Such is the account of the affair given by themselves; although more, it is believed, to suit the taste and belief of the time they lived in than their own. The two brothers had passed many hours silent and in the dark; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the visionary world, into which they had unconsciously slipped, presented to both such phenomena--founded on the meditations and recollections in which both had been immersed--as were easily rendered in the exoteric types of romance. The brothers talked long over the vision, and could scarcely satisfy even themselves that it was indeed a dream; but they agreed on its use of wisdom and warning, and disputed no more. The old house was not sold, nor the types divided. It is even affirmed that the bookseller's daughter and the Catholic widow lived there as right friendly sisters-in-law; and after many a broadside and folio page, the press they had worked for so many years at length struck off the tale we have just related--the German brothers supposing that some honest men in England might profit, as they had done, by a look upon Life's Highway. DUST-SHOWERS AND RED-RAIN. Recent scientific investigations in Europe and America have thrown some interesting light on the nature of these very curious phenomena. The results arrived at may be brought familiarly before our readers. Mr Charles Darwin, in the narrative of his voyage in the _Beagle_, states that while he was at St Jago, one of the Cape de Verd islands, in January 1832: 'The atmosphere was generally very hazy; this appears chiefly due to an impalpable dust, which is constantly falling, even on vessels far out at sea. The dust,' he goes on to say, 'is of a brown colour, and under the blow-pipe, easily fuses into a black enamel. It is produced, as I believe, from the wear and tear of volcanic rocks, and must come from the coast of Africa.' The same opinion was held by scientific men generally, as well of the dust met with in the North Atlantic, as of that which sometimes falls on the islands and shores of the Mediterranean: Africa was supposed to be the original source of the air-borne particles. Some of the dust, however, having been sent to Ehrenberg of Berlin, that celebrated _savant_, after a microscopical examination, laid an account of his inquiry before the Akademie der Wissenschaften, in May 1844, in which he shewed that the dust, so far from being inorganic, contained numerous specimens of a species of flint-shelled animalcules, or infusoria, known as polygastrica, and minute portions of terrestrial plants. The investigation led him to certain conclusions: '1. That meteoric dust-rain is of terrestrial origin. 2. That the same is not a rain of volcanic ashes. 3. That it is necessarily a dust carried up to a great height by a strong current of air or whirlwind from a dried-up swamp-region. 4. That the dust neither demonstrably nor necessarily comes from Africa, notwithstanding that the wind may blow from thence