natural duties; turn as from your ruin
from all those glaring images of honour which
a weak ambition places before you.

CHIPS

THE BOTTLE AT SEA.

A COUPLE of anecdotes have floated to us
in illustration of the article in No. 202
entitled "Bottled Information." A
correspondent mentions that Sir Duncan M'Gregor,
then an officer of the thirty-first regiment
of infantry, was on board the Kent, East
Indiaman, when it was burnt to the water's
edge, in the Bay of Biscay. As soon as the
fire broke out he hastily wrote a few lines
describing the situation of the vessel, and
threw them overboard in a bottle. Four years
afterwards, being quartered at Barbadoes, he
was walking on the shore very early in the
morning, when he espied something in the
water. The waves washed it to his feet, and
it proved to be the identical bottle he had
launched before being providentially saved
from the flames in the Kent!

The other story is related by Mr. Benjamin
Franklin Bourne, an American ship-captain,
in a recently published account of his adventures
among the Giants of Patagonia. After
three months' detention among those huge
savages, during which time he suffered great
hardships, he made his escape; and, having
reached Borga Bay, opposite Terra-del-Fuego,
he landed. "We found on shore inscriptions of
California-bound vessels. On a branch of a
tree, overhanging a little stream, we found also
a bottle suspended, containing papers. This
was taken on board, and its contents
examined. Three or four vessels, passing through
the Straits, had left memoranda of their
experience,—such as snow-storms, loss of
spars, anchors, chains, &c. Captain Morton
[Mr. Bourne's floating host] wrote a humorous
account of our voyage, to deposit in this
repository of curiosities; and I added a
contribution, narrating my capture by the
Indians and escape, with a request that if it
should fall into hands bound for the United
States or England, it might be published."
Mr. Bourne had previously written letters
to the United States, had carefully left
them to be sent through the post, and
had never doubted that his relatives and
friends were in full possession of his
adventures through that usually exact channel. It
turned out, however, that all his letters
miscarried; and that the bottled information he
had suspended from a tree, in a wilderness not
visited by man many times in the course of a
year, very soon afterwards made its appearance
at full length in the Boston Atlas newspaper!
It happened that some Indians found the
bottle, sold it to apassing trader, who forwarded
it to Smith's News Rooms, at Boston, United
States. The advertising powers of a bottle
hung upon a tree did not end there. In the
course of the homeward voyage, Mr. Bourne
visited the Fire Fly, Captain Smith. When
his name was announced, a young lady on
board instantly asked him if he was the hero
of the captivity in Patagonia? He was
astonished at her knowledge of his
adventures; but it turned out that the young lady
had landed at Borga Bay, and, having seen
the bottle, read its contents, and replaced
them, before the Indians took it away.

THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME.

THE little cloud no bigger than a man's
hand, in that right hand bottom corner of the
map, having gathered into a tremendous bank
of clouds of inky blackness, having already
partially broken, and with red rain made the
harvest grow where you wot of, seems now to
loom nearer and nearer over this land; and
there is a wind, the precursor of the tornado,
in whose fitful soughing I seem to hear the
sad notes of the "Girl I left behind me."

Sad, sad, indeed, to many thousand hearts.
Farms and homesteads were never made to be
burnt, nor churches to be battered by Paixhan
guns: the worst and most devilish use you can
put a cornfield to is to blow your brother's
brains out in it. These are not the days, thank
God! when the mere idle brag and vaunt of
glory will pass current as a sufficient reason
for the withdrawal of one tompion from a
cannon; for the accension of one fusee, the
crossing of one bayonet upon another. There
must be an awful necessity; this business
must be inevitable, or it is inexcusable and
abominable; and upon mere Field-Marshal
Anybody, strutting forth "to conquer or to
die" in any other cause save that of right
against might, I look with profoundest
contempt, as upon a madman who is behind
this world, and had better be consigned to
the next.

At this hour I write, the tune of the "Girl
I left behind me" is reverberating in
thousands, nay, millions of English hearts. The
rocky fastnesses of the Scottish highlands
send it back to the Cornish headlands; it
runs round the coast faster than the light of
the beacons that told of the approach of the
Armada; it crosses the Irish Channel quicker
than the messages can flash along the
submerged wires of the telegraph; it is heard in
the Queen's palace and the Grenadiers'
barrack-room; in the labourer's cottage, and
the gillie's sheeling, and the bogtrotter's
shebeen; it is the refrain of the languid
gossip of the drawing-room, and the boisterous
argument of the village alehouse. It
comes home, this tune, and the thoughts it
awakens, and is as interesting to every one
as death—death that sings the bass to the
fife's shrill treble. Who shall say but that
the maniac in his padded room, and the
convict in his solitary cell, have heard their