otherwise, a city life for us would now be irksome and unenjoyable, and anything like a lengthened sojourn in a mountainless land, far from the sight of ocean waves, well-nigh unendurable. There is some meaning, however wild and improbable it may seem at first sight, in the theory that accounts for the Egyptian pyramids as erected by a nomade people, who finally settled along the valley of the Nile, in remembrance of the mountains of their native land, and to serve instead of these mountains in making the astronomical observations for which the ancient Assyrians and Chaldeans were so famous. Be these things as they may, we dearly love the mountains by which our humble home is surrounded, whether basking in jubilant sunshine or wrapt in sorrowing cloud, whether robed in midsummer green, in autumnal purple, in brown and gold, or snow-covered and ice-bound to their base; what time the day is shortest, and the sun, almost shorn of his beams, shines but faint and far down at its farthest point of southern declination. It is recorded of Queen Mary, of sanguinary, or rather igneous memory, that so affected was she by the loss of Calais, that had been in the possession of England since the victory at Cressy under the gallant Edward III., upwards of two hundred years previously, that she declared in her last moments that, if her body was opened after death, the name of the lost city would be found written upon her heart; probably the nearest approach to anything like poetry to be found in any word or act of her dark and bigoted and wholly unhappy life. If such things were possible--and the ancients, at least, believed they were--we should be apt to say the same in our own case of the mountain ranges and sea views around us, with which we have held such intimate fellowship for upwards of twenty years.