the sham funeral that the emperor had devised for himself?--why, after stating that he had been carried to church on the 15th of August, where he received the sacrament sitting, they are entirely silent respecting the absurd obsequies of the 31st, to which their master would undoubtedly have summoned them, and which were so immediately followed by his death? But they are even more than silent, they indirectly deny all the alleged circumstances. Their narrative is at complete variance with that of the monks. About two o’clock on the morning of the 21st September 1558, the Emperor perceived that his life was slowly ebbing away and that death was near. Feeling his own pulse, he shook his head as much as to say: “It is all over.” He then begged the monks, says Quijada, in a letter to Vasquez of the 21st September, to recite the litanies by his bedside, and the prayers for the dying. The archbishop, at his request, gave him the crucifix which had been embraced by the empress in her last hours; he carried it to his lips, pressed it twice to his breast and said: “The moment has come!” Shortly after he again pronounced the name of Jesus and expired breathing two or three sighs. “So passed away,” wrote Quijada, with mingled grief and admiration, “the greatest man that ever was or ever will be.” The inconsolable major-domo adds: “I cannot persuade myself that he is dead.” And he continually entered the chamber of his master, fell on his knees by his bedside, and with many tears kissed over and over again his cold inanimate hands. THE INVENTOR OF THE STEAM-ENGINE. A. D. 1625. The biography of Salomon de Caus and the account of his labours and his discoveries were scarcely known until the year 1828, when a learned French scholar, Arago, published for the first time in _L’Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes_, a remarkable article upon the history of the steam-engine. In it he cites the work of Salomon de Caus entitled _Les raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines, &c._, which was first published at Frankfort in 1615 and reprinted at Paris in 1624. M. Arago draws from it the conclusion that De Caus was the original inventor of the steam-engine. Six years later there appeared in the _Musée des Familles_, a letter from the celebrated Marion Delorme, supposed to have been written on the 3rd February 1641 to her lover Cinq-Mars. It is as follows: