Whether or no the others followed my example, I cannot tell; for almost immediately I felt a subtle fire course through my veins, followed by a delicious languor that crept inwards to my heart, and seemed to arrest its pulsation by an irresistible persuasiveness to repose. Probably I swooned, for I lost all consciousness, and all recollection of time or place for many hours. * * * * * When I came to myself, I was a prisoner in this cursed asylum at Charenton. --Guy had betrayed me,--the false friend,--the poltroon,--and I, who trusted him too much, had fallen a victim to his stratagems. Whether he had been true to me at the beginning, and then had faltered at the last, or whether he had deceived me all along with affected complaisance, I never knew. For when he came to see me one day, my just resentment excited me to such a paroxysm of fury that the people here recommended him not to return, and I have never seen him since. So here I sit, in forced idleness, waiting for the arrival of some one who shall appreciate my great idea, and release me for its accomplishment. The people by whom I am surrounded are kind enough, but ignorant; they admire me, but are unable to understand me. So they bind me in silken chains, and clasp them with honeyed words, and I remain a prisoner. It is thus that the world rewards its greatest benefactors! MRS. KNOLLYS. BY J. S. OF DALE, AUTHOR OF "GUERNDALE." _Century Magazine, November, 1883._ The great Pasterzen glacier rises in Western Austria, and flows into Carinthia, and is fourteen or seventeen miles long, as you measure it from its birth in the snow-field, or from where it begins to move from the higher snows and its active course is marked by the first wrinkle. It flows in a straight, steady sweep, a grand avenue, guarded by giant mountains, steep and wide; a prototype, huge and undesigned, of the giants' stairway in the Venice palace. No known force can block its path; it would need a cataclysm to reverse its progress. What falls upon it moves with it, what lies beneath it moves with it--down to the polished surface of the earth's frame, laid bare; no blade of grass grows so slowly as it moves, no meteor of the air is so irresistible. Its substant ice curls freely, moulds, and breaks itself like water,--breaks in waves, plastic like honey, crested lightly with a frozen spray; it winds tenderly about the rocky shore, and the granite, disintegrated into crumbs, flows on with it. All this so quietly that busy, officious little Man lived a score of thousand years before he noticed even that the glacier moved.