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James T. Fields: Ankerstroem

After varying fortunes in the war, Gustavus concluded a peace on the fourteenth August, 1790, with his foreign enemies, but the nobility, who apprehended the loss of all their privileges, resolved upon his death. Accordingly, they formed a conspiracy under the direction of Counts Horn and Ribbing, and Colonel Lilienhorn, and a nobleman named Ankerstroem, undertook to murder him. Ankerstroem chose a masked ball, given on the sixteenth March, 1792, at Stockholm, as affording the fittest opportunity.

The king was warned by some anonymous friend, but he went to the ball, and the assassin shot him through the body. The king suffered with much firmness, and died on March 29th.

His murderer was discovered and executed, and many of the conspirators were banished from the country.

The private history of those times add that the chief conspirator was the Countess Christina, daughter of the Count Tessin, the king's governor, when a youth, and who was the king's mistress.

It is said that the king incurred her jealousy by his attentions to his own wife, and that in revenge she incited Ankerstroem to fire the fatal shot. A few days after the funeral of the king she committed suicide. that he distinctly heard the sounds rising up from the lake, like the gentle thrills of a musical chord, or the faint vibrations of a wine-glass when its rim is rubbed by a wet finger. He says: "It was not one sustained note, but a multitude of tiny sounds, each clear and distinct in itself; the sweetest treble mingling with the lowest bass. On applying the ear to the woodwork of the boat, the vibration was greatly increased in volume by conduction. The sounds varied considerably at different points as we moved across the lake, as if the number of the animals from which they proceeded was greatest in particular spots; and occasionally we rowed out of hearing of them altogether, until, on returning to the original locality, the sounds were at once renewed."

Sir Emerson Tennant was induced to conclude from all the facts, that the sounds were really produced by shell-fish. "They came evidently and sensibly from the depth of the lake, and there was nothing in the surrounding circumstances to support a conjecture that they could be the reverberation of noises made by insects on the shore, conveyed along the surface of the water, for they were loudest and most distinct at those points where the nature of the land, and the intervention of the fort and its buildings, forbade the possibility of this kind of conduction." In fact, similar sounds have been heard issuing from the sea in the harbor of Bombay, and near the landing-place at Caldera in Chili. In the last-mentioned locality they rise and fall as much as four notes. We may add the well-known fact that some fishes grunt when disturbed, and even oysters have an acoustic apparatus, though it does not rise to the dignity of an ear.

When Sir Emerson Tennant first communicated his observations at Batticaloa to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, Dr. Grant experimented with some specimens of a mollusk by placing them in a glass vessel filled with sea-water. This vessel was placed on the central table of the Wernerian Natural History Society of Edinburgh, around which many members were sitting. During the whole time of the meeting, a "clink," as of a steel wire struck on the side of the jar, was heard at intervals, and so distinctly that it extended to the distance of twelve feet.

The Man in the Tub.

OME here, little folks, while I rub and I rub!

O, there once was a man who lived in a tub, In a classical town far over the seas!