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"Believe in God and yourself, and do the best you can." In Hendrik on the Hudson, fifty miles from New York, there was, winter before last, a certain "patent seamless." But a hooped skirt with a history, touching and teaching, is no theme for flippancy; so, by your leave, I will unwind my story tenderly, and with reverential regard for its smooth turns of sequence.

As we were in the midst of the service, a lady who is the chief woman of the place, and had passed the winter at London with her husband, entered the congregation in a little head-dress, and a hooped petticoat. The people, who were wonderfully startled at such a sight, all of them rose up. Some stared at the prodigious bottom and some at the little top of this strange dress.

It is made of daguerreotypes blurring on their misted silver; tenebrous lithographs solemn facades of brick with classic white lanterns lifted against the inky smoke of a burning city; the pages of a lady's book, elegant engravings of hooped and gallooned females; and the scent of crumbled flowers.

Your whole troop could then climb, one following another, so that there would be no delay." Thus it was arranged, and then began and was completed the construction of the longest and most wonderful ladder ever made in Germany or anywhere else, so far as history records. It was composed of numerous small ladders, spliced and hooped with iron bands by the castle armourer.

The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead.

Hand-grenades were thrown and shells with lighted fuses rolled down on the heads of acquaintances of the night before, who replied from wooden coehorns hooped with iron. Not an officer or private in the Vicksburg armies who does not remember the 25th of June, and the hour of three in an afternoon of pitiless heat.

"The Board of Ordnance and Fortifications" provided for under the act approved September 22 last was convened October 30, 1888, and plans and specifications for procuring forgings for 8, 10, and 12 inch guns, under provisions of section 4, and also for procuring 12-inch breech-loading mortars, cast iron, hooped with steel, under the provisions of section 5 of the said act, were submitted to the Secretary of War for reference to the board, by the Ordnance Department, on the same date.

The fallen trees, the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque juxtaposition with the wrecked fragments of civilization, in empty cans, broken bottles, battered hats, soleless boots, frayed stockings, cast-off rags, and the crowning absurdity of the twisted-wire skeleton of a hooped skirt hanging from a branch.

When the proper hour came for paying their respects to their niece the queen, they tied on their large hooped petticoats, and other articles of court-dress, had their trains borne by their pages, and went to the queen's apartment to make their courtesies, and sit down for a little while, chiefly to show that they had a right to sit down unasked in the royal presence.

We have known for a long time that the artillery materiel devoted to the defense of the German coasts consists of a long, stationary inch gun; of long inch hooped steel guns, closed by a cylindrico-prismatic wedge; of an 8 inch mortar; and of guns of 11¾ and 15 inch caliber. The 11¾ inch gun is 22 feet in length, and, including the closing mechanism, weighs 79,200 pounds.