Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/716

 708 window-seat, but the pain-tortured head painted upon the wall of the circular closet was the visible image which would not loose itself from my memory. The idea of Mauleverer’s soul joined itself in some inexplicable way with the remembrance of that face. In a waking nightmare the hours passed by. As morning dawned a hope dawned, too, in my mind. Mauleverer might have recovered. Oh! please Heaven it might be so!—that all this fearful agony might turn out to be as causeless and unreal as a dream! Against myself the hope grew. I remembered how I had left Mauleverer, seated in the window-seat with his face turned towards the open window. I could see at once from the court if he were still there. I would get up. I sprung out of bed, and dressed with trembling hands. Even with my mind full of the figure on the window-seat, and of the face turned towards the window, I could not realise that face. No image, no remembrance of it, would come to me, try to reach it as I would. Instead of that face came the other. Why this was I cannot tell; but at other times in my life I have been unable to recall a countenance which should, according to ordinary judgment, have stamped itself indelibly in my mind. I have heard other people remark upon the same marvel.

I hastened to the college. As I turned into the court through the great gateway, I saw obliquely that the window of Mauleverer’s rooms was still open. Going forward I soon got within sight of that which I had come to see. Good God! there was the dead face turned towards me!

There was an inquest on Mauleverer, and there were medical examinations. They decided that he died in one of his customary fits.

I will tell the truth, here, as to my conduct then.

I denied all knowledge of his death. Wyatt, of course, affirmed that he had left me in Mauleverer’s rooms at chapel-time. This I could not deny; but I did deny that I was with Mauleverer when he died, and that I had any knowledge of his death.

I have never confessed the truth to a soul till now. After this I had a terrible fever. My cousin, who helped to nurse me through it, told me of my ravings about this dreadful story. She, who knew nothing of Mauleverer or of his death, attributed them wholly to fever delusions. I did not betray myself.

If my cousin (now my wife) were to see these pages, I believe she would still think the story a fever-delusion, and nothing more. People say that a fever always leaves some searing mark upon the mind which it has once held in torment I wish it might be only this. J. A.



the discovery of the planet Neptune—that glorious achievement of the human intellect that called forth this panegyric—there has been no subject of scientific investigation more interesting in its nature, or fruitful in result, than the researches that have recently been made into the physical constitution of the sun by Messrs. Kirchoff and Bunsen, based upon the opto-chemical analysis of the solar spectrum. Apart from the scientific value of these researches, they are so novel and beautiful that a short account of them can scarcely fail to interest the most unscientific reader.

The experiments with which we have to deal are founded upon the phenomena of the dispersion or decomposition of light. With the effects of this we are all so well acquainted—perhaps, in its most familiar form, by the resplendent but never-varying tints of the rainbow, or by the ever-varying forms of the same tints that play about the glass prisms, or drops of a chandelier—that a few words on its causes may not inappropriately preface the subject matter of this paper.

If a ray of sunlight be made to pass through a small hole (A) in a window-shutter, and a screen (B C) be placed at a short distance beyond it; there will be formed upon that screen a small spot of light (D), of the same size and shape as the hole, and in a perfectly straight line with it and the sun; but if the course of the ray of light be intercepted by a prism (E), placed as represented in the diagram, it will no longer pass in a straight line, but will, by refraction through the prism, be thrown upwards upon the screen, and instead of being an image of the hole, it will become considerably elongated in a direction at right angles to the lower edge of the prism; and this elongated band will be painted with all the colours of the rainbow, ranged in the same order, and with the same degrees of relative intensity. This is the solar spectrum, first observed by Newton, for mere amusement, with a prism which he bought at Stourbridge fair. “It was,” he says, “a very pleasing divertisement to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby:” destined, however, to fill a place in the annals of scientific research, not less significant than that other divertisement of his majestic mind which led to the discovery of the universal law “that governs alike the fall of the apple and the precession of the equinoxes.” But this philosophy in sport was to Newton’s mind science in earnest; and after various theories had failed to explain the production of the brilliant spectrum, he was led to account for it on the supposition that a