similar character, and it was quite unreasonably that his mind sprang to Bassetts, and persisted in staying there. South Americans, too! Then he thrust the suggestion aside with an emphatic refusal.

South

"Rubbish!" he thought impatiently. "That's out of the question. Americans-absurd!"

A few minutes later he was in his own building and in his own room. The atmosphere was exactly as usual, and it was not until he had opened his letters that he called in his cashier, an experienced man of advanced years.

"By the way," he said, "have you heard anything about Bassetts-in connection with South Americans?"

"Bassetts? No, sir, not a word!" "Very good. It must have been some other house."

Two minutes later he was at the telephone, making the same inquiry elsewhere. "Bassetts?" came the reassuring answer. "No-nothing. What have you heard? They're all right." But then he called up another number, to receive another reply. "Bassetts? Yes, we've heard. They've closed this morning. . . . Hope you're not in with them?"

He left the instrument after a moment, and recalled the cashier. "Bassetts have gone," he said calmly. "There was a South American muddle after all They are bound to drag others with them. I expect we shall hear the worst by noon."

The man retired dumfounded, and Mr. Burchell drew his handkerchief across his brows before he turned to the work of the day. Long before the cashier's task was completed he had gone out, and it was some time after noon before he returned. Then he called the man again.

"Gillinghams are as good as gone too," he said. "It was bound to be, and Trescott is certain to go. tons will, I believe, stand.

Lamb

You can

go into the whole matter now, and get at the total loss. There is no hurry about it-any time before five will do."

The cashier had lost his nerve long ago, but his employer's manner steadied him. He seemed to see a man standing in the midst of a quaking house and propping up the walls by sheer force of will. He retired again after asking a question or two, and the routine of the day was proceeded with.

At four a foolscap sheet of figures was laid on Mr. Burchell's desk by a hand that trembled. He scanned it closely, without a sign of emotion, and even checked the totals with that cool precision which his wife knew so well. He transferred the final calculation to his pocket-book with the same care.

"If you will allow me, sir," said the elderly cashier, in earnest agitation, "I should like to express my regret-and my sympathy."

Mr. Burchell seemed a little surprised. "It is very good of you, Simms," he said pleasantly. "Very good! Yes, this must be, of course, a serious check. Thank you."

"A serious check!" muttered Mr. Simms as he returned to his own desk. "A serious check! Well!" And it was with feelings of mingled respect and pity that he saw Mr. Burchell pass through the office later, on his way home, precisely at his usual time. The proud front of the beaten fighter is good to see, but it has its painful aspect.

Mr. Burchell walked to his usual train through the thronging City. There was in his bearing no betrayal of dejection, no shrinkage of dignity and confidence, and it was an unmoved face that he turned upon the scene of his misfortunes. "You have struck hard," he seemed to say in farewell, "but I shall be here again to-morrow!" And if the defiance found an echo in the groan of a stricken man, it reached no ears but his own.

CHAPTER III. Before he reached Highgate he had fully realized the whole extent of his losses, but had no spirit to begin to rebuild. The shock found him lacking in that power of recovery which had brought him triumphantly through earlier crises. On his way home from the station he turned into the Queen's Wood, to find a little solitude in the leafy alleys where he had often planned his business enterprises. Then after a while he went quietly to his house.

At this point he seemed actually at the nadir of his fortunes, and bitterly conscious that it was beyond his power to right them. It was not until he approached his own gate, however, that he thought of his wife at all in connection with the blow, and then his pity was curiously tinged with something much less noble. He might explain, but she would not understand. It would be useless to give her any details. He knew so well what her limits were. And in the bitterness of his defeat it occurred to him to make a study of the woman at this crisis. He would tell her the truth, and would observe the way in which she received it. It was a pity that she could not enter into his schemes a little more, that her limitations were so definite. She would have nothing to offer in the way of ideas-nothing.

He discovered now that the day's experience had quickened his perceptions to an almost painful extent. He noted, as for the first time, the beauty and tastefulness of his garden, the substantial structure of his house, the richness of his windows and of his hall. They looked different, he thought, because he saw them under the shadow of possible loss. In the morningroom, overlooking the garden, his wife was sitting, and she smiled a greeting as he passed. A moment later it occurred to him that she was almost al

ways there. With a little impatience, he found himself making the acknowledgment that a very domestic wife was sometimes an advantage. It was an advantage to have her in her place on this particular evening, even if she had no ideas to offer.

Entering the room, he went to a couch and sat down where he could see her face. He was still intent upon his purpose. His wife looked at him

in silence for a moment, and he observed-because he was there to make observations-a certain timidity in the look. At once he felt a little surprised. Surely he had never given her cause for timidity!

"Have you had a good day?" she asked gently.

That was about as far as she could penetrate into his business affairs, he reflected; but an instant later came the further reflection, "She always asks that. But she never forgets to ask that." And then he answered simply, "No; a very bad day. The worst in twenty years."

He spoke so calmly that she had to search his face for an endorsement of the statement. She lowered her work with a troubled look, and waited for more. With all her limitations, she seemed to have a faculty for reading his features.

"Three firms heavily in my debt," he said, "are closing their doors. The end of it is that I am very nearly ruined. Practically, I have lost threefourths of all I had."

She certainly seemed to take it seriously enough, he thought, for she sat as if transfixed. Then he saw, very clearly, her effort to comprehend the meaning of such a disaster, and looked to see horror and dismay in her eyes. He saw neither, and for a moment failed to realize what it was that he did see. Could it be that she felt no horror of loss, no fear of the future, only an overwhelming and infinite pity?

not quite so bad as that. I shall have one-fourth, and it will probably be the House in Islington." And then they thronged upon him swiftly-soul-stirring pictures and echoes of the days that followed-the joys and hopes of their early housekeeping, the efforts to make the ends meet, the long. dark days of heavy toil and straitened means and abounding hope, with the House as a shadowy stand-by, giving so little, promising so much. He remembered that she had never called it her House, never claimed it as hers apart from him; and yet, in a way, she had re

She stopped, suddenly conscious that she had spoken, and aware of an immense folly. The silence that fell was painful. Burchell raised his head a little to stare at his wife, and she fluttered and trembled. As for him, he almost laughed, the thing seemed for a moment so grotesque. But then, looking still at her face, he checked himself.

With his unusual keenness of perception, a not unnatural result of his terrible experience and his new relation to circumstances, he saw every thing that came. Moreover, he was impelled

to examine everything that came, to study it with an almost morbid desire for truth. That one phrase, "The House in Islington"-how banal, how foolish, how suggestively characteristic! Yet at once his mind fastened upon it for absolutely the first time, and in the space of a minute its whole significance was laid bare to him.

give it to him freely. And in those dull days he had never noticed her limitations!

The

The House in Islington! Was there any limit to the content of those four words? Looking at her face, with its eloquence of pity, he swiftly linked those old days with these new onesnay, with this last of all, this moment in which he sat and watched her. phrase was pregnant with significance, full of revelation, for he saw her last words not as the helpless outburst of incapacity, but as the keynote of a life, the crowning words of a story extending over many years. It was the sum of all her aims, a motto, as it were, that covered all her thousand silent sacrifices of self, her timid, unfinished sentences, her patient smile. And she had offered him her poor little House year after year since, as the emblem or perhaps the materialization of a devotion that found in this its most hopeful form of expression. And he? He realized now that he had failed to see the meaning of the offering, had turned away from it and contemned it. Only to-day in his pride of power and prosperity, he had finally thrust it away from him, and had even trampled upon it. He could not be worried with trifles. Trifles! That persistent and indescribable devotion!

Yes, reve

The House in Islington! lation brought self-revelation in its train, and he saw the real cause of her vague timidity, her silences; and, as if in contrast, he saw again the quaint pleasure she had found in the one gift he had accepted from her since the tide had turned—that wonderful pair of boots. He did not remember it now with amusement. Quite clearly he saw the House in Islington for what it had always been from the first day to the last, and the truth struck him with the force of a blow.

Unaccustomed emotion gathered in his throat and dimmed his eyes. That flash of perception dissipated a thousand vapors of vanity and self-esteem, and stirred into sudden life the older, nobler spirit which had lain so long under the deepening spell of the world and the City. He had reached a bad pass, indeed, that he had failed to see so much, had been so blind to the tragedy of his own hearth!

"Come here, Mary," he said huskily. She came, half-afraid and fully ashamed of her blunder. But he drew her down to his side, and did not afterwards release her hands.

She could see that he was not jesting, and her incredulity grew into wonder. He went on, growing stronger moment by moment, a better spirit rising from the ashes of his shame. He was minded to attack life again, to reconquer it so that he might prove himself worthy of the love he had seen revealed to him and at last had realized. And under this influence other things fell back into their true perspective.

"Still," he said, "I do not think these losses will break me. I am not broken as long as you are here to help me-as you have always done."

Slowly and doubtfully her wonder grew into joy. Now he was smoothing her hair,—a little awkwardly, with an unaccustomed touch-and scanning her face with strange intentness. Perhaps there were no lines there that might not be smoothed out.

"But-but I am so sorry, Philip!" she murmured.

Rapidly, in the new light he had been given, he summed up what he had lost and what he had gained through his losses. It seemed to him that it was his disaster that had placed in his hand the key of a better future, and he answered simply, "I am not sorry. I am glad!"

And thus it was that the House in Islington achieved its mission.

W. E. Cule.

Mr. Galsworthy has chosen an alluring title. No work so poor but it desires comment; better adverse than none at all. And when the text of the commentator is life itself, and the object of his criticism living men and women, vanity should see to it that he

"A Commentary." By John Galsworthy

gets a hearing. Mr. Galsworthy's commentary, one may guess, is not intended to be a wholly soothing document. You may, if you choose, bring a man abruptly home to himself by confronting him with the unmistakable effigy of his own solid form and substance, or, more subtly, by drawing his

gaze towards a dim projection, unfamiliar, sinister, or even monstrous, which yet on closer inspection he must acknowledge to be the authentic

shadow he throws. Mr. Galsworthy employs both methods, and as he turns his bright reflector now upon the closed-up ranks of the comfortable rich, now on the chaotic under-world of poverty and fear, the well-to-do spectator recognizes himself equally on either page as the author's objective. "Here in this picture see yourself; in this other, your work." The contrast, it may be said, and its application are not new, and a concentrated civilization has at least the merit of forcing them to some extent on the considera

tion of every man. Lazarus no longer waits at the gate. For a trifle he is made free of Dives's house, invades his most private hours, and has access to his mind if not to his bodily presence. The unanswerable pressure of his misery on the private conscience has been set down by Mr. Galsworthy in the sketch "A Lost Dog," where all the specious arguments of self-interest and common-sense retreat discomfited before the simple reiterated fact of the lost dog's existence. But we have something more here than ingenious and pointed statements of one of the oldest and most obvious of problems. Reneath the surface show of violent inequality you discover a fine thread of likeness, giving unity and rational sequence to the whole.

We may assume the short paper which heads the rest and gives its title to the book to be a more or less accurate summary of the author's point of view. The symbolism of the steamroller is sufficiently obvious, whilst the old man whose call in life was to warn the public of its dangers, with his glib use of "humanity," "morals,” “government by the people," "the milk of human kindness," and other book-learned properties, is clearly more than his own VOL. XLI.

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mouthpiece. At all events, when you have read his commentary on modern life you will have gained the essentials of what this book has to tell you. roadside philosopher, if you ask him, will give you his opinion, admirably condensed, on most of the outstanding features of the day. He passes under review the whole social structure. At the base, destitution, brutality, degenerate blood; at the head, purblind indifference. The building is neither fair to look upon nor seemingly secure. And you may derive from its contemplation no more consoling reflection than that, bad as it all seems, nobody in particular is to blame. This consolation, such as it is, emerges as you examine more closely the human items of which the fabric is composed. Some, for instance, are simply "born tired." "You can't do nothing with them; . . . they ain't up to what's wanted of them nowadays. You can't blame them, 's far as I can see." Some, again, live like the beasts; so would you in the same houses. "How can you have morals when you've got to live like that? Let alone humanity? You can't, it stands to reason." Others you will see taking their pleasures with aimless imbecility because "This 'ere modern life it's hollowed of 'em out. People's got so restless. I don't see how you can prevent it." Of those in the clutches of the law he will tell you: "Them fellows come out deadwith their minds squashed out o' them, an' all done with the best intentions, so they tell me." As for the rich, the comfortable, the official-"Well, they've got their position and one thing and another to consider-they're bound to be cautious; . . . them sort of people they don't mean any 'arm, but they 'aven't got the mind. You can't expect it of them, living their lives. . . . I don't blame them.”

The old man, it will be seen, with his impartial and lenient philosophy, is