above ground, but not so much as by water under ground. He held the rod with peculiar spirit, and an air of determination. Hoping to catch his lively manner, I took a rod, as I stood on the bank of the rivulet, and tried my own hands again. I moved neither hand nor foot, but the rod commenced its action; neither could I restrain it. He who has held the Leyden jar in one hand, while, for the first time in his life, he received its electric charge with the other, will recognise the sensation which communicated itself to the heart, when I felt the limbs of that rod crawling round, and saw the point turning down, in spite of every effort my clenched hands could make to restrain it. To my great satisfaction, without moving from the spot, I found the bark start and wring off from the limbs of the rod in the contest, just as the diviner often shews, to convince himself and his employer of the discovered fountain. It was manifest that the force moving the divining-rod is unconsciously applied by the hands of the diviner, and that the great art in holding the rod consists in holding it spiritedly. A smooth bark and a moist hand appeared to have a substantial connection with divining, and from that day till this, the rod has never failed to move in my hands, nor in the hands of those I instruct.

"Take the rod in the diviner's manner, and it is evident that the bent limbs of the rod are equivalent to two boughs tied together at one extremity; and, when bent outwards, they exert a force in opposite directions upon the point at which they are united. Held thus, the forces are equal and opposite, and no motion is produced. Keep the arms steady, but turn the hands on the wrists inward an almost imperceptible degree, and the point of the rod will be constrained to move. If the limbs of the rod be clenched very tightly, so that they cannot turn, the bark will burst and wring off, and the rod will shiver and break under the action of the opposing forces. The greater the effort made in clenching the rod, the shorter is the bend of the limbs, and the greater the amount of opposing forces meeting in one point; and the more unconsciously,

also, do the hands incline to turn to their natural position on the wrists. And this gives true ground for the diviner's declaration, that the more powerful his efforts are to restrain the rod, the more powerful are its efforts to move.'

This seems to be the true secret of an absurd superstition, prevalent amongst an intelligent community, by which the performer, and those who place confidence in his art, are equally deceived. The practice is followed by so many persons of respectable character, that it would be unjust to attribute fraud to them, and we must conclude that they are themselves in total ignorance of the truth. Any one may convince himself that the writer above quoted is correct in his solution of the mystery of the divining-rod, by simply tying together two large goosequills at the tips, and using them in the same manner as the diviner uses his rod. Two pieces of whalebone will answer the same purpose; and, indeed, the American Journal informs us that a professional gentleman, a most excellent man, and a well-known diviner, not many years deceased, commonly used a fork of whalebone as a divining-rod.

There is another curious circumstance connected with this subject, which is, that the water-hunter not only pretends to determine the site of a fountain by his instrument, but also to discover the depth at which it is to be found. Having ascertained the supposed site of the water, he retires slowly to a little distance, and advances again cautiously towards the spot. The moment the rod begins to move, he stands still and marks the place. He repeats his examination in the same way in every direction around the discovered spring, and makes it appear that the rod is affected on every side within a circle of a certain extent. The diameter of this circle is exactly double the depth of the water. Suppose the depth of the well to be seven, then the diameter of the circle within which the rod is moved, will be fourteen feet; but, strange to say, if the water lies seven-times-seven feet below the surface, then the rod will point within a circle seven times larger;

or, in other words, the attraction increases with the distance!

The American writer concludes thus: "The pretensions of diviners are worthless. The art of finding fountains and minerals with a succulent twig is a cheat upon those who practise it, an offence to reason and common-sense, an art abhorrent to the laws of nature, and deserving of universal reprobation.'

A PILGRIMAGE TO BALCARRES.

THE merit of the ballad of Auld Robin Gray has been acknowledged by learned and unlearned, high and low. Sir Walter Scott speaks of it as 'that real pastoral which is worth all the dialogues which Corydon and Phillis have had together, from the days of Theocritus downwards.' Mr Hazlitt says: The effect of reading this old ballad is as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!

"My father pressed me sair,

My mother didna speak,
But she looked in my face

Till my heart was like to break."

The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painful dependence, is excessive; and yet the sentiment of deeprooted, patient affection triumphs over all, and is the only impression that remains. To these testimonies add the tears of the multitudes who have heard it warbled in succession by a Billington, a Stephens, and a Wilson, and it will appear that scarcely any composition of the last hundred years has been more entirely successful than this.

I had long desired to make a pilgrimage to the scene of the birth and early years of the authoress of this much admired ditty, and an opportunity at length occurred

about the close of August 1843. A brilliant morning-alas! only too brilliant, as it proved-saw me making my way by a provincial coach through a somewhat out-of-the-way part of Fife, towards the ancient house of Balcarres, near which I was set down early in the forenoon. It was gratifying to find the place worthy of a poet, and of an ancient and noble family. Seated on the southern slope of the county, about three miles from the coast, it commands a view of great extent and beauty, including nearly the whole expanse of the Firth of Forth and the opposite Lothians. Among the objects which the eye takes in by a short sweep are the 'sea-rock immense' of the Bass, the undulating range of the Lammermoor Hills, and royal Edinburgh, the lofty terraces of which, though above twenty miles off, can here be seen gleaming like an illumination under the reflection of the evening sun. The house was formerly a plain old mansion, possessed of little attraction beyond its commanding position in the midst of a park full of old wood; but of late years it has been altered and decorated into a very fair example of what is, I believe, called the Tudor style of architecture, the principal part of the interior being, however, left in its original state. A little to the eastward are 'Balcarres Craig' and 'Den'-objects which add more picturesque beauty to the landscape than all that twenty Capability Browns' could confer. Such is Balcarres, once the seat of the line of earls taking their title from it, of one of whom our authoress was a daughter, but now belonging by purchase to a younger branch of the family, while the main line is settled at Haigh Hall, in Lancashire. I could have sauntered half a day with pleasure among the woods and cliffs, but was soon admonished by a heavy shower to seek the interior of the mansion.

The kind intervention of a friend of the proprietor enabled me, in his own absence, to see all that was to be seen there under the auspices of the servants. But, before proceeding further, it seems necessary that I should state some of those particulars respecting the authoress of Auld Robin Gray, on which the interest of the place, in

the eye of an ordinary individual, may be said to depend. A common Peerage would describe Lady Anne Lindsay as the eldest daughter of James, fifth Earl of Balcarres. It would tell how she was born in 1750, became the wife of Andrew Barnard, Esq., and died in Berkeley Square, London, in 1825, without children, and then it would consider its duty at an end. To one who has some feeling for old names and events, something more is needed. It seems worthy of notice, for instance, that Lady Anne's father fought for the Chevalier at Sheriffmuir, and that her grandfather was the leading political person on James's side in Scotland at the Revolution. Her mother died in 1820, and it is curious to consider how that old lady linked the present generation to one which we cannot but consider as remote. Her aunt by marriage was the wife of the Earl of Argyle, executed in 1685. The parents of our poetess had married when the one was sixty and the other under twenty, and they had eleven children, eight of whom were sons-' a family of soldiers,' as General Stewart of Garth has described them, and distinguished by their gallant conduct in every quarter of the world. It fell to the lot of the mother to rear her numerous progeny with straitened means, and she performed the duty with a prudence, skill, and high feeling, which left nothing to be desired. Anne, in her girlish days, lived much with her grandmother, Lady Dalrymple of Castleton, in Edinburgh, where she enjoyed the society then graced by a circle of authors who have even since had scarcely a parallel in Scotland. It must not be supposed that Lady Anne was one of those ordinary persons who are sometimes found to strike out one good piece, while every other effort, if they make any at all, is mediocre. Her memoirs and letters, of which some specimens have been printed, shew that she was an unusually clever and acute person, who, had her modesty permitted, or her destiny demanded, might have graced any walk in elegant literature. It was at the close of the year 1771, when left solitary at Balcarres, in consequence of her