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then living at Cairnbeddie, or Caer Beth, the castle of Macbeth, in St. Martin's, where he is said to have resided for the first ten years of his reign. He consulted the witches because he began to feel insecure in Cairnbeddie. He met them at a place still pointed out in St. Martin's, called, "the witches' stone." Tradition says there were only two witches; that they were among the most famous weird sisters in the kingdom; that one of them lived in the adjoining parish of Collace, and the other at a place called the Cape, not far from Dunsinane House. Shakespeare makes Forres the scene of the interview.

The immediate cause of the breach between Macbeth and Macduff, which ended fatally for the former, was connected with the building of Dunsinane Castle. Macbeth summoned his barons to assist in the work by supplying draught oxen to carry the materials up the hill. When he was

inspecting the operations one day he observed a pair of oxen so done up that they sank beneath their load. On ascertaining that they belonged to Macduff, he threatened to put his own neck into the yoke for furnishing such worthless cattle. When Macduff heard of the king's purpose he fled from court, pursued by the king. When Macbeth reached the thane's castle in Fife, and summoned Lady Macduff to surrender to him and deliver up her husband, she pointed to a white sail on the sea and said: "Yonder goes Macduff to the court of England. You will never see him again till he comes back with young Prince Malcolm, to pull you down from the throne and to put you to death. You will never be able to put your yoke, as you threatened, on the Thane of Fife's neck." Macbeth murdered Lady Macduff and her children, and returned.

According to Shakespeare, Macbeth died at Dunsinane. "It suited better the purpose of the dramatist," says Dr. Marshall, "that he should die there." In point of fact, after his defeat at Birnam, he fled northward by the back of the Sidlaws, closely pursued, fought another battle between Meigle and Newtyle, and, though beaten a second time, escaped to the north and continued the conflict for two years, but was slain at last by Macduft at Lumphanan* in Aberdeenshire. His cairn is on the brow of a hill about a mile above Lumphanan Kirk. Other memorials of the continued conflict exist in the name of the district where the second battle was fought, viz., Belmont-i.e., the mount of the combat-and in a tumulus called Belliduff, where, a local tradition says, Macbeth was buried after Macduff slew him. Many untrustworthy traditions were collected by Sir John Sinclair, who visited Dunsinane Hill when he was eighteen years old, and published in his "Statistical Account of Scotland," but "if there is anything certain," says Dr. Marshall, "about Macbeth, it is that he was slain by Macduff at Lumphanan."

J. K.

There is a station at Lumphanan on the Deeside Railway, between Aberdeen and Ballater.

THE

HE descent of the colossal statue of Wellington from its lofty position at Hyde Park Corner attracted much notice. The mass of metal weighed about fifty tons, and the shape might seem awkward for moving, the length of the horse from snout to end of tail being above twenty-five feet. The statue was brought down to the ground, slowly it is true, but steadily and safely, as it stood. How was it done? By hydraulic power, an energy in constant and extensive use in this "age of the engineers," but to which more than usual attention was directed on account of its use on that occasion.

Very few persons know anything about this force, and although many parts of London are permeated by it to a surprising extent, so silent and undemonstrative is it in its action, that most persons are quite unaware of its existence. It lies hidden in great strength at most of the main entrances to London-the railway termini and the docks and wharves; and the manufacturing and warehousing portions of the metropolis, as well

as its principal clubs, hotels, public offices, and institutions, are all more or less employers of it.

Take Paddington Station, for instance. Few persons can have had occasion to wait here for a quarter of an hour without witnessing some of its feats, though very possibly they may not have recognised hydraulic force as the agent. A square yard or two of the wooden platform suddenly begins to rise into the air, and is followed by a lamp-cleaner and a barrow-load of lamps, which come out of the shades below up to the level of the platform. The man pushes his loaded barrow off the lift, wheels another barrow into it, gives a slight signal, sinks down through the mysterious aperture, and disappears, and the original piece of platform closes over him. There is no noise, no puffing of steam or rattle of machinery. The apparatus comes up as silent as one of Macbeth's apparitions, and as silently disappears. Again, an engine, weighing a good many tons, has to be transferred to the next line of rails. It is run on to a small movable section of the line, and the

invisible and silent agent gets a slight hint from a lever, and over they go-engine and railway together just as a turntable moves with an engine upon it, only the whole load moves off sideways. Or, again, passengers for some particular train have to start from that farther platform there, and there is no getting to it without crossing the line. A wave of the magic wand in the shape of that lever there, and a convenient bridge rolls out from under the platform and spans the double line of rails. Coal is required up in the general offices over the departure platform. Just put it upon this lift or anything else that is too heavy to be carried upstairs-and give the word, and up it goes! To see what our silent giant can do in the lifting way, however, we must go out to the goods depôt at the back of the passenger station and see the deft and handy way in which he deals with coal and goods by the truckload. Turntables are spinning round here like so many teetotums-by hydraulic power all of them-and that endless chain there is also in motion by the same force. Hitch on to the moving chain that truck there, together with its load-it weighs perhaps ten or twelve tons, but never mind, a ton or two will make no difference-and the chain will run on just as though it had nothing hanging on to it. Haul the truck and its burden on to this lift, and -heigh, presto!-up it goes to the railway on the platform overhead, where the same giant lies in wait for it, grapples hold of it, drags it away to be emptied, and then drops it quietly down to the ground level, to run off and be filled again. All sorts of lifts and cranes, and revolving tables and capstans, are to be seen at work at this enormous depôt, and when we have sufficiently wondered at the vast strength and singularly easy tractability of this water giant we will go back again to the vicinity of the departure platform and see what he can do in a lighter department of activity.

Creep down into this little subterranean chamber and examine this beautiful little engine, with its three pistons at work in a manner which reminds you of the three legs on a Manx halfpenny. There is a little hissing and a little noise of motion, but not much. It works very smoothly and steadily, with perhaps four or five horse power, and the motive force is just the same as in all the other work. That same versatile agent that has been lifting and pulling and pushing in all directions is here printing all the tickets issued on the Great Western Railway.

We have by no means exhausted the list of the achievements of this potent operative, nor have we, as we shall presently show, selected its most astonishing feats; but, before multiplying illustrations of what hydraulic power can do, we ought perhaps to endeavour to afford our unscientific readers some account of the power itself.

Everybody who has dipped a little into elementary science must be familiar with the "hydrostatic bellows." Let there be a circular bellows, without any opening either at top or bottom, and quite watertight, and suppose a pipe passing through the bottom board. Now, if we pour water down the tube we shall find that the fluid shows a determination to rise in the bellows just

as high as it does in the tube. It will endeavour to keep the same level in both, and it will do so too, even though we put a considerable weight on the top board; and the greater the size of the bellows the greater the diameter of it-the heavier will be the weight it will lift, quite irrespective of the size of the tube. The higher the water rises in the tube the greater the pressure it will exert in the bellows. The fluid in the tube will exert a pressure equal to its own weight upon the whole body of water in the larger part of the apparatus. It will exert a pressure in all directions, and every part of the inside surface of the bellows-top and bottom and sides—will be under a force exactly the same as the dead weight of the water exerts at the same point of elevation in the tube. The tube may have but an internal diameter of a quarter of an inch, and the bellows may have a diameter of a quarter of a yard or a quarter of a mile, but every little section of the inside surface of that bellows equal to the inside size of the pipe will be under exactly the same pressure as that which the column of water in the pipe exerts upon the bottom of it. There will be a pressure exerted all over the inside of the bellows and, what is more, if we carry away horizontal pipes in all directions from the inside of that bellows and let the water into them, exactly the same pressure will be exerted over every portion of those pipes, however far they extend.

Now this hydrostatic bellows affords perhaps the simplest possible illustration of the principle of all the hydraulic machinery in existence. However complicated it may appear, we have here the principle of it all. At Paddington, instead of the bellows, they have a huge iron cylinder, with a piston moving up and down in it under a tremendous weight, and instead of the perpendicular pipe, which must be filled in order that the weight of water may exert pressure on the fluid in the bellows, they have a forcing-pump, driven by a steam-engine. The engine-or engines, rather, for they have two pairs each of sixty-horse power, and each pair working alternately-the engines are set going, and water is driven into the cylinder beneath the piston, which slowly rises under a burden of seventy-five tons, the force applied by the engines being multiplied by as many times as the diameter of the cylinder is larger than the pipe which the engines are pumping through. Supposing, for instance, that the cylinder is ten times as large as the pipes from the engines, then if those engines are working with a force of one ton, the force exerted in driving up the piston in the cylinder will be ten tons, and if the cylinder is seventy-five times as large as the pipes, the piston will go up under a weight of nearly seventyfive tons. Of course, the pressure on every square inch of the cylinder is tremendous, and the same pressure will be exerted throughout the whole system of pipes which extend from the cylinder, and which we have seen at work all over the station.

Now, then, as we have fairly introduced our giant, we will again proceed to show what he can do and what he has done.

A very curious application of the power was that embodied in the Bessemer steamship, which, it may be remembered, was built a few years ago for the Channel passage, with a view to the overcoming of sea-sickness. In the middle of the ship was a handsome saloon seventy feet long, and fitted up in the most luxuriant style. The whole apartment was suspended from a single pivot over the top of it, so as to swing freely in any direction. Hydraulic pistons were so applied to this dangling mass that it could instantly be moved in any direction, or, what was practically the same thing, could be held perpendicular when the vessel, of which it was the heart, rolled and pitched in all directions. A man stood with a spirit-level before him, and with a handle, something like that of a copying-press, in his hand. So ready and powerful was the tremendous force under his control that the least movement of his hand was sufficient to swing, not only a room seventy feet long, but all its furniture and a crowd of people in it. The ship did not answer the expectations that had been formed for it, and has since been broken up, but the display of hydraulic power on board of it in this and in other ways was very interesting.

There was another unfortunate enterprise in which the same force was exhibited in an equally striking way. The steam-ferry across the Thames near the Thames Tunnel, which was opened by the Lord Mayor some years ago, lies by the side of the river now, rather a melancholy instance of unsuccessful engineering. The ferry was intended to carry over vehicles as well as foot-passengers, and in order to get vehicles on board at all states of the tide a rising and falling platform was provided. This platform was in fact a piece of roadway built on hydraulic pistons. As many waggons, and carts, and horses, and men as it would hold would perhaps be crowded upon it, and then a man, sitting in a little glass-fronted box, would pull a lever and down the whole roadway would sink to the level of the floating ferry, or he would pull another lever and the whole would rise as smoothly and quickly as it had gone down.

All the London docks are large employers of the hydraulic power. Their cranes, and lifts, and dock gates are all, or nearly all, actuated by it. The East and West India Docks, for instance, have an enormous system at command. For the pumping power they have nine huge boilers in their chief engine-house, each boiler being about 24 feet long and 9 feet in diameter. They have six engines, with a total of 360 horse-power, and their "accumulator "-that is to say, the cylinder we have been talking of-is under a pressure of 90 tons, while a second one, held in reserve, has a weight of 75 tons. These burdens are driven up by the engines to a height of 24 feet, and they put every square inch of pipe connected with the cylinders, over which they move, under a pressure of 750 pounds. The power this gives is very great, yet it is controlled with the greatest possible ease. Creep with us up this steep ladder into one of the many little boxes dotted about the quays from which a crane is projecting over the ships moored below. It is a perfect maze of heavy chains and

wheels, and pistons and pipes, but the management of the whole of it can be learned in two minutes, and very likely the man who is working it has not the least idea of what the power he is manipulating really is. He stands in one corner looking out at his crane dropping or lifting some hogshead of sugar, or it may be a cage with an elephant in it, or a bundle of buffalo hides, and swinging round from ship to shore, and from shore to ship. He can make that crane do just what he pleases-move just as he wishes it, and all by a very slight pull of a chain. He stands with each hand on a chain and his foot on a sort of pedal, and with movements involving scarcely any exertion on his part he can perfectly command a power capable of lifting and swinging round into any desired position a load of eleven tons.

In describing the coffee warehouses of these docks some time ago allusion was made to the very curious machines then just introduced, but only partially adopted, for beating the barrels of coffee, in order to get into them the proper quantity. The coffee, as we then explained, has all to be turned out in heaps as it reaches the warehouses here, and afterwards put back into the receptacles in which it was imported. It is very often found that a little moisture of the air has caused the berry to swell, and it requires some effort to put in the same quantity that was taken out. It used to be the custom to shovel the coffee into the barrel, and let labourers shake it down by beating the sides of the receptacle with mallets. The method now adopted is to fill the barrel and wheel it under a hydraulic machine, from which a number of iron-headed mallets are suspended in a ring. The barrel is put in the middle of this ring, and a small wheel is turned round, alternately cutting off and turning on the water power. The result is that the mallets keep springing out and falling heavily back upon the barrel, and thus do an amount of beating in about a minute which it used to take five men six minutes to do. Since writing our account of the coffee warehouse here, this system has been extended, and there are now a dozen or so of these appliances.

The opening and shutting of the dock gates by hydraulic power most persons have witnessed, and the turning of a capstan by the same versatile agent is also familiar enough to most of us. There is, however, one application of hydraulics in these docks very curious and interesting, and of which few persons know anything. It is an employment of hydraulic force for the purpose of fire extinction. It is very generally known that the pressure of the ordinary mains of the water companies is insufficient to carry water to any great height. Even where the pressure is considerable, and the first outrush of water is all that could be desired, the outrush itself of course instantly relieves the pressure, and the force of the stream dwindles. To remedy this the East and West India Docks Company have called in the assistance of their high-pressure mains. These mains, as we have said, are under a strain of 750 pounds to the square inch, and if the attempt were made to bring them to play upon a building on fire in any volume they would possibly extinguish the

fire by knocking down the building. It has been found practicable, however, to introduce into the current from the ordinary mains a very small jet of water under the high pressure of the accumulators. The smallest possible jet introduced into the middle of the stream issuing from the ordinary hydrants has a very surprising effect. It seems to lend its own tremendous energy to the whole column of water by which it is surrounded, and the hose, which was perhaps laboriously heaving the water to a height of, say thirty feet, is at once enabled to hurl a powerful current up seventy or eighty feet.

There is another very odd application of this motive power over the other side of the river in the Surrey Docks, where grain is warehoused on a system more common, we believe, in America than in this country. A most singular method of carrying the grain from one part of the dock granaries to another is in operation here. Broad india-rubber bands, or travellers," as they are called, are made to run from point to point, and upon these bands the grain is poured. Curious to say, it does not run off the sides of the band, but speeds along with it, and is shot off at the end into a receptacle, from which perhaps it again sets out on another journey to some other point, not unfrequently running up hill as well as down hill or horizontally.

This, however, can hardly be considered a display of hydraulic power, which is merely the motor of the machinery.

A little lower down the river, however, we may find a display with a vengeance. The cranes in the East and West India Docks lift, as we have said, some eleven tons. They have, by the way, engines that will lift thirty tons, but they are actuated by steam. Even these thirty-ton cranes, however, are mere pigmies compared with the giant at Woolwich that was originally set up to lift the 80-ton gun when it was supposed that eighty tons would be, for a long time, at any rate, the utmost limit of gunnery. Very soon, however, came a gun weighing a hundred tons, and the machine which had actually picked up eighty tons of solid metal had to be strengthened and its general constitution reinforced for a greater feat. It can now safely be employed to lift 105 tons, and that merely by the power of water under pressure. Here, at any rate, it may be supposed that we have reached the very limit of mechanical strength as embodied in any one engine. Nothing of the kind. There is a crane at Liverpool which makes even the Woolwich engine look rather a puny affair. It will lift 160 tons of dead weight. There is another of the same kind at Bombay, and Sir William Armstrong, whose single energy and genius seem to have given birth to all this vast development of mechanical power, has recently erected another on the same principle and of the same power at Spezzia. The firm of Sir William Armstrong and Co. have indeed set up a piece of hydraulic machinery for "squeezing molten iron for the manufacture of guns which renders these cranes almost ridiculous in their puny impotency. "A hundred and sixty tons!" exclaims the "squeezer," contemptuously; "Pooh!

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look here," and he drives slowly out a sort of piston on to a glowing mass of metal with a force of 700 tons!

It was this same power-only a good many engines in combined effort-which lifted the two Menai Strait tubes into position, each tube weighing 2,000 tons, and requiring to be hoisted a hundred feet into the air. And it was this same power which Brunel used to drive the "Great Eastern" steamship sideways down from the stocks into the water, though she weighed ten or twelve thousand tons, and though one of the hydraulic rams employed burst under a pressure of 12,000lb. to the square inch!

We may add that it blows the bellows of the lately renovated great organ at the Crystal Palace; and it has just been applied by Messrs. Maudslay, Sons, and Field, the well-known engineers, for starting the splendid new engines they have lately supplied to the Royal Mint for making all our money.

Thus water, which, when under no strain or pressure of circumstances, yields to the tread of a fly, only requires the stern compulsion of necessity to enable it to perform feats of which even the most formidable of fabled giants never so much as dreamed.

The Amen of the Rocks.

THE Venerable Bede, with age grown blind,

Still went abroad to preach the new evangel. From town to town, village to village, journeyed

The saintly elder, with a lad for guide,
And preached the word with youthful zeal and fervour ;
And once the lad led him along a vale,

All scattered o'er with mighty moss-grown boulders.
More thoughtless than malicious, quoth the urchin,
Here, reverend Father, many men have come,
And all the multitude await thy sermon."

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The blind old man stood upright at his speech,
And spake his text—explained it—thence digressed,
Exhorted, warned, reproved, and comforted,
So earnestly, that tears of love and joy

Ran down his cheeks, and on his long grey beard.
Then, as was meet, he ended with "Our Father,
Thine is the kingdom, Thine the power, and Thine
The glory is for ever and for ever."
Then came a thousand, thousand answering voices-
"Yea, reverend Father, Amen and Amen."
Then, terrified, the boy fell:down repentant,
Confessing to the saint his ill behaviour.

"Son," said the holy man, "didst thou read never That stones themselves shall cry if men be silent? Play thou no more, my son, with things divine. God's Word is powerful, and cuts more sharp Than any two-edged sword. And if it be That man towards the Lord is stony-hearted, A human heart shall wake in stones, and witness." GELLERT.

D°

ORSET folk, if they are not witty, try to show themselves so, and enjoy pure fun of witty waggery, or "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of playfulness, or harmlessly droll mishaps. Although it is not so easy to pun in Dorset as it is in book English, since it has fewer than has English of twins of words of the same meaning, yet Dorset folk have a pun or two of their own. The mole (wond) is in Dorset wont, pronounced as want. One asks his neighbour, in speaking of an oncoming sale of some land, 'Why do Mr. A. zell his land ?" The answer may be, "Because the wonts (wants) be in it "-want of money.

I have heard this conundrum of the Dorset bluevinny (blue-mouldy) cheese, which is made of twice skimmed milk, and therefore will not run or melt from fattiness.

"Why is blue-vinny cheese like a brave soldier?" "Because it will stand fire and never run."

Many years ago, when practical joking was not uncommon in the upper ranks, one that was played off on a Dorsetshire man was capped by a small tit for tat, grounded on the two meanings of to set (1) to plant a wort, or shrub, and (2) to set a razor to a good edge. Mr. Fane sat in Parliament for Dorchester, and was found out in London by a merry barber, one of his constituents, who lived on the east side of Cornhill, in Dorchester. Mr. Fane, who was in merry mood, begged that he might be allowed to pay his constituent's fare, and book him a place by a night coach to Dorchester. He was very happy with

[By permission from Pouncy's "Dorset Illustrated."

But,

Mr. Fane's mark of esteem, and made himself snug for a ride to the west; but in the morning he was put down, with most bewildered mind, at Dorchester in Oxfordshire, which he boldly told the Dorchester people he never would be convinced was Dorchester at all, unless they could show him Cornhill and the town pump. alas! he was too soon convinced that Mr. Fane had cheated him. It is thought that he was no loser in cash, but yet he yearned to pay his representative in kind, and was too happy at last to receive from him a pair of razors to be set, on a promise that he should have them on his next call in the town. "Are my razors set ?" was Mr. Fane's inquiry within a week or two. "Ees, sir. They be a-zet, but I don't think they be a-come up," was the answer. "Come up? What do you mean ?" He had set them in his garden.

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Did you hit the bird you shot at?"

"I made the feathers fly" is the answer of one from whom a bird has flown away unhit with all of his feathers on him.

"How did you come?" (meaning, did you ride or walk) a man may ask another.

"Outzide ov a hoss" might be the answer if he had come on foot.