Journal an exact account of the number of his teeth and a description of his 'taking notice wonderful for his age-which, no doubt, he did in the Jewel Boom, with that contented cocking of the eye, he must have been a blasé baby, ready for anything, and past being astonished. to genius, for the readers thereof, a glove of steel becomes a gage. In the Horse Armoury, the ladies are partial to the mahogany-faced little Prince Charles in full armour. They stand before that staring boy, who looks, buried in awkward accoutrements, as uncomfortable as a wooden boy could look; and they chorus in whispers about his looking nice, till we don't wonder that his wooden visage has assumed for ever a pale mahogany or terra-cotta blush. Other ladies ejaculate Noble creatures !' but whether in reference to the varnished and polished horses or the wooden-faced warriors astride thereon, they leave undecided. One of the countless crowd of respectable, comfortablydressed working-men and sailors, has a different opinion at least about one of the mounted heroes; for he criticises the cumbrous armour of bluff King Hal as he would a suit of clothes, and looking at the metal-laden horseman, votes it But remarks made aloud are rare. In the long Armoury, under the amber and purple light of the small windows, and advancing up a metallic vista, with ungainly helmeted horsemen in endless array, among a confusion of the debris of medieval battle, a sense of awe hushes the sightseers; they look with serious faces and talk with bated breath, as they do in no other public exhibition-not even in cathedral aisles. Those that reverently admired the Crown Jewels are still more abashed before this charge of labelled steel cavalry. They hinted over yonder that it was a swindle to show them a model of the Koh-i-noor, and that it beant much to look at.' But there are no irreverent remarks in the dim Armoury; no shadow of incredulity is provoked even by the startling placards that bid us believe that those weapons of Charles II.'s time are the 'spears of pikemen eighteen feet long!' How has our army degenerated since the days of those giants! But though the announcement is made again and again, we hear no light remark upon so startling a subject. For interest to the crowd, nothing can vie with the jewels-except the dungeons. Within an immense round glass screen to keep out the dust, and a barricade of iron bars to keep out the hands, is spread tier above tier such a vision of gold as exists nowhere else out of the Arabian Nights; and at the top of all lies, bright with superb jewels, the crown of the noblest Lady in the land. All round this huge cage, the eyes and noses are loyally and admiringly poked between the bars; and the glittering glory within is not to be spoken of in common language or inspected save with reverent eyes. Ay! look at the font, all gold!' whispers Materfamilias in front of the article of her choice. My eye! what a jug!' whis-'a doosid ugly set-out!' pers a young urchin with his head almost stuck between the railings; to which his mother replies reprovingly: Don't say jug; that's a flagon!' 'Oh! come along!' roar half-a-dozen Cockney youths, boisterous with the gregarious boisterousness of the Cockney in his teens, with swaggering gait, brilliant neck-ties, and low felt hats. Come out o' this to where the men on horseback is!''And the cannon and the cannon-balls!' cries another, while they sweep down-stairs like a hurricane of boots. The unmounted cannon in the open ground are the delight of this description of go-ahead young man, and the Horse Armoury is his compendium of medieval war and chivalry, and the illustration of all his tales of knightly adventure. Has our young Cockney_read Ivanhoe? Has he heard of the Crusades? Has he done battle with the Saracens in imagination? Has he any glimmering vision of tournaments and courtly pageants -of the bloodstained Red and White Roses, and valiant Margaret of Anjou? We are afraid he has not. But he has read of Sir Coupegorge in the penny paper, and of Jack the apprentice who runs Ascending to the Armoury where modern away to the wars, saves the life of Sir Bangaway weapons are stored, the crowd wanders through de Beaumont, in full armour, in the very the dismal passages made between pillars and mouth of the enemy's artillery; and after a walls of upright gun-barrels. One is struck by terrible career of anachronisms, rescues the the truth of Longfellow's simile in his verses Lady Armadilla, with the raven hair and on the Springfield Arsenal, where too, From floor to ceiling, Other violet eyes; runs away with her by stagecoach from the wicked Baronet's feudal castle, and marries her by torchlight in 'cloisters,' just in time before the terrible Sir Coupegorge, swearing Or rather a hundred huge organs marshalled vengeance, arrives upon the scene armed cap-à-pie in close avenues, waiting for our soldiers' hands in steel, and revolver in hand! Some such to draw from their keys the terrible war-music, historic association as this the young Cockney the 'loud lament and dismal miserere.' carries with him into the Horse Armoury. Did weapons are fashioned into such incongruous but not one of them-for our indirect instruction-ingenious devices as the Prince of Wales's weddingpoint out a gauntlet to his companions as a cake, or 'the risen sun made of bayonets and what d'ye call it? a gage, yes-that there's a gage?' And we knew instantly that he was thinking of that touching passage in The Knight of the Dragon Casque-or some such title, but these romances are too grand for memory-where Jack the hero casts his 'mailed glove' down before the miscreant who aspired to the hand of his lady-love, and cried: Be this my gage, &c.; and the miscreant, doffing his plume, took up the gage, and said: 'Come on, thou duffer!' Hence, with the power of generalisation natural springs of ramrods.' It is here, among the dark avenues, in the atmosphere of oil, that the dismal character of Her Majesty's Tower begins to oppress the thoughtful visitor. He goes down, deep down to the dungeons, with a proper sense that the sky far away is murky, that the river outside is mud, that life is miserable for the majority of mankind, and that he himself is an undetected monster. This dismal sensation settles down upon him as a product of the atmosphere of Her Majesty's Tower; after several experiments, we traced it to the Armoury where the huge organ arrangement of firearms is kept; and we put it down scientifically to the want of the knowledge of the principles of window-making and ventilation in ancient days, and to the action upon the nervous system of an overpowering collection of gun-barrels, silent sightseers, and polishing oils. Down in the dungeons, the Cockney becomes hilarious. He laughs aloud, and at last assumes his ordinary sightseeing demeanour. Girls dart under the temporary wooden staircase, playing Hide-and-seek; and though cannon-balls are heaped where the rack was worked, as if that spot of bygone agony were too terrible to tread, elsewhere all-the-world and his wife jog round the racking dungeon, and make merry, utterly unable to realise the meaning of its name of horror; and in the awful dungeon beyond, into which prisoners were lowered from light of day, young men look up the disused sloping shaft, and turn away with a grin of self-congratulation. Nor is there much thinking done in the more lightsome prison rooms, though there is much talking and pointing to inscriptions on the walls. 'You see,' says a woman, they didn't well know what to do with theirselves.' Truly they did not. But few understand that these scratchings on the walls are the written witness to prolonged and intense human suffering; that one at least died here wasted away in this very room, the sight of his wife and child denied to him; him whom dead they carried down that steep stone stair outside, where the crush of sightseers comes twisting up now, and where the girls are laughing and clutching the rope that hangs down the centre pillar to help giddy climbers. intelligently, the finest historic monument of England; the days when only fire-buckets are lowered into the dungeons and kept there; and when the awful Traitors' Gate is mostly used by sparrows, those knowing birds finding it useful as a roost for chirping the river news, and convenient for popping into an undisturbed muddy nook after their raids upon the wharves. SOME MATRIMONIAL ECCENTRICITIES. THERE is no end to the matrimonial extravagances that are continually being perpetrated. What strangely assorted couples you meet every day in the street-in private life-everywhere! There would almost appear to be no kind of incongruity of which examples could not be found-no kind of disparity, physical, intellectual, or moral, which, if an obstacle to union at all, has not been overcome. Extremes of many kinds are so common that we need not particularise them here. Unless on the theory of the saying that 'extremes meet,' it is by no means easy to account for some of them. Here is a somewhat curious, though far from unpleasing, illustration, which was communicated to us some time ago by a lady who had just returned from a voyage to India with her husband in the vessel of which he was skipper. The cook, a negro, was a general favourite with all on board; and in the course of the return voyage, not only our lady friend, but all the passengers, and the crew as well, became deeply interested in Sambo's matrimonial affairs, for nothing afforded the honest fellow greater delight than to talk of the pretty little English wife who, he said, was waiting to welcome him on his return to England. Some, especially the ladies, were disposed to be sceptical, suspecting that Sambo was either romancing, or indulging in one of those elaborate equivoques in which the negro mind delights. The precedent of Desdemona and Othello notwithstanding, the idea of a nice-looking English girl actually falling in love with and marrying Sambo was not to be accepted without considerable reserve. In the restricted community on board a vessel, small matters are often invested with an altogether exceptional importance, and so the question of Sambo's wife was magnified into one of the great problems of the day. It was at length resolved, in order to gratify the general curiosity and put the story to the test, to have a party of some sort on board ship as soon as London was reached, and invite Sambo to bring his wife, who, he declared, resided there. party was arranged accordingly. The long-talkedof guest of the evening duly appeared-'And, would you believe it?' the captain's wife afterwards remarked with great animation—‘she was actually pretty!' Sambo was the hero of the hour; and everybody declared that a prouder husband, or a more happy, contented, and devoted little wife, had never been seen. Outside, between this prison and the great White Tower, red-coated soldiers are manoeuvring to a bugle call; and on the cannon, lying closepacked and unmounted, the Monday visitors are gossiping, and sitting down to luncheon, or peeling oranges. They have seen the place without any of its horrors, or any of those historic visions that quicken the pulse and give more than a vague interest to old walls. Thank heaven for the nineteenth century! That beefeater with his red-embroidered coat, and broad round hat gay with loops of colour, might have stepped out of less gentle times; but see! there is with the beefeater a dark and dingy helmeted policeman; the Sixteenth Century talking with the Nineteenth! And outside the muddy grassgrown moat, beyond the outer walls, we shall find the busy narrow streets of London, the warehouses and cafés creeping close up to this tremendous pile of ramparts and towers. And out there beyond the southern wall, where those tips of masts are travelling, there are the ships, the steam-power, the crowded wharves of the nineteenth century; and the gray river has sunk away from Her Majesty's Tower, leaving it high and dry, just as civilisation has shrunk in course of time from such cruelties as those walls witnessed when the Tower was palace and The very act of marrying at all is in some prison. Thank heaven again for the quiet days instances a most eccentric proceeding. What, of Her who owns, by right not only of blood for example, could be more absurd than the but of justice and kindliness, that bright crown recent marriage, in a small agricultural village in the Jewel Room; the days when all the world in England, of a couple whose united ages came can wander through the fortress, and see in it to a hundred and fifty-eight, the bridegroom being nothing but the grandest curiosity, or, more seventy-seven, and the bride eighty-one? Nor The was this the only peculiar feature of this extraordinary union. The bridegroom's Christian name was Thomas, and the bride's Mary; and this was the third Mary that Thomas had selected as his partner, while it was also the third Thomas to whom Mary had been united by the conjugal bond. To crown all, both were in receipt of parochial relief to the extent of two shillings and a loaf each per week. A hardly less extraordinary wedding is reported from Charlotte, North Carolina, being that of a blind girl to a man who was deaf and dumb. It was not to be expected that such an event would escape the observation of facetious Western journalism; nor did it. A local paper took occasion to point out that by this marriage each of the parties would acquire an opportunity to practise little pantomimic scenes from which ordinary married folks were entirely debarred. When they quarrelled, for instance the wife being unable to see, while the husband could not hear or speak-she could hurl at him broadside after broadside of steel-pointed invective; and the poor man could but stand there, study the motion of her lips, and fondly imagine she was telling him how sorry she was that anything should come between them. He, on the other hand, could sit down, shake his fists, and make hideous grimaces, she all the while thinking he was sitting with his face buried in his hands, and hot remorseful tears streaming from his eyes. One of the most remarkable matrimonial complications on record occurred a few months ago in Long Island, New York. A married woman who felt her end approaching, and who was solicitous as to the fate of her six children, implored her husband to marry her younger sister, she being the only person fitted in her eyes to take charge of her family. The husband promised to act in accordance with her wishes immediately after the funeral, and the sister also undertook to fulfil her behests. The sick woman, however, was not satisfied. She feared they might not prove so good as their word, and entreated them to give her the consolation of knowing that her children would certainly be cherished after her departure. Worn out with her importunity, and there being evidently no hope of the poor woman's recovery, they finally consented to be married at once. The ceremony accordingly took place; and so much comfort and satisfaction did the invalid derive from contemplating the future of her little ones, that she speedily recovered from her illness, and gave cheering proof of her convalescence by turning her sister, bag and baggage, out of the house! Some very eccentric matrimonial arrangements are occasionally brought to light in our courts of law. A singular illustration occurred in London the other day of the extraordinary views that often prevail among people of a certain class as to the way in which private agreements affect marriage. The parties in the case in question were a porter and a cook, who had married on the express understanding, embodied in a formal agreement, that unless and until the latter should arrive at the following accomplishments—namely, piano, singing, reading, writing, speaking, and deportment, the said marrying' was to be no more thought of, and considered null and void. The pair were regularly married; and as the lady did not master the required accomplishments, continued to live apart for fourteen years, the husband fully believing that 'the female of us,' as the woman was denominated in the agreement, was not his wife. When, however, the case came up for decision, the judge was of a different opinion. Marriages which are not in themselves in any way peculiar are sometimes rendered very much so by the eccentric manner in which they are gone about. We recollect a wedding at which the happy pair had no sooner been united than, to the amazement of every one except the officiating clergyman, who had been let into the secret a few minutes before, the eldest brother of the bride advanced with one of the blushing bridesmaids, and requested that the ceremony should be repeated for their behoof. It appearing that all the necessary legal and other preliminaries had been duly arranged, the demand was complied with, and the company had to celebrate two weddings instead of one. This recalls the case of an enterprising Scotch widow, who, failing the appearance at the eventful moment of her intended second husband, utilised the occasion, the clergyman, and the company in a way which must call forth the admiration of the most skilled diplomatist. She was a bouncing young widow of twenty-five, and had agreed to marry 'No. 2,' as she playfully termed him, in a year and a day from the demise of 'No. 1.' The happy day fell on a Wednesday, and the ceremony was to take place at the bride's house. A magnificent wedding-feast was provided, and about sixty guests invited. The hour fixed for the marriage was six P.M. In the forenoon, the bridegroom arrayed himself in his best, and went off to invite a few friends in the country who had been overlooked. Whether he happened to take with him a copy of the Pickwick Papers, and came across Mr Weller's famous advice to his son Sam on the subject of 'vidders,' will probably never be known; but by this or some other means, he appears to have been reduced to a peculiarly vacillating state of mind with regard to the important step he was about to take; for by the afternoon post his brideelect received from him an intimation to the effect that he had conscientious scruples as to marrying a woman so recently widowed. would make it a matter of careful consideration, and abide by the result of his subsequent feelings. She was not to take this as a positive declinature; but if he had not arrived by six o'clock, she might consider the marriage off. The widow did not either faint or go into hysterics, but decked herself in her bridal robes, and smilingly received the guests who had been bidden to the feast. When all the company had arrived, the lady read to them the communication she had received from the recreant bridegroom. Loud and long were the denunciations it elicited, and the heroic bearing of the widow under such trying circumstances was marked and commended by all. This need not prevent the feast,' she said; and the banqueting began. The feasting over, the room was cleared for dancing, and everything went as merrily as if the wedding had passed off under the most favoured auspices. The result of it all was that an elderly bachelor, who had opened the ball with the irrepressible widow, became so enamoured of her, that before the He evening was far advanced he had proposed, and, what was more, had been accepted. The minister was recalled; and at eleven P.M. the wedding, though not the one for which the guests had been assembled, was solemnised. The ceremony had scarcely been performed, when the door-bell was violently rung, and in stalked the superseded bridegroom. 'Careful consideration' had at length overcome his 'conscientious scruples,' and he had come back to claim his bride-only, however, to be introduced to her as the wife of another. Served him right. of feet below. The officer in attendance replied, Marriage by electricity is one of the latest novelties which have been introduced on the other side of the Atlantic. The first wedding of this kind took place last year at the cantonment in the Red Lands, Dakota, the clergyman officiating from a place called Bismarck, many miles away, by telegraph. The bride and bridegroom responded to the electric marriage ceremony at one end of the wire, in the presence of witnesses; while the correspondent of the Pioneer Press and several other witnesses saw the clergyman perform his duty at the other. The questions The news of this romantic wedding was circuand answers were written, telegraphed, and re-lated far and wide, and graphic accounts of it duly sponded to, and the blessing was pronounced in the usual form, and wired' with perfect accuracy. All present at both ends of the wire, it was reported, were much affected towards the close of the ceremony; and the whole affair excited general interest. appeared in nearly every newspaper in the United Shortly after this, the telegraph was again brought into requisition for purposes matrimonial; but on this occasion its use was a merely accidental contingency in the execution of a still more eccentric matrimonial freak. The notion in this instance was to be married on the summit of a high mountain known as Pike's Peak. At sunrise on the eventful morning the bridal party set out, mounted upon saddle-horses, on their romantic errand. Before they had proceeded far, a somewhat untoward accident befell the Reverend Doctor who had been engaged to perform the ceremony. He had been mounted upon a particularly lively animal, which, after waltzing along the road for some distance on two legs, wound up his performance by pitching the unfortunate clergyman over a fence and into a stream. He was soon fished out; but, though not seriously injured, the mishap altogether deranged the plans of the wedding party, for the reverend gentleman not unnaturally declined to risk his health by continuing the trip in his dripping condition, in spite of all persuasions and the offer of a safe and quiet animal. After some consultation, a brilliant idea suggested itself to the bridegroom, which was, that the clergyman should proceed to the nearest city -Colorado Springs-and from the United States Telegraph Office, which was connected with the signal-station on the Peak, perform the ceremony by telegraph. The Doctor ultimately consented to this arrangement, and thus another element of romance was added to the undertaking. The summit of the Peak was reached about noon. The sergeant in charge of the station was greatly delighted with the notion of a wedding in his elevated retreat, and entered into the spirit of the thing with enthusiastic good-will. The instrument-room of the signal-station was decorated with flowers and flags, and the sergeant sent a call down to the Springs office, some thousands AN INDIAN SNAKE-DANCE. In an age of the distant past, the Moqui Indians ceaselessly flowed through the country. Constructing a raft, he stored it with provisions to last him for many moons, launched it on the San Juan, to be carried by its swift currents whithersoever they went. After encountering my perils, he entered a large water, on the hures of which great rocks elevated their fronts to the stars. Driven ashore, he ascended to the top by perilous passes, and found them inhabited by a family of Indians, who received him with great rejoicings as the ruling spirit of their race, whose coming had been prophesied for ages by the wise men and priests. He took their wisest and most beautiful maiden for his bride, whose charms long rendered him forgetful of his own people; but the spirits of his fathers called him, and obedient to the call, he, with his wife, started for home. Imminent dangers beset their path; but the guardian spirit of his bride led them through every peril safely to his people, by whom he was received as the pride and wonder of his race. But unfortunately for the Moquis, jealousy rankled in the bosom of their women. A foreign woman possessed the heart of the stateliest and bravest of their tribe. Subjected by them to every indignity that wicked ingenuity could devise, and too proud to make known her grievances, the bride, determined on revenge, gave birth to a brood of serpents, against the charmed lives of which neither the arrows nor battle-axes of the Moquis could avail. The Moqui children were slain by their deadly fangs. The people, pursued by this terrible foe, fled from the land of their fathers, till, on reaching the country in which they now dwell, a mighty serpent lashed their pursuers to atoms, and commanded the Moquis to possess his hills and valleys, and to live at peace with all his kind. In gratitude to their deliverer, the wise men of the tribe established the Snake-dance as a religious rite; and for ages, no serpent has been killed by that tribe, nor Moqui bitten who follows the teaching of the nake-priests. Such was the chieftain's history of the festival. The following is Keam's narrative of the snake dance. granted admission to the estufa, and on descending by a ladder from the centre of the roof, we found the snakes, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty in number, contained in large oval earthenware urns. Soon after we had entered, a ceremony was gone through by those of the priesthood who were present. Pouring the living mass out of the urns, they, with their wands, drove them around the floor of the estufa from east to west, and then around an altar laid in the rock floor two feet from the west wall of the building. This altar was coloured variously in squares, and on each of its four sides a snake was painted in natural colours. Around it lay stone implements, knives, axes, arrows, hammers, a large mortar and figures of small animals in stone, as well as a number of the eaglefeather wands, one of which is placed beside the altar when a snake-priest dies, remaining there until the chief-priest declares that the departed one is happy in the Spirit-land. The priests all wore waistband, breech-cloth, and moccasins fringed with red; besides which, their faces were painted, from forehead to mouth, black; from mouth over the chin, white; their bodies, pink; their arms and legs dyed a dark brown. Around the right leg, below the knee, was attached an ornament made of tortoiseshell, together with the horny part of a deer's hoof, which in the dancing which followed produced a sort of humming rattle resembling the noise of a rattlesnake in anger. During their exercises in the estufa, the priests drank freely from a large urn containing medicine-water. The Snake-dance itself took place about four o'clock in the afternoon. A cotton-wood grotto had been erected on the rock near the estufa, with a single buffalo robe tied firmly round it, leaving a small entrance on one side. Around this was traced a mystic circle thirty feet in diameter. Within the grotto the snakes were now deposited en masse. The dancers were twenty-four in number, the remaining eighteen priests being The reserved to receive the snakes from their hands and to chant during the progress of the dance. The dancers first advanced towards the grotto wands in hand. Then wheeling round, they separated Preparations for the dance, which we witnessed, twelve a side, and formed in line, representing had been in progress for eight days. The snake- the two sides of a triangle, of which the grotto priests, forty-two in number, devoted the first was the apex. The eighteen followed, dividing four days to secret rites. The four succeeding days equally, and facing the dancers, while all joined were employed in capturing the snakes which in a wild chant, accompanied by a continuous haunt the sandy plains around the puebla (village), sounding of the above-mentioned rattles. With a wand, painted, and bearing at one end chief-priest then advanced to the entrance of the two black eagles' feathers, the priests caress grotto, bearing an urn of medicine-water from the heads of the snakes as they coil in the the estufa, two large sea-shells, and two stone sand. The snake-priests are supposed to have figures of mountain lions. Chanting in a monoborrowed this idea from the habit of the eagle, tone, he stood for about ten minutes waving the which, when capturing snakes, is said to charm urn in the air. Another dance and chant folthem to comparative harmlessness by hover- lowed; upon the conclusion of which, the nearest ing over and fanning them with a rapid and priest on the right entered the grotto on hands peculiar motion of its wings. Having secured and knees among the writhing and hideous mass, a sufficient number of the reptiles, they are car- soon reappearing with a large snake in his mouth, ried in sacks to the estufa-the council-house its head and tail twisting about his face. Being of the Moquis. This chamber is an excavation in the solid rock from nine to ten feet deep, by eighteen feet wide and twenty feet long, covered with poles, mud, and stones. Hung on the walls in fantastic groups are highly ornamented moccains, breech-cloths, waistbands, rattles, and tortoiseshells. On the morning of the dance, we were taken by the left arm by a fellow-priest next him, he was led around the mystic circle. The snake was then dropped on some sacred cornmeal which the squaws had scattered within its bounds. Immediately on falling, the creature coiled in anger, whereupon one of the eighteen caressed its head with his wand and took it in |