THE KING WHO DIED OF LOVE FOR A MERCHANTS DAUGHTER.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1516, 22 January 1886, Page 4

THE KING WHO DIED OF LOVE FOR A MERCHANTS DAUGHTER.

A merchant had a daughter, the fame of whose beauty drew many suitors for ber band, but he rejected them all; and when she was of proper age he wrote a letter to the kirn;, describing her charms and accomplishments, and respectfully offering her to him in marriage. The King, already in love with the damsel, from this account of her beauty, sends bis four vizars to the merchant's house to ascertain whether she was really as charming as ber father ha 1 represented her to be. They found that she far surpassed the power of words to describe; but considering amongst themselves that should the King take this bewitching girl to wife, he would become so entangled in the meshes of lore as totally to neglect the affairs of the kingdom, they underrate her beauty to the King, who then gives up all thought of her. But it chanced one day that the King himself beheld the damsel on the terrace of her bouse, and, perceiving that his vizars had deceived bim, he sternly reprimanded them, at the same time expressing bis fiied resolution of marrying the girl. The vizars frankly confessed that their object in misrepresenting tbe merchant's daughter to him was their fear lest, possessing'such & charming bride, he should forget his duty to the State ; upon which the King, struck with their anxiety for his true interests, resolved to deny himself the happiness of marrying the girl. But he could not suppress his affection for her, and fell sick and soon after died, the victim of love.— Talet of a Parrot. EARTHQUAKE DREAD. As earthquakes surpass all other phenomena as agents of sudden destruction, so the impression which they produce on those who for the first time experience their effects is peculiarly and indescribably awful. Men of reputed courage speak of a feeling of " intolerable dread" produced by the shocks of an earthquake, " even when unaccompanied byKsubterranean noises." The impression is not that of simple fear, but a feeling of absolute pain. The reason seems for a while to have lost tha power of separating real from imaginary causes of terror. The lower animals, also, are thrown into a state of terror and distress. " Swine and dogs," says Humboldt, " are particularly affected by the phenomenon of earthquakes." And he adds that " the very crocodiles of the Orinoco, otherwise as dumb as our little lizards, leave the shaken bed of the stream and run bellowing into the woods." Humboldt's explanation of the peculiar sensations of alarm and awe produced by an earthquake upon those who for the first time experience the effects of tbe phenomenon is in rll probability the correct one. " The impression here is not," he says, "the consequence of the recollection of destructive catastrophes presented to our imagination by narratives of historical events ; what seizes us so wonderfully is the disabuse of that innate faith in the fixity of the solid and sure-set foundations of the earth. From early childhood we sre habituated to the contrast between the mobile element water and the immobility of the soil on which we stand. All the evidences of our senses have confirmed this belief. But when suddenly the ground begins to rock beneath us, the feeling of an unknown, mysterious power in nature coming into operation and shaking the solid globe arises in the mind, the illusion of the whole of our earlier life is annihilated in an instant" —*, A> Pwfor, At Knwkdot,