Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/689

 . 13, 1862.] used in the Zenana for flogging the ladies of the court!”

A brief tour through a long series of glowing cosmoramic views, Alma and Sebastopol, and the Vatican, and Switzerland, and Aladdin’s Palace, et hoc genus omne, and we are again in the great hall, where the bell is just proclaiming the approaching descent of the diving bell. For those who are in want of a headache, and do not mind paying a shilling for the accommodation, this is such an opportunity as does not often occur. We have different tastes: so, after having sufficiently admired the unfortunate diver, who, enveloped in waterproof, and with his head mysteriously encased in a huge tin pot, seems to spend the greater part of his life in groping for halfpence at the bottom of a pond, we leave the diving bell to make its daily journey, and push on past wax flowers and portions of the Blondin rope, and Dr. Eddy’s steam shield-ships of 1300 tons and 500 horse-power, with masts which in action lie down snugly along the deck, blocking up apparently all possible retreat through the cabin doors, and little iron mounds like beaver huts to protect the guns; and now our attention is arrested by another seeming instrument of torture, in which is actually a wooden representative of the unhappy being who is the subject of its pangs. This, however, proves upon examination to be a galvanic bath; and by and by, in one of the galleries upstairs, we come upon a still more awful-looking chair, in which the same agent is again employed for the restoration of the invalid.

And then we come to those two innocent-looking little brass rods which played so fatal a part in the following sad tale.

Poor Edwin was a clerk in the, well, in a Government office. But clerks, even Government clerks, are mortal, and to him, as to others, had come the piercing shafts of love. Was it from a three-cornered note of tender pink, or from a whispered intimation on the crowded staircase of Lady P, or was it by the intuition of his own beating heart, that he divined the presence of his loved Angelina and her schoolmates from the adjacent Regent’s Park at this excellent institution one frosty day in January, 185—? No matter. There she was; and we need not waste much time in guessing the destination of a day’s leave obtained by young Edwin from his superiors in Pall Mall. The eventful moment came; and as Angelina faintly strove to fix her wondering attention upon the explanations of the talented lecturer in the centre of the hall, young Edwin stood suddenly by her side. Oral communication was difficult, for, wedged closely in the crowd, but two paces off, was Mrs. Dragonnette, the inexorable duenna of Minerva House; but soon a little ungloved hand slid gently into his, while the other clasped tightly, and perhaps a little ostentatiously, the nearest of the two fatal knobs of brass. Five seconds of Elysium, and then came a hurried movement of the throng, and Edwin, in imminent peril of separation from his fair queen, grasped vigorously at the companion rod. P—r—r—r—t. Ah!!! A thrill shot through the unfortunate pair; a shriek burst from Angelina’s lips, as, for the moment, she fancied that wrist, elbow, and shoulder must all be out of joint. In an instant the eyes of Madame Dragonnette were upon her, and in another she was on her way back to the Regent’s Park. The blow was fatal. The ill-starred couple never met again. It was but last week that Angelina was married to an eminent dealer in Russian hides and tallow, while Edwin still sits, a disconsolate bachelor, in his cocoa-matted office in Pall Mall. Should he ever recover, as of course he probably never will, so far as to again indulge in the tender passion, he will probably be very careful not to venture on its experience in too close proximity to an electrical machine.

But what a magnificent machine it is, with its seven-feet plate and all its gigantic appliances! It was constructed, we are told, for the Emperor Napoleon, and cost no less than 250l. For half an hour and more, if only a moderately dry atmosphere allows of the exhibition, are we delighted with the brilliant marvels of this beautiful instrument. Single sparks, more than six feet in length; chains of glowing light, reaching to the very roof of the great hall; and huge spiral flames, and brilliant colours, and wonderful experiments upon a small boy in an iron box.

And when this is over, we again continue our tour of observation, and now our attention is attracted by some of the most ingenious absurdities that perhaps ever entered the mind of man. Here is a wonderful engine, like an elaborate rack, for teaching to swim. Here a “burglary detector,” a wonderful arrangement, by which, when a thief opens by night either door or window, the fact is at once notified by sound of bell to the master of the house, for whose subsequent guidance a notice board sets forth with business-like accuracy the particular door or window at which the entry has been made. Here is an eight-fold cannon, with its various muzzles radiating, wheel-like, from a centre, and admirably calculated for the simultaneous destruction of friend and foe. Here a “reversible devotional stool,” with a kneeling-place, intended to turn bottom upwards during the sermon for the accommodation of your feet, but better adapted to enforce involuntary prostration at some too neglected shrine. Here is a “thought-writer,” a heart-shaped, palette-like piece of wood, furnished with two wheels and a pencil, by resting the tips of your fingers on which your thoughts are to be unconsciously recorded on the sheet beneath. And last, not least, here is a most ingenious machine, full of cranks and wheels and screws, and fine-cutting chisels,—a sort of adaptation on a small scale of the celebrated brass gun turning machinery at Woolwich, and its end is—to peel apples.

And now we are in the little room above the great theatre, and are wandering with ever-increasing admiration from one to another of Pherson’s glorious photographs of Rome. There stands the Coliseum, with its myriad arches bright and clear as in the broad Italian sun, or, better still, the soft rich moonlight of the southern clime. There are the graceful columns of Minerva’s