of the earth’s attraction.  In the steady oscillations of this little instrument no less a power is concerned than that grand elementary force of nature, that is able to uphold the orbitual movements of massive worlds.  In the one case, the majestic presence is revealed in its Atlantean task of establishing the firm foundations of the universe; in the other, in its Saturnian occupation of marking the lapse of time.  In the planetary movements, material attraction bends onward impulse round into a circling curve; in the pendulum oscillations, material attraction alternately causes and destroys onward impulse.  In the former it acts by a steady sweep; in the latter by recurring broken starts.  The reason of the difference is simply this:  the planetary bodies are free to go as the two powers, attraction and impulse, urge them.  The weight of the pendulum is prevented from doing so by the restraining power of the string or rod, that holds it bound by a certain invariable interval to a point of suspension placed farther than the weight from the source of attraction.  A pendulum, in all its main features, is a terrestrial satellite in bonds—­unable to fall to the surface of the earth, and unable to get away and circle round it, yet influenced by a resistless tendency to do both.  Its vibrations are its useless struggles to free itself from the constraint of its double chains.

THE COUNTRY COUSIN.

The village of Westbourne was what Americans would call a stylish place, though situated deep in the heart of Derbyshire.  Most of its houses had green palings and flowers in front; there was a circulating library, a milliner’s shop, and a ladies’ boarding-school, within its bounds; and from each extremity of its larger and smaller street—­for Westbourne had only two—­outlying cottages of various names dotted the surrounding fields.  The largest of these, and decidedly the handsomest, belonged, as the door-plate set forth, to Mr Harry Phipps Bunting.  It had been called Bunting Cottage, ever since the late possessor—­after having made what his neighbours esteemed a fortune, by himself keeping the circulating library, and his spouse the boarding-school—­built it by way of consolation for the second year of his widowhood, and retired there from business to hold high gentility in his latter days with his only daughter and heiress, Miss Jenny.  At least half of Westbourne believed that in the said arrangements Mr Bunting had his eye on a second and somewhat superior match:  in short, those good people averred that the handsome cottage was neither more nor less than a substantial snare for Mrs Phipps, the widow of a captain and second-cousin of a baronet, who, with a small annuity and an only son, lived in the odour of great rank and fashion in a neat brick-house at the other end of the village.