The instances in which buildings provided with rods have been struck do not prove them useless; or, as some say, that the rods do harm by attracting the lightning that they are unable to conduct to the earth without injury to the building. The point does not attract, but only catches the electricity that sweeps over it. When violent shocks or explosions occur the rod may be of little service. Its office is to prevent these by silently conducting the excess of electricity from the air. The rod, rightly placed, conducts to the earth all it can, lessening the evil it does not entirely prevent. But all danger is not removed. The position of the opposite poles in the immense battery may be such as to give the stroke a horizontal direction, and far below the point of the rod; such currents have been known to pass long distances through atmosphere and smite with destructive violence objects lying in their path. Against these lateral attacks rods above our roofs are probably little or no protection. Still the more good conductors there are in any locality the less danger, as they prevent the accumulation of electricity. POACHERS IN ENGLAND. By JAMES TURVES. It is somewhat surprising that none of our present-day novelists, like Charles Reade or Thomas Hardy, who are always on the outlook for romantic realism, whether it be in incident or in fact, have had their eyes directed to the rural poachers who abound in every shire. Poachers, though neither quite respectable members of the church nor of society, are more interesting characters than burglars or ticket-of-leave men, who figure frequently in the novelist’s pages. And, very strange to say, it has been left to a lady to write the first accounts of poaching episodes, episodes remarkable for their masculine touches and their wonderful grip of open-air reality; Harriet Martineau, in her “Forest and Game Law Tales,” astonishes us by her graphic realism and her delicacy of treatment; Charles Kingsley wrote one or two of his pathetic ballads on the subject of a poacher and his wife; Norman Macleod made a Highland poacher the subject of a character sketch; and in our own times Mr. Richard Jefferies, a writer who finds pleasure in minute description and vivid realism, has in his own style of exact word-painting given us a pleasant book about his own experiences as an amateur poacher. But the real poacher, the rural vagabond, the parish character, the ne’er-do-weel, whose life is a living protest against the game-laws, is of more lasting interest than any amateur can ever be.