Various

“ We had been on the glacier about an hour when the light began to creep up over the mountains, and we were in the midst of a scene of wonderful beauty. The Monte Rosa, the Lyekamm, Castor and Pollux, the Breithorn, the Matterhorn, and many another shrouded in their utter whiteness stood round us in awful calm, closing us in upon a lake of tossed and heaving ice. The moonlight which streamed down upon us on one side, and the pale yellow light of the dawn on the other, lit up the scene with a weirdness which seemed not of our world. ”

“ Having only once got up the ball in the course of an hour, and having sharply struck myself on the side of the head with my own racket, to say nothing of the curious attraction of the ball to my shoulder-blades, I determined that that should be my last as well as first visit to a racket court, charming as the game doubtless is when well played. ”

“ It looks so easy to hit the ball with the great battledore-shaped racket—until you try: perhaps as easy as battledore and shuttlecock, now ousted by lawn-tennis. So just descend into the black-lined arena, and you will discover that the small sphere you aim at finds out all sorts of impossible angles, and dodges you in a way that no fellow can stand ”

“ Be that as it may, simple walking does not find many advocates, except on Sunday, or as a stop-gap on some off-day when rackets and the river begin to pall, as every amusement seems to do by the end of term. I have even heard a member of an eight-oar say after six weeks' daily attendance at the river, that 'he really felt he'd had almost enough of it.' And it is rather an objection to rowing, that as soon as your blisters have hardened and you feel indifferent about the cushion on your chair, the act of pulling your own weight and a trifle over begins to have a certain sameness. ”

“ And now we conjure up a droll figure, whose eccentricity borders on madness, the spendthrift squire of Halston, John Mytton. He is tormented with hiccup, and tries the novel cure of setting fire to himself in order to frighten it away. Applying a candle to his garment, being sparely clad at the time, he is soon in flames. His life is only saved by the active exertions of some people who chance to be in the way at the time. He invites some friends once, and when the company are assembled in the drawing-room, he startles them all by riding into the room on a bear! ”

“ The snow was as hard as a road, and the cold intense. Biener is an excellent guide, but his pace is very slow, and thus we got rather benumbed. We had, however, passed the Little Matterhorn on our left, and the Théodulhorn on our right, with the little rude cabane erected on the rocks at its foot—more than eleven thousand feet above the sea, and the highest habitation in Europe—and were beginning to trail our snake-like length up the snow-slopes on the west and south of the mountain, when my friend became so unmistakably ill that we came at once to a halt and a consultation. ”

“ I do not much affect the archery and croquet, nor yet the flower-shows; very good in their way, I daresay, but you can enjoy them at home, where a racket court, or even a skiff, is not always handy, and where skittles are apt to be voted low, and the secrets of cider-cup hidden from the butler's ken. So make your hay while the sun shines. And almost as fast as the skittles fall before the practised hurler, fly the nine weeks of the summer term, which comes to most men but three times in their lives ”

“ Such being the man to whom the Honourable Elkanah Day and his noble wife had agreed to give their daughter, can it be wondered at that that daughter should not only be indisposed to comply with their wish, but should also be so disgusted and indignant at its expression as to give way to her feelings in words and acts which in themselves are incapable of justification? ”

“ A few years ago the largest snake in the Gardens was an African python, that deposited above one hundred eggs in a nest of moss which had been supplied to her; and as some writers about snakes had told us that the python incubates her eggs, and that only this kind exhibits any such maternal instinct, she also drew crowds of the curious. ”

“ Captain Bernard O'Neil, the bridegroom elect, was nearly twice the age of Isabella Day; and although not an ill-looking man, was yet one whom no virtuous or noble-minded girl could look upon with respect, for he was known to be addicted to the vice of gambling, to be able to consume daily an enormous quantity of wine, and to be the slave of all sorts of debauchery. ”

“ In serpents the eggs differ from those of birds by undergoing a sort of incubation from the very first, so that whenever examined, the embryo more or less advanced will be found. In the case of the pythoness of 1862, an egg was examined on the fifteenth day of incubation, and found to contain a living embryo; a noteworthy fact, as the python incubates for fifty-six days before hatching her eggs. Observations with the eggs of chilobothrus are attended by the same results—namely the fetus in a certain stage of development is discovered whenever a gravid snake is killed and examined. ”

“ And talking of running, there is or was a Hare and Hounds Club, which numbered some distinguished runners among its members; and one college at least had lately, and perhaps still has, a pack of beagles. If a man be of very solitary habits and much inclined to hide him from his kind, there is jack-fishing in many parts of the river, engaged in which contemplative recreation he may moralise to his heart's content. ”

“ If you go in front of the nets, keep your eyes and ears open, or you may get knocked down by a stray ball—a danger kept constantly in your mind by frequent cries of 'Head!' which cause many to anticipate the bump in store for one. A man does not look to advantage at the moment when he becomes conscious of a descending cricket-ball in close proximity to the back of his head. ”

“ Of all eccentricities, those displayed by misers are the most notable and repulsive. To dwell upon them at any length is neither pleasant nor interesting; it is only where parsimony and genius are allied that one pauses to examine the specimen. Let us now take a brief survey of Nollekens the sculptor, in whom these opposites were met. Descended from a miserly stock, he did not fall short of his ancestry in his love of money, and it first became apparent in a filthy mode of living while a student at Rome. ”

“ Isabella was now left with a young child to fight the world alone. Health and vigour, however, were her portion; and hearing that plenty of work for women was to be had at Cleator near Whitehaven, she repaired thither, and found a settlement and a living. While there, she was one day agreeably surprised by a visit from her kind friend Lady Curwen, who had driven from Workington Hall expressly to tell her that an advertisement applying for the heirs of John Pearson who worked in Beerpot Foundry, had that week appeared in the columns of a London newspaper, and urged her to attend to it. ”

“ Heat combined with moisture are essential to the development of snakes' eggs; and in the choice of a spot in which to deposit them, the maternal instinct of the animal in a state of freedom is evident. It is generally among decaying vegetation where heat is generated, or in some moist soft herbage where the sun's rays can penetrate. To regulate the temperature in a close cage and keep the moss precisely in a condition to suit snake requirements, was by no means easy, and our pythoness seemed far from satisfied. ”

“ There are some whose eccentricity takes the form of hatred of society. Of this number was the Honourable Henry Cavendish, a man of great learning and enormous fortune, who earned the title of 'Woman-hating Cavendish,' as he would never see a woman if he could avoid it. If a female servant was unlucky enough to shew herself, she was instantly dismissed. ”

“ We, not well versed in Ophidian biographies, might have expected the anaconda to lay eggs because her cousin the pythoness did so; and we might have also speculated upon her incubating them, as the python did. But she has produced a perfectly developed though dead family of six, instead; a circumstance of so much interest to naturalists, that the loss of the young ones is to be regretted though not wondered at. Captured from her native lagoons, and shut out from the light of day in a box just large enough to contain her, this 'good swimmer' arrives alive ”

“ One still more remarkable characteristic of the anaconda is that, like the sea-snakes (Hydrophidæ) , but unlike the python, it produces its young alive. We have long been accustomed to think that only vipers produce live young—and hence their name—and that all the non-venomous snakes lay eggs. But snakes, so far as those in captivity are concerned, are continually doing what is not expected of them. Zoological Gardens afford valuable opportunities to students for acquiring knowledge of the form, size, habits, &c. ”

“ Even the Long Walk is beginning to fail as an avenue, and there are some gaps in the foliage, I think. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: but even though he does work, and 'reads' when he ought, Jack need not be dull withal at dear old Oxford. ”

“ The child, Isabella Pearson, did not die; she conquered the foe, and was left to pass through a more eventful life than that which generally falls to the lot of a poor girl. Although an orphan, she was not without friends; an only and elder sister was with relatives in Dublin, and her father's friends were well-to-do farmers in Westmoreland. Nor was she without powerful interest in the village of her birth: Lady Curwen, of the Hall, paid her marked attention, as she had done her mother, because that mother was of noble descent, as I shall now proceed to shew. ”

“ There are also one or two tennis courts in Oxford; but I do not think that the favourite game of the Merry Monarch is very generally played except on grass.
I shall not part from Brown yet, but shall accompany him to Holywell and get a hand in the fives-court. It is a hot game, but not a graceful one, like rackets. It is all very well to poise your racket overhead, sway backwards and send the whizzing ball against the wall. ”

“ The guests are panic-stricken: one mounts on a table, another on a chair; they all strive to make their escape from the ungracious animal, and its still more savage master, who is enjoying the misery of his guests with the laugh of a madman. ”

“ PLAYTIME AT OXFORD.
'What is to be done this afternoon?' is a question invariably asked by scores of undergraduates, either at the well-supplied breakfast-table (for whatever men do not learn at Oxford, they at least learn to eat a good breakfast) , or by those victims of procrastination who leave everything to the last moment, just as the scout is bringing up the more modest luncheon. ”

“ Under either circumstance maternal instinct is undeniable; and if chilobothrus merely discovered and appropriated the nest of some other creature, her intelligence is still worth recording.
We knew an instance where a snake in captivity exhibited restlessness and uneasiness, crawling about the cage as if in search of something. Those who had the care of it suspected she was with eggs, and placed some sand in the cage. This appeared to satisfy her, and the eggs were deposited. Mr Gosse had a Jamaica boa in the same condition. ”

“ Millions fall into long straight ditches dug as traps and there perish; millions more are crushed by rollers; hogs and poultry devour them greedily; and a number of ingenious machines stand ready to catch the winged locusts in the air or to capture them as they crawl. ”

“ Isabella Pearson (mother of the child we have just spoken of) , whose maiden name was Day, was a daughter of the Honourable Elkanah Day and of his wife Lady Letitia, daughter of the Earl of Annesley. How she came to marry John Pearson forms one of the many chapters in human history which come under the head of Romance in Real Life, or Scandal in High Life, in the newspaper literature of the day. ”