f March, last year, the thermometer at
Rochester was several degrees _below zero_; at Troy, New York, on the
5th it stood at -14 deg. (_below zero_); at Ogdensburg, New York, at -32 deg.
(_below zero_); at Watertown, New York, -34 deg. (_below zero_)! These
intense colds recur as late as April.

[C] The average of twenty years shows that the James River and Kanawha
Canal was closed annually by ice only fifteen days; the longest period
in any one year was fifty-six days.

[D] A single English order for Cumberland coal, to be shipped by a
Baltimore dealer last December, was for three hundred thousand tons.

[E] New York _Nation_, December 19, 1872.

[F] Last year's grain-yield in the Mississippi Valley was one billion
and thirty-six millions of bushels. In many parts of the West, for want
of transportation, corn is now sold for as little as eighteen and twenty
cents per bushel, and the husks are worth, for fuel, nearly as much as
the grain. One of the great newspapers of the West, the Chicago
_Inter-Ocean_ (January 8th) in discussing editorially "The Reason
Farming does not Pay" in that country, forcibly says: "A charge of
thirty cents per bushel for the carriage of corn, when the freight
should be only fifteen cents, absorbs _one-half the value of the crop_;
and this process, repeated from year to year during the whole period of
a decade, exhausts what would otherwise become the surplus of the
farmer, and finally impoverishes the entire agricultural community."

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON."

CHAPTER I.

"LOCHABER NO MORE."

On a small headland of the distant island of Lewis an old man stood
looking out on a desolate waste of rain-beaten sea. It was a wild and a
wet day. From out of the louring south-west fierce gusts of wind were
driving up volumes and flying rags of clouds, and sweeping onward at the
same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the
shore. Far as the eye could reach the sea and the air and the sky seemed
to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapor, as if
beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and water, and
the confused and awful voices of their strife.

The short, thick-set, powerfully-built man who stood on this solitary
point paid little attention to the rain that ran off the peak of his
sailor's cap or to the gusts of wind that blew about his bushy gray
beard. He