The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-07-01 00:00:00

ing a leak, or other as:triage, during the-vcyage. The Act 5
Vic., s. 2. c. 17, to continue in force to the Ist May, 1845.
WHAT IS SOLITUDE ?—The songs are over, and the small
singer gone to her heather bed. There is a Highland moon !
The shield of an unfallen archangel. There are not many

stars, but those two—ay, that one—is sufficient to sustain
the glory of the night. Be not alarmed at that low, wide,
solemn, and melancholy sound. Runlets, torrents, rivers,
lochs, and seas—reeds, heather, forests, caves, and cliffs—
all are sound, sounding together a choral anthem. Gracious
heavens! what mistakes people have fallen into when writing
about solitude! A man leaves a town for a few months,
and goes with his wife and family and a travelling library
into some solitary glen. Friends are perpetually visiting
him from afar, or the neighbouring gentry leaving their cards.
while his servant boy rides daily to the post-village for his
letters and newspapers. And call you that solitude? The
whole world is with you morning, noon, and night. But
go by yourself, without book or friend, and live a month in
this hut at the head of Glenevis. Go at dawn among the
cliffs of yonder pine forest, and wait there till night hangs
her moon-lamp in heaven. Commune with your own soul
and be still. Let the images of departed years rise, phantom-
like, of their owu awful accord, from the darkness of your
memory, and pass away into the wood gloom or the moun-
tain mist. Will conscience dread such spectres ? Will you
quake before them, and bow down your head on the mossy
root of some old oak, and sob in the stern silence of the
haunted place ? Thoughts, feelings, passions, spectral deeds,
will come rushing around your lair, as with the sound of the
wings of innumerous birds.—ay, many of them like birds of
prey, to gnaw your very heart. How many duties undis-
charged ! How many pleasurers devoured ! How many sins
hugged! How many wickednesses perpetrated ! The desert
looks more grim, the heaven lowers, and the sun, like God's
own eye, stares in upon your, conscience !—Recollections of
Christopher North.
To PRESERVE CUT FLONVERS.—It is now, alas ! a long
eighteen years ago since we first saw, in the drawing-room
of a gentleman now no more, in the hot dry weather of the
dog-days, flowers preserved day after day in all their fresh-
ness, by the following simple contrivance .—A flat dish of
porcelain had water poured into it. In the water a vase of
flowers was set ; over the whole a bell glass was placed with
its rim in the water. The air that surrounded the flowers
being confined within the bell glass, was constantly moist
with water that rose into it in the form of vapour. As fast
as the water was condensed, it ran down the sides of the glass
back into the dish ; and if means had been taken to enclose
the water on the outside of the bell glass, so as to prevent its
evaporating into the air of the sitting-room, the atmosphere
around the flowers would have remained continually damp.
What is the explanation of this ? Do the flowers feed on the
viewless vapour that surrounds them ? Perhaps they do ; but
the great cause of their preserving their freshness is to be
sought in another fact. When flowers are brought into a
sitting-room, they fade, because of the dryness of the
The air of a sitting-room is usually something
than that of the garden, and always much
more so than that of a good greenhouse or stove. Flowers,
when gathered, are cut off from the supply of moisture col-
lected for them by their roots, and their mutilated stems are
far from having so great a power of sucking up fluids as the
roots have. If, then, with diminished powers of feeding,
they are exposed to augmented perspiration, as is the case in
a dry sitting-room, it is evident that the balance of gain on
one hand by the roots, add of loss on the other hand by the
whole surface, cannot be maintained. The result can only
be their destruction. Now to place them in a damp atmos-
phere is to restore their balance ; because, if their power of
sucking by their wounded ends is diminished, so is their
power of perspiring ; for a damp atmosphere will rob them
of no water. Hence they maintain their freshness. The
experiment can be tried by inserting a tumbler over a rosebud
in a saucer of water.—Gardeners' Chronicle.
MAXIMS IRONICAL.—You will observe, when you make a
bed fur your dog in the exact spot where you wish him to lie,
that the animal is always of a different opinion as to the
choice of a lodging ; if you let him alone, be will find a bed
of his own accord, but no inducement will make him enter
the one you have arbitrarily provided for him. This stroke
of natural history you will apply to your children, if you have
any ; force them into your way of thinking on all subjects,
especially when the affections rind passions are engaged ; with
the unbleared eyes of youth, compel them to squint at life
through the blue and yellow spectacles of age ; and when they
jump, as they will, out of the bed you have made for them,
tear your hair, and cry to heaven against filial ingratitude.—
Entertain a profound contempt for dress, deportment, and the
opinion of society. When you are voted, by the common
consent of civilised society, to the backwoods of America, you
will be surprised to find how completely you are at home.—
Never take the trouble to consider, of your own head, what
is proper for you to avoid or pursue. Keep on your hands
two or three good advisers, so that when your affairs go
wrong, you may have somebody to swear at.—lf you are an
author, and quarrel with your publisher, resolve magnani-
mously to annihilate him, by not writing any more. Writers
on proverbial philosophy call this line of conduct " biting a
man's nose to vex his face."—Never be civil for nothing.
When you see you can get anything by it, be as obliging as
you please. If civility costs you nothing, that is no reason
why you should sell it at the same price.—Practical jokes
show great talent and ingenuity ; and young men should take
every opportunity of practising such on all occasions. The
latest I know of, was of young rats dropped into an empty
decanter, and left on the sideboard. The butler, coming to
decant the wine, was so overcome with terror at the sight of
the decanted vermin, and being of an apoplectic habit, that
he burst a blood-vessel and died on the spot—the practical
joker pronouncing it capital fun.—Bentley's Miscellany.
THE DISGRACED ELDER.—Look at that grey-headed man
of three-score and upwards, sitting by the wayside. He was
once an elder of the kirk, and a pious man he was if ever
piety adorned the temples—" the byart haffets, wearing thin
and bare," of a Scottish peasant. What eye beheld the
many hundred steps that, one by one, with imperceptible
gradation led him down—down—down to the lowest depths
of shame, suffering, and ruin ? For years before it was
bruited about that Gabriel Mason was addicted to drink ;
his wife used to sit weeping in the spence when her sons
and daughters were out at their work in the fields ; and
the infatuated wan, fierce in the excitement of raw ardent
spirits, kept causelessly raging and storming through every
nook of that once so peaceful tenement, which for many
happy years had never been disturbed by the loud voice of
anger or reproach. His eyes were seldom turned on his un-
happy wife except with a sullen scowl or fiery wrath ; but
when they did look on her with kindness, there was also a
rueful self-upbraiding in their expression, on account of his
cruelty; and at sight of such transitory tenderness her heart
'uld overflow with forgiving affection, and her sunk eyes

mestic sorrow will conceal from the eyes and ears of men ;
and at last Gabriel Mason's name was a by-word in the
mouth of the scoffer. One Sabbath he entered the kirk in
a state of miserable abandonment, and from that day he was
no longer an elder. To regain his character seemed to him,
in his desperation, beyond the power of man and against the
decree of God. So be delivered himself up, like a slave, to
that one appetite, and in a few years his whole household
had gone to destruction. His wife was a matron, almost
in the prime of life, when she died ; but as she kept wearing
away to the other world, her face told that she felt her years
had been too many in this. Her eldest son, unable, in pride
and shame, to lift up his eyes at kirk or market, went away
to the city, and enlisted into a regiment about to embark on
foreign service. His two sisters went to take farewell of him,
but never returned; one, it is said, having died of a fever in
the infirmary, just as if she had been a pauper ; and the
other—for the sight of sin, and sorrow, and shame, and suf-
fering, is ruinous to the soul—gave herself up, in her beauty,
an easy prey to a destroyer, and doubtless has run her course
of agonies, and is now at peace. The rest of the family dropt
down, one by one, out of sight into inferior situations in far-
off places ; but there was a curse, it was thought, hanging over
the family, and of none of them did a favourable report ever
come to their native parish ; while be the infatuated sinner,
whose vice seemed to have worked all the woe, remained in
the chains of his tyrannical passion, nor seemed ever, for
more than the short term of a day, to ceaselhugging them to
image of a perfect patri-
his heart. Semblance of all that is most venerable in the
character of Scotland's peasantry ;
arch, walking out to meditate at eventide ! What a noble
dignified, and composed !
forehead ! Features how high,
There, sitting in the shade of that old w ayside tree, he seems
some religious missionary, travelling to and fro over the face
of the earth, seeking out sin and sorrow, that he may tame
them under the word of God, and change their very being
into piety and peace. Call him not a hoary hypocrite, for
he cannot help that noble, that venerable, that apostolic
aspect, that dignified figure, as if bent gently by time, loath
to touch it with too heavy a hand—that holy sprinkling over
his furrowed temples of the silver-soft and the snow-white
hair—these are the gifts of gracious nature all, and nature
will not reclaim them but in the tomb. That is Gabriel
Mason, the drunkard ! And in an hour you may, if your
eyes can bear the sight, see and hear him staggering up and
down the village,
boys
ard b cursing, swearing, preaching, praying—
stoned by blackgu
s and girls, who hound all the dogs
and curs at his heels, till, taking refuge in the smithy or the
pot-house, he becomes the sport of grown clowns, and after
much idiot laughter, ruefully mingled with sighs, and groans,
and tears, he is suffered to mount upon a table, and urged
perhaps by reckless folly to give out a text from the Bible,
which is nearly engraven on his memory—so much and so
many other things effaced for ever—and there, like a wild
itinerant, he stammers forth unintentional blasphemy, till
the liquor he has been allowed or instigated to swallow,
smites him suddenly senseless, and, falling down, he is hud-
dled off into a corner of some lumber room, and left to sleep;
"
better far for such a wretch were it to death. .Recreation
of Christopher North.