The candle, therefore, being placed in the lantern, thus wonderfully constructed, as we have said, of wood and horn, was both protected from the wind, and shone during the night as luminously without as within.”—Asser.

During the wanderings of Alfred, when compelled to conceal himself, with a small number of followers, from the hoards of Scandinavian pirates, he was disturbed one day when reading in his rude hut by an aged beggar supplicating for a morsel of food. Remembering his own poverty and distress, he laid down his book, and called his wife to give the old man some food. The Queen found they had only one loaf left for their family; but Alfred, thinking the necessities of the beggar more urgent than their own, broke it in two and presented the poor claimant for relief with the half.

JAMES FERGUSON STUDYING THE STARS.

JAMES FERGUSON, a mechanician and astronomer of considerable repute, was the son of a poor Scottish day labourer. James, being a weak boy, was sent to tend sheep for a small farmer, as a quiet easy occupation.

While his flock was feeding about him, James by day made models of mills, spinning wheels, and other machines, and at night he studied the stars.

When a little older, he went into the service of another farmer, a respectable man, named James Glashan.

After the labours of the day, young Ferguson used to go at night to the fields with a

24

JAMES FERGUSON

blanket about him, and a lighted candle, and there, laying himself down on his back, he pursued for hours together his observations of the heavenly bodies.

"I used," he says, "to stretch a thread with small beads on it, at arm's length, between my eye and the stars; shaking the beads upon it till they hid such and such stars from my eye, in order to take their apparent distances from one another; and then laying the thread down on a paper, I marked the stars thereon by the beads.

"My master at first laughed at me ; but when I explained my meaning to him, he encouraged me to go on; and, that I might make fair copies in the daytime of what I had done in the night, he often worked for me himself. I shall always have respect for the memory of that man."

THE CONJUROR OF NUNEATON.

THE early life of Thomas Simpson, the eminent mathematician, was singularly unpromising.

About a hundred years ago, there was a famous conjuror in the village of Nuneaton, in Leicestershire. He told fortunes, calculated nativities, and was the oracle of the place. He was a very young man, the son of a stuff weaver, and he himself had worked at this poor trade in the lodging-house of a tailor's widow.

One of the widow's lodgers was a travelling pedler, who also boasted himself an astrologer and fortune-teller, and was furnished with sundry learned books. During his absence on an excursion to Bristol, he left these books in the

weaver's care. They included Cocker's arithmetic, and a treatise on algebra. When the pedler returned, he was astonished to find that his young friend had made marvellous progress in scientific and occult knowledge, by means of these books. The pedler at once set to work to draw the weaver's horoscope, and predicted that in two years he would become a greater philosopher than himself.

The weaver forthwith proceeded to verify the prediction. He threw aside his shuttleand commenced a new career as schoolmaster and conjuror. It was under these circumstances that he married the tailor's widow.

When his fame as a conjurer was at its height, a young girl came to him one day, desiring to be shown her affianced lover in a vision, or to have a conference with a spirit concerning him, for he was at sea, and she was anxious to learn what he was about.

Conjurors are seldom without a variety of resources for such emergencies.

A confederate was attired in terrific habiliments, and concealed among a quantity of straw