I cannot describe this scene: it seems impossible to detail slowly, and circumstance by circumstance, what took place like a flash of lightning. The singing, the shriek, the flames, and the extinguishing of them-the confusion of the theatre, all mingled together, all occurred in one moment.

"She is not hurt : sit down!" cried Tom, from the stage: "keep your seats, all of you!"

They carried Lucy out of sight, still wrapped in the coat. Robert returned a minute after, and with a trembling voice confirmed Wilson's statement-Lucy was hurt very slightly, if

at all.

We began to resume our seats; Clara seemed inclined to faint, but I consigned her to my sister, and with the vicar went to learn more particularly about the little actress. We had difficulty in gaining admittance to the room where she was. There was a crowd up the passage and round the door. Through these we made our way, and when the actors recognized the vicar's voice they let us in.

Lucy, supported by Tom's arm, was in a chair; and, kneeling by her, administering some restorative, was Mr. Sutton the doctor, who had been present at the performance that evening. She had a wild, unearthly expression of face, but was talking fast and excitedly between the sips of the liquid. "Oh, sir, I am not hurt at all!" she said to the vicar, as he entered. "He saved me-he saved me!" and she nestled closer to Tom.

"God in heaven bless you!" sobbed Mr. Owen.

"Young one," Tom said to me a little after, "go and get those people away, there's a good fellow. There will be no more play-acting tonight. See the women-folks home, will you? And some of you," he continued, "tell them from the stage the performance is all over. We don't want them here. There's a mob round

the door already."

By degrees we got the theatre empty: I saw Clara and my sister home. Clara was still faint and frightened: she seemed to think herself the heroine of the accident, and made out Lucy in some sort a culprit for having so frightened her.

I ran back to the inn as soon as I could: Tom was in the bar-parlour with some of the players: "It is all right," he said, as I entered: "thank heaven she has escaped with scarcely a burn!"

Lucy had escaped miraculously. A scar or two about her hands and arms were the only tokens of the accident: for many days, however, she was ill. The shock to the nerves was not to be surmounted immediately. I do not think she appeared again upon our little stage before the actors left; and, as they never after that performed in the village, that birth-day exhibition was her last theatrical appearance there.

(To be continued.)

Amongst the multitudinous sylvan tribes that, in so many varied ways conduce to the beauty, health, variety, and resources of our planet, not one exceeds in value and utility to man the broadcast Coniferæ, or cone-bearing family. Some one or other of which is found in every region that human enterprize has penetrated; from the mountains of Norway to the Hymalaya; from the swamps of North America to the valleys of Japan; on the hot savannahs of India, and amidst unthawing Arctic snows; clinging to the dreadful precipices, disrupted rocks, and loose masses of lava amidst the terrific desolation of Teneriffe, or towering eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea, on the bleak elevated tracks of the Mexican mountain Orizaba.

These are special situations; but, in brief, from the shores of the Pacific to the Polar regions, where Franklin found the white Spruce forming the extreme boundary of arboreous life, some branch or other of the tribe have their habitat.

Everywhere the cone-bearers are striking objects, whether rising with a savage ruggedness of outline, like the storm-beat pines of Salvator Rosa, amidst the wildest scenes, Alpine solitudes, or giving beauty to richer or more graceful ones, like the drooping Pinus excelsa, which the Hindoos, in their admiration, call Raesula (or "King of Firs"), and the lofty and elegant Deodar, which they distinguish as Devadera (the "Tree of God"), and regard as of the Divinity's especial planting; or, to come nearer home (for it may now be seen in every English arboreteum), the fair Araucaria excelsa, whose fringed and plume-like softly-tinted branches attests to the beauty of Paradise amidst the penal miseries of Norfolk Island.

Under the general name of Coniferæ are ranged the different species of fir-trees (abies), the pines (or pinus), the cedars (cupressus), the juniper (juniperus), &c.; which, however dissimilar in habit or appearance, are alike in many points of their organization, and possess in common the valuable quality of secreting a resinous sap. The fir was formerly considered a part of the genus Pinus; from which, however, it is readily distinguished by its more pyramidal form, by the leaves rising singly around the stem, instead of springing out of a shrivelled sheath by twos or threes, or in greater numbers, and by the character of the fruit, the scales of the cones being round and thin.

tion, which bears the generic name Picea, and is represented by the silver-fir Abies picea, the cones are mostly long, and generally cylindrical, and the leaves, like the last, are evergreen, two-ranked, and all turned to one side. In the third group, of which the larch (larix) is the type, the leaves grow in clusters and are deciduous. The fourth division, Cedrus, which is represented by the cedar of Lebanon, has the leaves also in clusters, but evergreen, and bears erect cones. In these groups are included some of the most valuable and important of the coniferæ.

The firs are the offspring of cold climates, and it is worth noting how admirably the pointed or pyramidal outline of these trees adapts them to bear unharmed the severe snows of the Alpine and extreme Northern regions, to which they are indigenous, and which is so distinct from the more compact or spreading form of the pines. Did their branches, instead of tapering to a spire, expand at the top, they would break under the superincumbent weight. As it is, there is no resting-place for the snow, and it falls from them, or nearly so, as soon as it descends.

Another proof of prescience and arrangement is apparent in the distribution of the most valuable of this useful tribe. Just as coal is found in the greatest quantity in those countries where the mechanical arts are most in use, and where its existence is requisite to develop them; so the Abies excelsa, or Norway spruce-fir (the most generally important of the coniferæ to the wants of civilized man), is the species which Nature has chosen to scatter broadcast in the most picturesque places of Northern Europe. All through the mountainous parts of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Russia, and Siberia, it forms great forests, and clothes the valleys and the slopes of hills; sometimes lifting its lofty stem one hundred and fifty feet in height, feathered from the top to the bottom with long, drooping, fan-like branches, of a deep grassy green.

habitants, are composed for the most part of the Abies excelsa, which having in a growing state afforded shelter to the villages and chalets scattered on the mountains, and the fertile vine-bearing fruity vallies lying amongst them, and employment to the wood-cutters and charcoal-burners, who with the herdsmen from the sparse communities of these upland regions, is thus transported to serve the arts and appliances of a more advanced civilization, after a mode ancient as the Hebrew records, where we find King Hiram replying to the demand of Solomon for cedar and timber of fir, to be used in the building of the Temple: "My servants shall bring them down from Lebanon unto the sea, and I will convey them by sea in floats unto the place that thou shalt appoint me."

In its natural state, the fir supplies materials for the rude huts of the foresters; it feeds their fires through the inclement winter months, and its branches, full of resinous sap, affords brands, by the light of which the soft wood itself is carved into the thousand toy-shapes that find their way to the bazaars and shops of London and Paris, and the provinces, the work of simple untaught peasant hands. With the return of spring, the moisture which has been received from the earth through the spongelets of the roots, is thence transmitted through the cells of the stem and branches in the shape of a resinous juice to every portion of the tree; even to the extremities of the countless needle-shaped leaves, forming its evergreen foliage; undergoing in its passage those chemical changes the cause of which no human analysis has yet accounted for. This juice oozes forth as the heat advances in clear terebinthine tears, signalling to the woodmen that the trees are suffering from a plethora of viscous sap, and that the time to relieve them by incision has arrived. The bark is then cut, and the sap flows forth, at first clear as water, but of a yellow-white colour, which gradually deepens to a citron shade, and becomes thicker the longer it runs. In the south of France, where large forests of larch exist, the turpentine harvest, when Pomet wrote, took place twice a year-in spring-time and autumn; when the countrypeople brought it in casks and goat-skins to sell to the merchants of Lyons, who disposed of it under the name of Venice turpentine, which it retains to this day.

The common turpentine of commerce exudes chiefly from the Pinus sylvestris and its varieties. A large proportion of that which we import comes from America, where there are gigantic forests of pine. The bark is pierced in March, and continues to flow till October. The balsamic odour of these forests may be perceived, freshening and giving vitality to the air for a considerable distance; and the soughing of the winds, "making religious music at night-fall in the pines," as Theodore Parker has it, is one of the grandest anthems that nature lifts up to the God who made it.

When the wandering Osteaks, Kamtchatdales, and other nomadic races of Asiatic Russia, observe the fresh and silvery foliage of the Abies alba,

or white spruce fir, they know that springs are near, and 1aise their twig huts, or pitch their tents in the neighbourhood, which promises a supply of the two great necessaries of their rude existence, fuel and water.

In Canada, we read, the boatmen use the thread-like filaments of the root of this tree to sew the bark of which their light canoes are made, while its resin is employed to make them water-tight. Unlike its congener and frequent neighbour, Abies nigra, the timber of the white spruce is inferior, and of comparatively stunted growth. The black spruce, on the contrary, is very valuable, and is extensively used in America for ship building, though in this country its principal and comparatively insignificant employment is for making packingcases for our manufactures. It is the young shoots of this species which supplies the valuable anti-scorbutic extract known as essence of spruce -an important article of commerce, concentrating the fresh healthful juices of the ever-green forests and the vigorous earth, for the wanderers on the acred ocean, and preserving their frames from the physical sufferings which the want of vegetables and fresh provisions formerly added to the perils of the old navigators. Besides this use, the essence of spruce has other preventive and remedial qualities, and holds in modern pharmacy the reputation which Shakspere's courtier lord has bestowed on parmacite: it is "the sovereignest thing on earth for an inward bruise." Nor are the other members of Abies less valuable contributors to medicine, manufactures, and the arts. The inspissated leaves of one kind affords the gum in chemistry known as Frankincense; and for those valuable products, Burgundy pitch, Canada balsam, the resin of commerce, and various varnishes, we are indebted to the same useful family.

In Louis the Fourteenth's reign, all the processes by which the terebinthiate extract became converted to these commercial substances took place in bye places for fear of fire, usually within the precincts of the pine woods themselves; thus the forest of Cuges, about four leagues from Marseilles, was in those days famous for the manufacture of the oil of turpentine, of colophony, and zopissa, by which euphonious names the king's druggist distinguishes resin and black pitch.

Here the liquid dripping from the trees was taken straight to the alembic, and gave up its oily particles in distillation. Here, where they had carpetted the earth with fir needles from season to season, and ripened their cones for many a year, the green branches passed through slow combustion into charred billets for lamp black, exuding their resinous juices in thick pitch, passing away into new forms and a new element, or entering into other combinations totally distinct from their primary condition.

In the kingdom of Naples, and in other mountainous parts of southern Europe, the silver fir (Abies picea), beloved by poets and painters, sung in the undying verse of Ovid,

The true utility of pine planting, however, will be found in the value of the timber for commercial purposes ship building, house building, agricultural and domestic carpentry; in fact, scarcely a branch of trade but is in some way indebted to the coniferæ. Of late years the construction of railways has greatly increased the consumption of pine wood for sleepers and other purposes; and when it is borne in mind that the first have to be renewed every seven years, and new ones laid down over the thousands of miles of lines that reticulate the surface of Great Britain, this single use opens a successional demand for the timber, which had better be supplied by the home market than from those of neighbouring nations; while the extended propagation and culture of the trees would afford additional occupation in our rural districts.

The genus most valued for the purposes enumerated is the one which nature has herself bestowed on us — the hardy, tall-growing, picturesque Scotch fir (Pinus sylvestris), proper to the storm-swept, solitary heights of Abernethy and Cairngorm, as the cedars to Lebanon; and, like them, holding arborary dominion there in an unbroken succession from the Flood. But the species, like the people of the north, has the tendency to take root and flourish in every variety of soil-neither sand, gravel, peat, nor clay forms any impediment to its thriving. A chalky soil, or one bedded on red sand or iron-stone, stunts its growth for a timber tree, but everywhere else it is at home. Its favourite situation when transferred from its hardy mountain home, or the substratum of rocks and sandy places in which it naturally grows, to the luxury of cultivated life, is the valley or the open slope of a hill side, where there is a good depth of subsoil and plenty of room for the feeding of its enterprizing spongelets. In such situations it attains perfection in fifty years, so that the individual who has planted the seed may himself reap the golden profits of his prudent sowing, and bequeath a similar benefit to his children at half that age.

In the meanwhile other profits are derivable from pine plantations in the shape of fire wood, turpentine, tar, and pitch; even the cones are gathered by the Norfolk children, and sold for fuel; and the fir needles themselves replenish the strength of the soil, and make the best top-dressing for the growing trees.

Unfortunately for the introduction of new species, the cheapness, hardihood, and utility of the Scotch fir have hitherto prevented arboriculturists from experimentalizing to any great purpose with other varieties which unite those qualities with others equally valuable; for the uses of the various species seem almost as diversified as the species themselves. Hardy as

is the Scotch fir, the Pinus pinaster (or Cluster pine) is still more so, and it possesses in an equal degree the fertilizing properties of the larch; so that in France large tracts of barren land have been reclaimed by means of this pine, and many hundreds of acres of heath-land on the estate of Mr. Peters, of Norfolk, on which Pinus sylvestris perished, is now covered with plantations of this valuable and beautiful tree, many of which at thirty years old were upwards of eighty feet in height, and estimated to yield five loads of timber each; one (the Swiss Stone pine) also hardy, with very fine wood, and more fragrant than any of the species, retaining its odour for many years, is so offensive to moths, bugs, &c., that they are not to be found in the rooms where it is.

The cones of the Pinus Cembra yields an edible kernel, which is said to afford an excellent oil; this is also a hardy kind, and Douglas, the discoverer of the Pinus Lambertiana (an enormous tree rising up two hundred feet in height on the sandy plains of New Albion, where no other vegetation exists), tells us that the resin which exudes from it when partly burned loses its usual flavour, and becomes of a sweet taste, and is then used by the natives as a substitute for sugar. The seeds are also eaten by the natives, both raw and roasted, and even the resident Spaniards have them served up as a dessert.

Fine specimens of this vegetable giant exist in England, but it does not appear to have been tried out of arboretums and gardens, though in its natural state it is found scattered through sandy valleys and plains, which would appear incapable of supporting vegetation of any kind.

Looking at what has already been done by individual enterprize in the way of introducing new species into Great Britain, and the promising aspect of plantations and pinetums in various parts of the country, an imaginative person might conceive of Hindostan, and other tropical regions, as the hot-beds of our supplies in the hereafter, when a more rapid transit not only of seeds but of seedlings will enable us rather to transplant than to import them.

It is certain that to many kinds this change of climate will prove beneficial. Few of the coniferæ of hot countries are good timber-trees; the oily spiritous viscous juices to which so much of the excellence of the wood is attributable passes away by evaporation, and leaves it loose and dry. In these moist, cool regions, another habit might ensue, and the virtue of a close firm texture and durability be added to height and beauty of foliage and outline.

It is a law of vegetable life that the necessities of man shall be substitutes to them for hands and feet and power of locomotion; he seeks them out for the help they afford him, gathers them from all parts of creation, and, acting on the hints that Nature gives, of the soil and situation adapted for their several requirements, brings the best of them within his grasp, and, generally, to the advantage of both. Under the natural arrangement of the coniferæ, the most practically valuable of them are those within

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