LETTER XIII.

THE HEART.

THERE was once upon a time a banker, a millionaire, who could reckon his wealth not by millions only, but by hundreds of millions and more; who was, in fact, so tremendously rich that he did not know what to do with his money-a difficulty in which nobody had ever been before.

This man took it into his head to build a palace infinitely superior to anything that had hitherto been scen. Marbles, carpets, gildings, silk hangings, pictures, and statues-in fact, the whole mass of common-place luxuries as one sees them even in the grandest royal abodes, fell short of his magnificent pretensions. He was an intel ligent man, and thoroughly understood the respect due to his riches; and the common fate of kings seemed to him far too shabby for the entertainment of his dynasty, which he looked upon as very superior to all the families of crowned heads in the world. In consequence he sent to the four quarters of the globe for the most illustrious professors, the most skilful engineers, the cleverest and most ingenious workmen in every department; and giving them unlimited permission as to expenditure, ordered them to adorn his palace with all the wonders of science and human industry.

Science, and human industry, and unlimited means-

what will they not accomplish? No wonder that noth. ing was talked of for a hundred miles around but the magic building-of which, by the way, I do not venture to give you a description, because it would carry me too far away. Let it suffice to say, that never Emperor of China, Caliph of Bagdad, or Great Mogul had such a habitation as our banker, and for a very good reasonhe was twenty times as rich as any such gentry as I have named ever were in their lives.

When all was finished one trifling flaw was discovered : the place was not supplied with water. A spring-seeker, who was summoned to the premises, could only discover a small subterranean watercourse, a sort of zigzag pipe, formed by nature, between two beds of clay, in which the rain of the neighborhood collected as in a sort of reservoir. The water was neither very clear nor very plentiful, as you may imagine; and the professor appointed tc examine it, having begun by tasting it, made a horrible face, and declared there was no use in proceeding any further; for it had a stagnant flavor which would not be agreeable to my lord.

To the amazement of every body, my lord jumped for joy when he heard this unpleasant news. It was proposed to him to fetch water from a river which flowed a few miles' distance off; but he would hear of nothing of the sort. What he wanted was something new, unexpected, impossible-that was his object throughout. He took a pen and drew up at a sitting the following programme, which caused our poor professors to open their eyes in dismay :

1st. We will use the water on the premises.

2ndly. It shall flow night day and in all parts of the palace at once.

3rdly. There shall be plenty of it, and it shall be good.

The professors looked at each other for some time without speaking, and the gravest of them, whose fortunes and characters had been long ago established, suggested that they should simply give my lord and his money the slip, and so teach him to make fools of people another time!

But the youngsters, less easily discouraged, cried out against this with one accord. They declared that the honor of science was at stake, and that they ought to return impudence for impudence, by executing to the letter the impertinent programme! At length, after much discussion and many propositions made against all hope, and thrown aside one after the other as impracticable, a sudden inspiration crossed the brain of an engineer who had not yet spoken; and the following is what he proposed :

What prevented the water from being sweet and fit to drink, was the want of movement and air. What had to 'be done, therefore, was to erect a pump, but a pump provided with numberless small pipes, extending to the watercourse in all directions, and so arranged that by means of them it should be able to draw up the water from all the corners and windings where it lay stagnating, and then forcing it forward into a pipe terminating in a rose, like that of a watering-pot, whence it should gush out to fall down in fine rain, into a reservoir in the open air. From thence another action of the pump was to bring it back well aerated, to send it once more into a large pipe with numerous lesser ramifications, which should convey it into every corner of the palace.

Up to this point all seemed practicable, but the hardest

part had not yet come. The great difficulty was how to supply this enormous consumption with so slender a runnel of water as the one at their disposal. But our en gineer had provided for this by a stroke of genius.

Under each of the taps (always kept open), which were dispersed all over the palace, he would place a small cistern, from the bottom of which should go a pipe communicating with the body of the force-pump which drew up the water from the original watercourse. By which means the water which ran from the taps would be taken up again and go back to feed the reservoir in the open air; whence it would again return to supply the taps; and so on and on, the same water continually keeping the game alive, as people call it. Have you not sometimes seen at a circus or theatre a large army represented by a hundred supernumeraries, who file in close columns before the audience, going out at one side of the stage and coming in at the other, following close at each other's heels indefinitely? By a similar artifice the engineer would change his meagre little runnel into an inexhaustible fountain. The water drawn up from the watercourse by each stroke of the pump would fully compensate for what was used in its passage through the palace by the inhabitants. Lastly, as it might sometimes happen that the said inhabitants washed their hands under the taps, the water on its return to the cisterns, was to pass through a series of small filters, in order to cleanse it from any impurity it might have contracted by the way. Always flowing, always limpid, it would soon lose every trace of its original source, and might defy comparison with the water of any river in the world!

A unanimous buzz of congratulations welcomed this plan, at once so simple and so bold, and our professors

thought their troubles were over, but they were not at the end of their difficulties yet. When it came to the actual erection of the machine, (naturally a most complicated one, as it had to set a-going a quintuple system of pipes-pipes from the water-course to the pump, pipes from the pump to the reservoir, pipes from the reservoir to the pump, from the pump to the taps, and from the taps to the pump again,)—our banker, who had got amused and excited as they went on, conducted them to a small dark closet, only a few square feet in size, concealed in a corner of the large apartments, and informed them with a laugh that he had no other place to offer them. Besides which, he made them understand that on account of its situation, there could be no question of furnaces or boilers being set up there (he detested equally coal-smoke, fires, and explosions)-nor of workmen employed about the machine (it would not be decent to have them going up and down the front staircase)— nor above all, of the frightful brake-wheels always screeching and grinding, the unwieldy pistons rising and falling with a noise sufficient to give one the headache. He himself slept near the little dark closet, and the slightest noise was fatal to his repose. Having explained all this, the rich man curtly made his bow and retired.

For once our professors owned themselves beaten. They had come forward quite proud of their invention, and now they were received, not with ecstasies of delight, but with fresh demands, more ridiculous even than the first. They were decidedly being mystified, and were preparing in consequence to pack up and begone, furious, and swearing by all their gods that they would never again expose science to see itself disgraced by a purse-proud vulgarian's scorn; when, lo! happily, a