The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1850-08-27 00:00:00

and the

bmit willingly to the laws of r

country." Soon after the culprit was turned off, the
crowd, which behaved with decency throughout, began

quietly to disappear.
CAUSE OF WET WEATHER.—It is not likely that you
should recollect a poor, harmless, honest old man, who
used to deliver the letters when you were at• Keswick ;
Joseph Littledale is his name, and, if you remember him,
it will be by a chronic, husky cough, which generally
announced his approach. Poor Littledale has this day
explained the cause of our late rains, which have prevailed
for the last five weeks, by a theory which will probably be
as new to you as it is to me. " I have observed," he

` that, when the moon is turned upward, we have
!ether after it ; but if it is turned down, then we

have a wet season

it is turned down, it holds no water, like a basin, you
d then down it all comes." There, Grosvenor,
hile before the march of intellect shall
which I find, upon

it will be

y as or!

nat as this

Inquiry, to be the popular opinion here.—Life of Southey.
TOPOGRAPHY AND TEMPERANCE.—" The fact is, sir,
public-houses are the great landmarks of the country.
Whether you are benighted in a Northumberland moor,
lost in a Devonshire lane (the one thing in nature which
it is well known has no end) ; whether you are cast away
in a river ; left without a clue on Salisbury Plain ; or re-
duced to a state of topographical despair in a Warwick-
shire wood; the first person you meet, be it lie or she,
gentle or simple, old or young, a genius or idiot—will
assuredly convince you that the only rmn•al means of di-

recting you are the names and signs of places of public.
entertainment. 'Go on straight till you come to the
Green Lion, then turn to the left close to the Goat and
Compasses, and after you have passed the Plough, bear
off to the right; and, opposite the Jolly Gardeners, you

will see a lane : go down that lane till you have to cross a
brook by the side of the Bottle and Bagpipes, and when
you have got to the Three Whistles and Cockchafer fur-
ther down, get over a stile next to t
key-cock, take the first to the left

he Tinker anc
and that's it.'

were the directions by which I found my old friend,
Groggles, last Monday. Without the signs I have men-
tioned I never should have found Groggles to this day.
Unless, sir, they wish the topography of our native land
to be utterly confused, and desire to make voluntary
locomotion impossible (I call railways compulsory travel-
ling, for you must go where they choose to take you), I
do entreat of them to leave us their signs, whatever they
do with the inns. Why not move the former to stand
sponsors to their new-fangled watering-places ? Take
the Puncheon of Rum from what used to be the post-
ing-house (before stem blew post-horses off the road,)
and stick it on the parish pump. Let wayside wells be
ornamented with effigies of Topers' Heads ; transfer the
Barrel of Beer from the village inn to the village foun-
tain, and the Jolly Full Bottle from the alehouse to the
conduit. Then, when a man comes to the picture of
three drunken soldiers, and the inscription The Rendez-
vous,' lie will know it means a reservoir, or regular meet-
ing of the waters. "The Punch-bowl,' in golden letters,
will indicate a water-trough ; the Black Jack' would
give a significant licence for water to be drunk on the
premises; and the Sir John Barleycorn' would indicate
that a good supply of the ale of our first parent is not far
off."—Dickens's Household Words.

ADDISON AND THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.—It is
curious to observe how often that which is regarded as
fantastical and chimerical in one age, acquires the cha-
racter of cold reality in another: "Strada, in one of his
prolusions," says Addison, "gives an account of a &ii-
merical correspondence between two friends by the help
of a certain loadatone, which had such a virtue in it, that
if touched by two several needles, when one of these
needles so touched began to move, the other, though at
ever so greit a distance, moved at the same time and in
the same manner. He tells us that two friends, being
each of them possessed of these needles, made a kind of
dial-plate, inscribing it with twenty-four 'Letters' in the
same manner:to the hours of the day aro marked upon
the ordinary dial-plate. They then fixed one of the
needles on each of these plates in such a manner that it
could move round without impediment, so as to .point to
any one of the twenty. four letters. Upon their separat-
ing from one another into distant countries, they agreed
to withdraw themselves punctually into their closets at a
certain hour of the day, and to converse with one another
by this their invention. Accordingly, when they were
some hundred miles asunder, each of thetn shut himself
up in his closet at the time appointed, and immediately
cast his eye upon the dial-plate. If he had a mind to
write anything to his friend, he directed his needle to
every letter that formed the words that he had occasion
for, making a little pause at the end of every word or
sentence, to avoid confusion. The friend, in the mean-
while, saw his own sympathetic needle moving of itself
to every letter which that of his correspondent pointed at.
By this means, they talked together across a whole con-
tinent, and conveyed their thoughts to one another in an
instant over cities or mountains, seas or deserts. If
M. Scudery, or any other writer of romance (continues
Addison), had introduced a necromancer, who is generally
in the train of a knight-errant, making a present to two
lovers of a couple of those above-mentioned needles, the
reader would not have been a little pleased to have seen
them corresponding with one another when they were
guarded by spies and watches, or separated by castles and
adventures. In the meanwhile, if ever this invention
should be revived or put in practice, I would propose that
on the lover's dial-plate, there should be written, not
only the twenty-four letters, but several entire words,
which have always a place in passionate epistles—as flames
darts, die, language, absence, Cupid, hearts, eyes, hang.
drown, and the like. This would very much abridge the
lover's pains in this way of writing a letter, as it would
enable him to express the most useful and significant
words with a single turn of the needle." Addison wrote
this in 1711. Had he lived a hundred and forty years
later, he would have seen not only the sympathetic needles
of Strada, but even the alphabetic dial literally realised.
—Dublin Univireily Magazine.