The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose. But Nature's poetry was more beautiful than man's. The wind and the beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose--or rather, the rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance. What next? The rose dies; the timber tree dies; decays down into vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to coal: but the plant cannot altogether undo its own work. Even in death and decay it cannot set free the sunbeams imprisoned in its tissue. The sun-force must stay, shut up age after age, invisible, but strong; working at its own prison-cells; transmuting them, or making them capable of being transmuted by man, into the manifold products of coal--coke, petroleum, mineral pitch, gases, coal-tar, benzole, delicate aniline dyes, and what not, till its day of deliverance comes. Man digs it, throws it on the fire, a black, dead-seeming lump. A corner, an atom of it, warms till it reaches the igniting point; the temperature at which it is able to combine with oxygen. And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after ages to the sense of its own powers, its own needs, the whole lump is seized, atom after atom, with an infectious hunger for that oxygen which it lost centuries since in the bottom of the earth. It drinks the oxygen in at every pore; and burns. And so the spell of ages is broken. The sun-force bursts its prison- cells, and blazes into the free atmosphere, as light and heat once more; returning in a moment into the same forms in which it entered the growing leaf a thousand centuries since. Strange it all is, yet true. But of nature, as of the heart of man, the old saying stands--that truth is stranger than fiction. V. THE LIME IN THE MORTAR I shall presume in all my readers some slight knowledge about lime. I shall take for granted, for instance, that all are better informed than a certain party of Australian black fellows were a few years since.