They are all gone to London court,
Robin Hood, with all his train;

He once was there a noble peer,
And now he's there again.

But if he went to London, as the ballad says, he did not long stay there, but resumed his wild life in Sherwood Forest, where he robbed and ruled for twenty years. At the end of that time he was struck with remorse for the life he had led, and he retired to Berkley Monastery. He fell sick, and the ruthless monks, believing that neither his illness nor his penitence would be of any long duration, resolved to destroy him by treachery, and one of the order who practised physic bled him to death.

Edward. How could he be such a fool as to trust them? I hope his bowmen came and shot them all.

Mr. Austin. No, they fled beyond sea; and Robin was buried under a "fayre stone, by the way side, that all men might without fear or dread take their journeyings that way, which they durst not do in the lifetime of the said out. law."

Thus he that never fear'd bow nor spear,
Was murder'd by letting of blood;
And so, loving friends, the story doth end
Of valiant bold Robin Hood.

CHAP. VI.

THURSDAY EVENING.

Florence. Papa, will you not tell us some anecdote this evening?

Mr. Austin. No, I mean to be obstinately silent for at least a week: it is now my turn to be amused; and so, young lady, I will even retort upon you. Will you not tell us some anecdote this evening?

Florence. Pray excuse me till to-morrow: I think I must adopt Charlotte's expedient, and procure some kind proxy. Mamma, will you? wont you be my proxy?

Mrs. Austin. Willingly, Flory to confess the truth, I expected some such request, and have been prepared to answer the question you put to me a few days ago,-whether there was a

nation whose stature fell as far short of ours as the Patagonians exceed it?

A

Amy. Is there a nation of pigmies, or Lilliputians?

Mrs. Austin. No, my dear Amy, there is not. The relations of Dean Swift and the ancients are equally fabulous. There are no Brobdignagians nor Lilliputians; no giants like Plutarch's, sixty feet high, no nation of pigmies in the centre of Africa, a foot and a half in stature, waging continual war with the birds; but we know that there is a tribe of Patagonians, and there are little men called Kimos, still more diminutive than the Laplanders.

Edward. And where do they live?

Mrs. Austin. They inhabit the high mountains in the centre of the island of Madagascar, which you know lies off the eastern coast of Africa.

Gerald. Madagascar, if I recollect right, lies within the tropics, in the torrid zone, and the stunted Laplanders inhabit the Arctic regions. How does it happen that the coldest and the hottest climate should equally produce people of a smaller stature than those of the temperate zone?

Mrs. Austin.

I was not prepared for that query: your father, perhaps, can answer it.

Mr. Austin. The mountains of Madagascar, where the Kimos have been seen, are amongst the highest in the world, and so many feet of altitude have been found to produce a change of climate equivalent to so many degrees of latitude. If, for instance, on the downs close by there was a mountain, like Cotopaxi of the Andes, twenty thousand feet high, I might agree to ascend the mountain whilst you travelled northward to Johnny Groat's house, to Christiana, to the North Cape, and to Spitzbergen. When I got higher I should see pines like those of the magnificent forests you would admire in the neighbourhood of Christiana; a little farther on I should be obliged, like your Lapland deer, to dine on lichens; proceeding on our different travels, we should both, at last, only find the fungus tribe (as in the caverns of the earth); and, finally, all vegetation would cease. From the rarity of the air, and the extreme cold, we should both find a difficulty in breathing; you would, therefore, turn towards home, pass from Spitzbergen to Lapland, from Lapland to Scotland, from Scotland to Surrey. I should descend eighteen

thousand feet of the mountain whilst you had travelled as many hundred miles south, and we should meet in the farm meadow, sit under the oaks, and rest upon the luxuriant grass.

Amy. Then ten feet above the level of the sea is about equal to a mile in latitude.

Mr. Austin. That will do well enough for a rough guess. Humboldt has calculated all that with the greatest nicety, but I am ashamed to say I forget the proportions of his scale, and I have not his "America" to refer to.

Gerald. It is easy to understand this, as it refers to climate; but I don't see how it applies to the human species, and why the Kimos should therefore be still less than the Laplanders.

Mr. Austin. Because the climate of their elevated abodes, although between the tropics, is still colder than Lapland; and the human species, like the vegetable productions of the earth, is found to be smaller in cold climates.

Gerald. I thought that the kinds only of vegetables varied in different latitudes: is the size of the same kind affected by climate?

Mrs. Austin. I thought as you do, Gerald, till I saw a beautiful herbal which was brought home by one of Captain Parry's officers from the northern expedition. I was much surprised to