ty-four hours; Jupiter in ten. The earth revolves in a year; Mars in
a year and ten months; Mercury in about three months; Venus in seven and
a half months; Jupiter in eleven years; Saturn in twenty-nine; Uranus in
eighty-four; Neptune in a hundred and sixty-four. A summer in Mercury
lasts some three weeks; in Neptune forty-one years. Light leaps from the
sun to the earth in eight minutes; to Neptune in four hours. In short,
the reader has to consider thousands of discovered facts, to carry with
him a whole world of indubitable inference, and to study a truly
wonderful bringing of the whole machinery, or rather organization, to
geometrical law, before he can apprehend how glorious a whole the
Copernican astronomy has become.

THE CONVICT'S TALE.

In the gloomy cell of the condemned were two persons. A muscular and
powerfully-made man, heavily ironed, sat on a low bench placed in one
corner. At a glance an observer would have pronounced him a native of
Ireland. His head was well-formed, and covered with a thick mass of
curling hair, of a light-brown color. The form of his mouth indicated
courage and decision, and in the large blue eyes there was a thrilling
expression of suffering and despair, which is never seen among the
hardened in crime. It seemed as if the over-burdened spirit looked forth
from those mirrors of the soul, and in his extremity asked sympathy and
consolation from those among whom his fearful lot was cast.

His companion was a Catholic priest, the tones of whose voice, as he
spoke in soothing accents to the condemned, were soft and clear as those
of a woman.

The prisoner spoke, and his voice sounded dull and hollow. Hope was
extinguished in his soul, and all the lighter inflections which express
the varied emotions stirring within us, had ceased to vary the
monotonous sounds which issued from his lips. A few more hours, and for
him Time would have ceased to revolve. What then had he to do with human
aspirations--with human joys? Nothing: his fate on earth was known--an
outlaw's life, a felon's death!

The prisoner folded his manacled hands over his breast, and said:

"Why should I seek to prolong my wretched existence by asking such a
commutation of my sentence? Death is but one pang, whereas solitary
confinement for life, to which I should probably be doomed, would be a
living torture. To live forever alone! Think what that must be even to a
man innocent of crime, and feel how far worse