having been heard, in the dead of the
night, by a sentinel at Windsor Castle.
The story assumes the following form: In
the time of William the Third, a soldier
was accused of sleeping at his post, while
on sentry duty on one of the terraces at
Windsor Castle. Matters were likely to
go hard with him. He declared, however,
that at the time when, according to the
accusation, he was asleep, he heard St.
Paul's clock strike, and (moreover) that it
struck thirteen! The narrative further tells
that, on inquiry, it was found that the clock
really had exhibited this strange irregularity;
and the poor fellow was acquitted.
Now this is an interesting story, which
most of us would like to believe to be true.
But Mr. Walesby, an authority on clock
lore, states that there was neither public
clock nor large bell at St. Paul's in the
time of William of Orange; the clock was
made by Bradley in 1708, and the bell by
Phelps in 1709, both in the time of Queen
Anne. St. Paul's bell may have been heard
as far off as Windsor, but he declines to
accept the statement on this evidence alone.

The stories relating to the travelling of
the sound of great pieces of artillery are
numerous, but, most probably, not all
equally worthy of credence. All we can
do is to take the statements as they
stand, and then to judge them by such
fair tests as may offer. The Rev.Hugh
Salvin, who published a Journal in
1829, states, that when he was chaplain
on board His Majesty's ship Cambridge,
on the South American Station, the naval
salutes at Chancay were heard at Callao,
thirty-five miles distant, although there are
several projecting headlands intervening,
and although the wind generally blows in
the adverse direction in that region. The
same writer informs us, that when the
incident at Callao was mentioned to the
lieutenant of His Majesty's store-ship Arab,
that officer stated that, on one occasion,
the evening gun at Plymouth was heard at
Ilfracombe, the one place being on the
south coast, and the other on the north
coast of Devon; the distance is sixty miles,
and there is much intervening hilly country.
Whether the lieutenant himself heard the
sound, and whether he had the means of
knowing for a certainty that it came from
Plymouth, we are not told.

On the 24th of April, 1868, the gunners
of the North Stack Fog Gun Station, Holyhead,
heard a booming sound directly from
the west; or rather, the windows of their
station-house were heard to clap repeatedly,
and the whole station, which is built on
Hotyhead Mountain, was subjected to a
kind of trembling. On comparing notes,
it was found that at that very hour and
minute the iron-clads and artillery at Kingstown
Harbour fired a salute, when the
Prince and Princess of Wales were embarking
after their visit to Ireland. The
distance from Holyhead Mountain to
Kingstown Harbour is sixty-two miles in a
straight line.

During the first three days of June, 1666,
the English and Dutch fleets were in action
in the German Ocean, between the Naze
and the North Foreland. The sound of the
firing was heard both at Cambridge and in
London. We have this on the authority
of Cooper's Annals of Cambridge in the
one case, and Pepy's Diary in the other.
But there is a much more remarkable
anecdote told by Cooper, connecting Sir
Isaac Newton with the affair, and revived
by Mr.Walter White in his Eastern
England. "There is a tradition at Cambridge,
that at the beginning of June, 1666, the
year in which he began his optical
discoveries, Newton, then a Bachelor of Arts,
went into the hall of Trinity College, and
mentioned to some of the Fellows that a
battle was being fought between the Dutch
and the English, and that the latter had the
worst of it. The Fellows requesting him
to explain how he came by his knowledge,
he answered that, being in the Observatory
(then over the gateway of the college), he
heard the report of a great firing of cannon,
such as could only be between two great
fleets: and that, as the sound grew louder
and louder, he concluded that they drew
near our coasts, and consequently that we
had the worst of it—which the event
verified."

When an insurrection took place at
Messina, we are told that the sound of the
guns was heard at Syracuse; these two
Sicilian towns are about eighty miles apart,
the straight line joining them keeping
pretty near the coast. When the French
bombarded Genoa, the sound is said to
have been heard at Leghorn; this, if
correct, denotes a journey of ninety miles,
across the blue waters of the Gulf of Genoa.
Ninety miles must, also, be about the
distance from Hounslow in Middlesex to
Southwold in Suffolk; an explosion at the
powder mills near the first-named place,
somewhat under twenty years ago, was
heard at the latter. By this we infer that,
on a particular day and hour, a low
rumbling sound was heard at Southwold, and