Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 Part 11

To play the game the globe is set revolving, and a player, commencing at the south pole, plants a flag into each hole one after another at each revolution of the globe, and advances northward. The score of the player, which may be either a gain or a loss, is determined by the nature of the facts indicated on the rectangular s.p.a.ce above which a flag may stand when the globe stops revolving; and this is, of course, the interesting and humorous part of the game. London, for example, counts thirty, Paris twenty, and so on, according to population. A coal mine, a Manchester cotton factory, a grain mart, all are reckoned gains; but an encounter with a Zulu or a lion in Africa, a storm in the Atlantic, a polar iceberg, a crocodile on the Nile, naturally go for serious losses.

A PERSONATION; WHAT IS MY NAME?

BY ELEANOR JOY.

I was a queen of royal birth. I was married on the 8th of September, 1761, to a certain King of England, with whom I lived for fifty-seven years. I had fifteen children, all of whom lived to grow up except two.

The king whom I married had never seen me, and was only attracted toward me by my writing him an eloquent letter on the miseries and calamities of war. I was brought to England in a yacht covered with streamers and flowers. I was not very handsome, and the king, my husband, winced when he saw I was not as beautiful as some of his ladies at court. But he soon began to love me, and I lived happily with him till my death. Who am I?

THE METRIC SYSTEM IN COINS.

It may not be generally known that we have in the nickel five-cent piece of our coinage a key to the tables of the linear measures and weights of the metric system. The diameter of this coin is two centimeters, and its weight is five grams. Five of them placed in a row will, of course, give the length of the decimeter; and two of them will weigh a decagram. As the litre is a cubic decimeter, the key to the measure of length is also the key to measures of capacity. Any person, therefore, who is fortunate enough to own a five-cent nickel may be said to carry in his pocket the entire metric system of weights and measures.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GIVING THE BABIES AN AIRING.]