the scene of action. We shortly arrived at the extreme point which the staging has yet attained, nearly a mile out to sea. The lines of railway are occupied with the passage of trains which arrive every few minutes; each engine propels five trucks, which are severally loaded with about ten tons of stone. The space is left open between the rails, so that when the truck has come to the right point, the man in charge has only to touch a lever at the bottom, and the whole load is immediately let fall into the water. But the effect is not to be described in these few words of bald description, and simple statement of the mechanical arrangements. It was a sight not soon to be forgotten. Imagine yourself standing on what was apparently, though not really, a frail and slender framework, which shook violently beneath the heavy roll of the engines and their trains, as they came up to discharge each its cargo of fifty tons of stone, which falls with the roar and dash of an avalanche into the seething, surging flood beneath. The breaking crash of stones is soon lost in the sullen reverberating plunge, and in an instant the rocks are swallowed by the whelming waters, which fling back in triumph a cloud of feathered spray; then the boiling tide subsides into rippling quietude, till again lashed into fury by another cataract of stones. And so goes on this battle between art and nature; the capacity of the sea at first appears inexhaustible, but at length man is rewarded by seeing the ledge of rock growing beneath his patient assiduity.

The average breadth of this foundation is 260 feet; but the breadth of the breakwater at the top-ten feet above highwater-mark-will be 23 feet 6 inches. About 400 workmen are employed on the breakwater and on the works generally, besides 800 to 1000 convicts who are entirely occupied at the quarries.

If the same rate of progress continues to be observed, the breakwater will probably be completed in three or four years from the present time.

As we retraced our steps, we stopped frequently to admire the wonderful appliances which mechanical science has brought to bear upon all engineering difficulties. Thanks to the great politeness of Mr Coode, the head engineer, we were allowed to see the model of the breakwater, and also to examine a very interesting piece of apparatus, of his own construction, a self-registering tide-gauge, which indicates every wave that breaks upon the shore.

In the premises of the office is a remarkably fine specimen of a fossil tree, some thirty feet in length, the sight of which made us determine to lose no time in examining some of those interesting remains of a former world in situ; accordingly, we procured a carriage to take us to the top of the island.

We returned nearly to the spot where we first landed, then passing behind Portland Castle, we found ourselves in the town of Chesil. Never was there such a quaint old place; it looked the more venerable perhaps from the fact of its being built entirely of stone-in some cases, even the roofing was of stone: this tended to give it a gray and uniform appearance; added to which, there was not a tree or shrub to be seen. The town runs some way up the hill, on either side of a street as steep almost as a roof. At one angle of the road, you look down the chimneys of houses whose door-steps you had been level with a few minutes before. Climbing laboriously up the hill, the view opens before you; and now, for the first time, you see the whole long line of the Chesil beach; the western bay lies at your feet, stretching far towards Devonshire. The prospect at this point is highly picturesque-the precipitous road, with its continentallooking old town, and to the left, broken and rugged cliffs, ending abruptly in the sea.

On gaining the summit, the first thing that struck us was the stone-carts, which are rude and primitive, and the wheels of solid wood, enormously thick. We easily found a guide to the stone-quarries, which, it should be observed, are not those used by government, which are not shewn except by an order from the secretary of state.

We found the quarries in full work. It seems that the Portland stone was first brought into repute in the time of James I. It was employed in the erection of the banqueting-house at Whitehall; St Paul's Cathedral, Blackfriars and Westminster Bridges, and the New Royal Exchange, are also built of this stone. The annual quantity now shipped is between 30,000 to 40,000 tons.'

Dr Buckland, Sir Henry de la Beche, and others, have made observations upon the geology of Portland. It appears that the 'dirt-bed,' as the workmen call it, is the depository of the fossilised trees. This stratum rests upon the ('good') Portland stone, which, again, has beneath it, according to Buckland, 'compact, chalky limestone with chert,' and 'sandy limestone with chert,' also rubbly beds with chert.' "The latter description,' says Mr Coode, 'is the most exact;' and he adds: "The character of this chert or flinty matter, which contains vast quantities of shells, and chiefly of the Trigonia, is entirely different from the chalk-flints.'

The dirt-bed, we were told, is about thirty feet in thickness, and in it are found the fossil trees of the cycadeoider in great numbers. "They are partly sunk in black earth,' says Mr Webster, and partly covered by superjacent calcareo-silicious slate; from this slate, the silex to which the trees are now converted must have been derived.' Some observations of the late Andrew Crosse are pertinent to this matter; he says, in a paper on Change: "The island of Portland is full of fossil trees-trees whose body is converted into silica and chalcedony. This is the work of ages, and the probable cause electric transfer, by which the silica quits the soil, and is drawn up through the pores of wood.' Sir Roderick Murchison, in his Silurian System, thus describes the cycade as a beautiful class of plants between the palms and conifers, having a tall straight trunk, terminating in a magnificent crown of foliage.' And Mrs Somerville, in her Physical Geography, remarking on the great changes which the earth has undergone, observes of the oolitic series: Plants allied to the zamias and cycades of our tropical regions, many ferns and pines of the genus araucaria, characterised its vegetation; and the upright stems of a fossil tree at Portland shew that it had been covered with trees.' Covered with trees and plants, now exclusively the productions of tropical climes-we repeat these words with awe: what thoughts rush upon the mind as we contemplate this single fact! Now, on this sterile rock, a few stunted trees and shrubs

hardly find means of existence. In that mysterious past, waving and luxuriant foliage decked the scene with rare forms of beauty. In Sir H. de la Beche's Geological Researches, he traces the probable history of the portion of England of which this is a part. We have not time here to linger with the geologists in their descriptions of how, in the lapse of time, after its primal glory, the dirt-bed became an estuary of the sea, or brackish lake, where the mud, possibly, of some vast river deposited its remains of terrestrial and freshwater creatures, and subsequent deeper depression of the area gave opportunity for the deposition of marine fossils. So go on these marvellous alternations of level; step by step, we may, and do learn to decipher more and more of the wonders of the pre-Adamite world. Such reflections read as a good moral to the plaudits of this self-glorifying age. When we build leviathan ships, throw chains which bind continents together, and pulsate with human thoughts; when we stay the ocean with a boundary, and turn the most subtle forces of nature to our bidding-let us not forget the unnumbered ages of change which this finite globe has seen; and beyond all, remember the metaphysical questions which regard time and space themselves but as conditional truth.

MY COUNTRY-HOUSE AND ITS TENANTS. I AM the proprietor of Wythrop Place, Wythrop, Hampshire: the 'Place' being of course not any long row of ghastly plaster-of-Paris-pillared edifices built by three men and a boy in a fortnight, as one reads of in the rule of three, but a respectable mansion in the country; and I only point this out because I once received an answer to an advertisement addressed to me at 14 Wythrop Place, a mistake which I do not wish should occur again.

Living at the Place myself, for any length of time, is, however, out of the question, since I possess a brewery more than ten miles away from it, which requires my constant supervision, and my object, therefore, of course is, to get somebody else to live there. I find no great difficulty in the matter, so far as obtaining tenants; but where I fail is in convincing them that they ought to pay me rent for it. One would really imagine, to judge from their demands upon me, and their repudiation of my demand upon them, that the obligation lay upon the other side. There is a story afloat of a great theatrical manager -that is to say, of the manager of a great theatrein connection with his treatment of dramatic authors, which strikes me as affording an excellent parallel to the case of myself and my tenants. The author arrives by appointment at the manager's place of business. His five-act tragedy has been accepted; his only doubt is whether he shall ask for it three hundred guineas, or four. Your piece, sir,' the great man admits, 'is fine; the situations are striking; the bad characters are sufficiently bloody, the good ones spotless as can be desired; and the general sentiments are in accordance with public opinion. Therefore, all I have to say to you is: What will you give me to play it?' Similarly, it would by no means surprise me should a person of easy manners and gentlemanly address call upon me any day, and, after allowing that Wythrop Place was elegantly furnished, commodiously arranged, and fit, in every respect, to accommodate himself and family, should finish his eulogium with: And now, sir, what will you give me to live in it?' I have had to do with numbers of candidates for my country-house who certainly entertained that view, if they did not express it, of the relation of landlord to tenant; people, who, having resided in fashionable furnished apartments in town during the season, languidly turn over the autumn leaves of the Times advertisement-sheet until

they find a house in the country to suit their tastes as to locality and convenience. Rent cannot be said to be a secondary object with these gentry—who are generally well connected,' and what the estate-agent calls desirable'-for it is not an object at all. They are the last persons to haggle, bless you, about a paltry thirty guineas, more or less, for the three months; the question as to whether the stable manure shall be regularly fetched as usual by Farmer Stubble, or not, is of no sort of consequence to them; they beg I will not apologise for the rather worn appearance of the drugget on the back staircase; as to the entrance-gate being indifferently hung, so that it sometimes has to be lifted before one can open it, they would not care three farthings should there be no entrance-gate at all. Why should I say three farthings, since money, much or little, seems never to enter into their thoughts. They are come down into the country to retrench, and all their modesty requires is a roomy furnished house in a pleasant neighbourhood, with a little park-land about it, and the use of a kitchen-garden-gratis.

It is very easy for the reader to say: "This is nonsense; a man can't be expected to keep up a countryhouse for the gratuitous entertainment of strangers,' when he is expected to do it, as I am, year after year: or to ask me why I don't make them pay, when I can't make them. Goodness knows that I have been too shamefully treated by this class of persons, to have any delicacy about employing the very cruelest means to exact my dues. May I have another country-house upon my hands, if I would not have used torture, had the constitution permitted it, upon more than one of these wretches; but there is no redress to be got anyhow. Often and often, I have set the machinery of the law in motion against them; and we all know how much it costs to start that ingenious contrivance, and how exceedingly difficult the fly-wheel of it is to stop; but nothing ever came of it, except an attorney's bill. My tenants have generally taken their departure to the continent about a week before their term is up; they write from the south of France or Northern Italy, to mention casually that their rent must stand over (over what, I never could make out; certainly not over me) for a little; but to insist particularly upon some work-bag of Berlin wool, or carved wooden papercutter-which they have inadvertently left behind in the right-hand drawer of the table in the back drawing-room-being forwarded to them at once with the greatest precautions against its being lost. They are anxious enough about their own trumpery property, and speak of it in terms which would lead you to imagine that it was a hostage, if necessary, many degrees above the value of their debt. One very gentlemanly tenant of this kind wrote to me from a fashionable watering-place, where he intended to reside for the winter months, to say that he had been much pleased with Wythrop, and would make a point of recommending it to his friends. That individual I did manage to lay hold of. I would have spent my entire patrimony rather than that man should have been suffered to escape my vengeance. I would have violated any law, foreign or British, and had him kidnapped, wheresoever he had betaken himself, and securely handed over to other of my myrmidons as soon as he touched English soil, before he should have gone unpunished. After expending about twice the money that was owed me, I lodged this scoffing wretch, I say, in the county jail. Very likely you may have heard of it; the provincial radical newspaper had a critique upon the matter next week, headed: Wythrop Place and its Owner;' wherein it was first shewn that all aristocrats were blood-thirsty and heartless; and, secondly, that I was not an aristocrat by any means; concluding with some disparaging and excursive remarks upon my beer. Moreover, since I had sued

my enemy for rent for the weeks which he had passed in my house, and not for the quarter only, I subjected myself to an action for false imprisonment, and was glad to pay fifty pounds to be out of it.

As for putting in an execution or seizing for it, what is the use of that with such tenants as mine. I only cut my own throat; execute myself and seize upon my private property, with the exception of such prizes as the work-bags and the paper-cutters. All the wealth of this sort of tenant seems to consist in wearing-apparel, of which they have large quantities, but which it is not legal to make prey of; at all events, I seldom get anything. I never made more than one capture with even a tolerable success, and that one was upon the chattels of Tilly Ricketts, subsequently described in the Insolvent Court as being of no profession, and no certain dwelling-place. His baptismal name was Chantilly, but I called him Tilly for short, and because I got to be tolerably intimate with him. He was a bachelor and a sporting person, having, indeed, been unfortunately attracted to the Place by its convenience for hunting purposes; and made nothing of riding ten miles to dine with us at the brewery and returning in the evening. He would arrange in a playful manner, over the dessert, to have a cask or two of strong beer sent down to the Place, from our famous tap; and he would pay for it, he said-satirically, as I am now aware-when he paid the rent. He came upon every occasion on a new horse, and generally attended by a little pack of hounds. For Tom and Bob-two small but most ferocious terriers-he said he had refused five-andthirty guineas. I thought he was a fool then, of course, but I have now quite a different opinion of Chantilly Ricketts. He possessed a pony, Leporello, which he affirmed to be by far the best pony then extant in this country or in the world at large-I never knew anybody with a pony, by the by, who was not prepared to affirm this-and he had been tempted, in vain it seemed, to part with this animal also for some astounding sum.

I rode over to Wythrop once during the latter portion of his residence there, and found the house turned into little better then a kennel. He was smoking a cigar, with his two favourite dogs, in the drawing-room-not that they were smoking just then, although they could do it, for I have seen them myself sitting up with pipes in their mouths, upon their hindlegs, like Christians-preparatory to a rat-hunt about to take place in the same apartment. He put a stop to my natural remonstrances on that occasion by saying good-humouredly: 'Well, my dear sir, I suppose a fifty-pound note will make it all right between us when I go away; and if it will not, I give you my word, you shall have a hundred; and my word is as good as my bond:' which indeed it was, exactly.

The butcher, or the grocer, or the baker, or a combination of these for he owed every body-put Tilly into jail without my assistance; but I, as landlord, had of course the first choice of his goods. Two horses--for seizing which I sustained actions from their legitimate owners, who had only lent them to Mr Ricketts upon trial-the celebrated pony, and the brace of wonderful dogs, fell to my share. I was shaking my fist at these latter animals, intending, however, the gesture to apply to their master rather than to themselves, when the more savage of the two, Thomas, flew at my thigh, and was disengaged from it not without great difficulty; while the pony ate his head off, or nearly so, for weeks in my stable, and was sold with his canine friends at last for fourteen pounds. All this time were Tilly's creditors appealing to me to see them righted, instigated thereto by the incarcerated Mr Ricketts himself. He told them that, with his priceless Leporello in my possession, I had absolutely become his debtor to an extent that would

cover all their bills; and he wrote me a letter to that effect, which had this very singular postscript: P. S. I think it right to state, sir, that I look upon my present misfortunes as being in some sort a judgment upon me for demeaning myself by going to your house to dinner-to a brewery: none of my family, no Ricketts, from time immemorial, was ever before mixed up with anything connected with trade.' And this annoyed my dear wife not a little, who, I am sorry to say, is rather thin-skinned about our celebrated tap. The house at Wythrop is certainly unsuited to one of my calling; but it was left to me-and one generally takes what is left to one without apology-by my great-uncle, who never took to me kindly, and who, as I am now convinced, carried out his animosity to the very last; the unforgiving old gentleman, broken in health, moribund as indeed he was, actually extended his resentment beyond the grave, in leaving me his house in the country. He well knew, for he was a man of business, that it must needs be a hundred and fifty pounds a year out of my pocket at least, and his malice has been more than gratified.

There are respectable tenants to be got, of course; but these are in reality more expensive-they certainly take more money out of my pocket-than the people who don't pay. There is scarcely anything in the house that suits them; and where anything does, they are clamorous to have more of it. There are only two arm-chairs in the dining-room,' complained one of these importunates: where, I should like to know, is my mother-in-law to sit?' And 'more tables' was set down laconically by another among a number of items of things wanted, just as the nabob demanded his more curricles.' The pump is out of order, or the roof lets in the rain; the park-palings want renewal, the drawing-room carpet is wearing into holes; the well runs dry, and requires to be dug twenty feet deeper in the summer-time; and the cistern bursts in the winter. Every new tenant has his new grievances, and every season its particular array of wants and repairs: nor does it by any means follow that I bring the Piace to perfection after all, for the improvements that have been effected at a great expense to please one incomer, are the very things, perhaps, which induce his successor to demand a reduction in the rent. If tenant-right in Ireland means anything like what it has meant at Wythrop Place, it must be one of the most impertinent dictations which it ever entered into the brain of man to defend. About a twelvemonth ago, the greatest shock to my feelings as a landlord was administered, which they have as yet experienced. I had taken especial pains to insure myself against risk with this particular tenant-if I can call a man particular who stuck at nothing-not even at felony. I had carefully eschewed the aristocracy and the sporting circles, and had selected my man from among the honest and steady-going candidates of the middle class; he was a City man of the very highest respectability, who did not know a foxhound from a harrier, which he pronounced without the 'h'; and he was, to conclude, a drysalter, and his name was Stubbs. The estate-agent referred me to this gentleman's own place of business in London, as a guarantee of his solvency; and, indeed, it was a magnificent establishment. Moreover, the good simple fellow had never put his nose in a country-house before, so that he would not have known what was wanting, even had not everything been as complete as it was. This model-tenant kept a most respectable cob, which was supplied with hay from my own rick at a very moderate cost, for I am not the man in these sort of cases to be left behindhand in liberality. If there had been a breath of suspicion-which there, of course, was not-regarding Mr Stubbs's honesty, one glance at that cob would have left its proprietor spotless and unsullied. It seemed, as Tilly Ricketts would

have great experience in sporting matters, says: "If the laird will favour his native tenant, and make sheep his primary object, and will not sympathise a little with his feathered friend, grouse will soon disappear off the ground, and, in my opinion, from the following causes: smearing with that abominable, poisonous, offensive-smelling grease and tar; and continually herding five or six thousand sheep, with a team of colley-dogs.' Further, the Old Un' says: 'Let Scotland return to its natural state, as I found it in 1832-feeding on its grouse-portions the Highland black-faced sheep, in place of its foreign usurper the white-faced Cheviot. The black-faced requires less care, less burning of heather, less gathering and driving, less grease and tar; stains the ground less; travels less in large bodies; and with its quick eye and light and careful tread, respects the nest and eggs of his native companion.' Colonel Whyte, another authority, writes to the Field to say that the grouse of a district in Donegal, being afflicted with the tapeworm, is 'confirmation strong as proof of Holy Writ' that he is right in supposing that in sheep-farming and its concomitants the disease originates-especially as a Scotch sheep-farmer has lately taken possession of the land!

In another letter, the colonel tells us that the place a grouse loves to feed on is knolly ground, with the young short heather sprouting up; and this is precisely the spot the sheep selects for his nightly resting-place. Can we wonder, then, at the livers of grouse being diseased, feeding as they do on heather besmeared with mercury? Now, these spots are rare, either on mountains wholly burned or on mountains never burned-and under one category or the other come three parts of the Scottish hills-and, being rare, are of course much frequented by both. The present breed of grouse in Scotland I believe to be for the most part thoroughly broken down in constitution, and accordingly every wet winter brings on an access of the disease; and as weakly fathers beget weakly offspring, so year by year under the present system, they will become more and more delicate.'

A series of letters have also been appearing on heather-burning, in the Inverness Courier; we have room, however, for but one extract on the subject. 'Veritas' thus decides in favour of the burning 'I have lived among the hills a great many years now, and, although neither sportsman nor farmer, have had many opportunities, not only of hearing the subject of grouse-disease discussed, but also of noticing the effects of heather - burning; and feel warranted in stating, without fear of much contradiction, that the strongest and healthiest birds are invariably to be found on moors which are regularly and systematically

burned.'

We need say little about the destruction of the eggs. It is certain, however, that many are destroyed -some by accident, others by poachers, who supply the dealers with them. Grouse-eggs have been largely transported to England, for experiments in stocking English moors. The Spectator newspaper, in a recent article, indicates still another way of disposing of the eggs: The birds are failing, partly from a disease which is carrying off great numbers, but there are two other causes of their disappearance. The watchers of the deer-forests, thinking only of the antlered game, dislike the grouse because they attract poachers, and destroy the eggs wherever they find them, and thus abolish one form of sport to save another. But we suspect the worse disease under which the grouse suffer is the increase in the number of sportsmen.' This last suggestion, in our opinion, points to the true cause of the scarcity of the birds, although combined in some measure with the disease; and we have not arrived at this opinion without much personal inquiry, and after the perusal of a large amount of correspond

ence on the subject. That overshooting is the real cause of the decrease of the grouse, is sufficiently obvious even from the fact, that the rent paid for liberty to shoot grouse and deer this season was somewhere about L.200,000. But even this large sum will cease to be wondered at, when the reader learns that 100,000 brace of each of the principal game-birdsgrouse, partridge, pheasant, snipe-are required in London alone, reaching the metropolis in the shape of consignments to wholesale and retail dealers, and as presents to friends. If we average these as yielding the sportsman half-a-crown per brace, it gives us a sum equivalent to about a fourth of the rental. overshooting is caused to a large extent by persons renting shooting-grounds who are unable to afford so expensive a luxury, and who therefore shoot like mad,' as the Ettrick Shepherd expresses it, to make up the rent-caring not whether they leave a sufficient stock of birds to multiply and replenish the earth. It has been said that

A London brewer shoots the grouse,
And a lordling stalks the deer.

This

But while these parties can no doubt afford to pay for grouse-shooting or deer - stalking, without the annoyance of feeling that they must reproduce the money, there is another class who make a business of the sport, and who bestow a large amount of hard work on it, in order to turn it to commercial account.

As illustrating the system of shooting for profit, we may state that we happen to know two humble but industrious men who followed this plan with great shrewdness. These men were natives of one of our Highland glens, and followed the business of what is called in Edinburgh chairmen, although their title of street-porters will be more generally understood. Roderick and Duncan had a good connection, and were well employed as messengers during the winter season, when the various courts of law are in session; but as each returning summer arrived, the brothers found that it entailed upon them a forced idleness of four or five months consequent upon the long vacation,' and that however busy they might have been during the winter, their earnings were insufficient to carry them over the dull months of their vacation. Having once or twice attended gentlemen to the Highlands for a few weeks' shooting about the glorious 12th, it came to pass that eventually, having made careful and accurate arrangements, they rented a shooting on their own account, and set actively to work with their own two guns, and one or two hired attendants, determined to shoot the rent out of the place and a profit besides

which they did. This is only one instance out of many. Billiard-room keepers, livery-stable keepers, and others having strong ideas of combining pleasure and business, frequently rent a moor, and of course take care not to lose by the speculation. It is perfectly clear that such sportsmen as these have little care as to whether they leave a stock of breeding-birds or not; they rarely visit the same ground twice, to make sure of obtaining value for their money, this being the only side of the question they look at. No wonder that gentlemen following these parties think they have stumbled either upon 'Glendo' or 'Glendiddle.'

Look, too, how times are changed-how steamboats and railways flash across the country and up to town. Formerly, there were no such rapid modes of conveyance, and game having to be sent by the mailcoach at a considerable cost of carriage, smaller quantities were consumed. Then the population has increased so considerably as to produce a proportionate demand; every year the supply augments, because every little retailer's wife must now-a-days have her occasional dinner-party, and of course, if it is in season, she will have game on the table. All this