“Where are they?”

We led him to the door.  He went in, and we softly closed it after him.  As we went up-stairs to our own room we heard deep groans of anguish.  We knew that his heart could not relieve itself by tears.  My husband read the “prayer for persons in great affliction,” and then we sat silently looking out on the peaceful sea.  In the great stillness of the house, we heard the calm wave plash up on the smiling sands, and watched the silver specks in the distance as they hovered over the blue sea.  So soft, so still, it had been the day before,—­and where we now saw the placid wave we had seen it then.  Yet there had two lives gone out, as suddenly as one quenches a lamp.

Thinking, but not speaking, we waited.  The report of a pistol in the house struck us to the heart.  I believe we felt sure, both of us, of what it must be.  He had loved her so much!  And now we were sure, that in the tension of his grief, reason had given way.  When we saw them next, there were three where two had been, in the marble calm of death.

* * * * *

THE FORMATION OF GLACIERS.

The long summer was over.  For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the Equator roamed over the world from the far South to the very borders of the Arctics.  The gigantic quadrupeds, the Mastodons, Elephants, Tigers, Lions, Hyenas, Bears, whose remains are found in Europe from its southern promontories to the northernmost limits of Siberia and Scandinavia, and in America from the Southern States to Greenland and the Melville Islands, may indeed be said to have possessed the earth in those days.  But their reign was over.  A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death.  The Elephant whose story was told at length in the preceding article was by no means a solitary specimen; upon further investigation it was found that the disinterment of these large tropical animals in Northern Russia and Asia was no unusual occurrence.  Indeed, their frequent discoveries of this kind had given rise among the ignorant inhabitants to the singular superstition already alluded to, that gigantic moles lived under the earth, which crumbled away and turned to dust as soon as they came to the upper air.  This tradition, no doubt, arose from the fact, that, when in digging they came upon the bodies of these animals, they often found them perfectly preserved under the frozen ground, but the moment they were exposed to heat and light they decayed and fell to pieces at once.  Admiral Wrangel, whose Arctic explorations have been so valuable to science, tells us that the remains of these animals are heaped up in such quantities in certain parts