+ ~ -
 
Please report pronunciation problems here. Select and sample other voices. Options Pause Play
 
Report an Error
Go!
 
Go!
 
TOC
 

every means his imagination could
suggest to induce the sorcerer to deliver up
his treasures. Master Guillaume was
inflexible. He hungered and thirsted, three
days more. Louis Morand appeared at a
window; the Master threatened him with
the vengeance of Heaven. Louis Morand
replied by an insulting smile, and urged him
to give up his treasures. Master Guillaume
wrapped his head in his mantle, and went to
sleep. Next day, Louis Morand appeared
again.

"'In the name of Heaven,' the Master
faintly cried, 'do not kill, in such a cruel
way, an old man who never did you anything
but good!'—'Give me, then, your treasures,'
said Louis Morand. The old man bowed his
head without replying. Louis disappeared.
That night Master Guillaume did not sleep.
He prayed, without being able to calm his
spirits. He called Louis Morand. Louis
Morand appeared.

"'My son,' he said, 'what have I done, to
be condemned to die such a horrible death?
Have pity on my white hairs! Have pity on
your father's friend! Spare my life; if you
refuse that, at least shorten the torments I
suffer.'—'Give me, then, your treasures,'
repeated Louis. 'Mercy! mercy!' cried the
old man. But Louis constantly replied, 'Give
me your treasures!'

"At last. Master Guillaume pulled a golden
bell. A thick vapour rolled before Louis's
eyes. With the vapour, the prison disappeared.
Louis beheld the sorcerer sitting opposite to
him in his velvet chair, which he had never
quitted. He also found himself in precisely
the same position he had occupied when the
necromancer said to him, 'So be it, as you
desire.' The golden bell was still vibrating
within the purple drapery. The illusion,
the effect of the sorcerer's art, was at an end.
Zano entered.

"'Zano,' said Master Guillaume, ' put down
only a single partridge to roast for supper.'"

OLD BONES.

Not many years ago there were discovered
by some labourers who were digging in the
gravel in front of St. John's College, Oxford,
some "giant's bones." They were carefully
placed in a wheel-barrow, and trundled off to
the Professor of Geology, who had the
reputation in that town of giving the best price
for all old bones. The discoverers presently
returned to their fellow workmen, with
information that the doctor had decided the
bones to be, not bones of giants, but of
elephants; and that he had given them
(although there was no brag about it in his
windows) two sovereigns more per pound
than they could have obtained at any other
house.

But how came an elephant to have been
buried in the middle of the street? The
oldest inhabitant at once decided, that
although the doctor had as usual his own
book-learned theory, the elephant was one
that had died in Mr. Wombwell's menagerie
when it was being exhibited in Paradise
Square, long, long, ago.

This was an elephant, however, that had
lived before the days of Wombwell. Long
before King Alfred had laid the foundation
stone of University College, or the Fellows
of St. John's had begun to enclose the
nightingale-haunted groves of Bagley Wood,
did this elephant, in company with others of
his class, fearing no proctor, roam over the
tract of land on which the undergraduate
now lounges, looking about to see how
he may spend paternal moneys. Times are
changed, and we ought to be thankful for it.
Great would be the annoyance suffered by
the white-throated M. A., who in eighteen
hundred and fifty-three should suddenly have
his ideas disarranged by the apparition of that
great leviathan on the top of Heddington Hill.
There is no danger of that now; it is certain
that those elephants are dead and gone, but
at the same time it is not less certain that
they died and went the way of their flesh in
the neighbourhood of Oxford; and not about
Oxford only, but throughout nearly the
whole of England. In the streets of London
the teeth and bones of elephants are
frequently turned up by the pick-axes of men
digging foundations and sewers. Elephants'
teeth have been found under twelve feet of
gravel in Gray's Inn Lane. They have been
found too at a depth of thirty feet. In digging
the grand sewer near Charles Street, on the
east of Waterloo Place, Kingsland, near
Hoxton, in eighteen hundred and six, an
entire elephant's skull was discovered
containing tusks of enormous length, as well as
the grinding teeth. In the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford, there are some vertebrae
and a thigh-bone of an enormous elephant,
which must have been at least sixteen feet
high; these bones are in the most delicate
state of preservation. They were found at
Abingdon in Berkshire, about six miles from
Oxford.

Near the same placenamely, at Lulham
during the digging of a gravel pit, not very
long ago, there were found some "giant's
bones," that were indeed human, and must
have belonged to a man of considerable size.
This discovery made a sensation at the time;
and, to quiet the agitation and the scandal
raised thereby, a coroner's inquest was held
in due form over the skeleton, ending in a
verdict, honestly arrived at by twelve true
and lawful Berkshiremen. Upon subsequent
examination by competent authorities, the
mysterious skeleton was pronounced, most
decidedly, to be that of an old Roman, who
had been buried with all his arms and military
accoutrements near the camp to which
he had probably belonged, and of which the
remains are still to be seen on the two hills
called the Dorchester Clumps. Little did his