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was going back to-morrow; she could work and help them just as before; and yet a gulf seemed opening between them forever. She had been selfish and petulant-she saw that now; sometimes impatient with her old father's trumpery rocks, or Lizzy's discontent; in a rage, often, at Joseph. Now she saw how hardly life had dealt with them, how poor and bare their lives were. She might have made them warmer and softer, if she had chosen. Please God she would try, when she went home again-wiping the hot tears off, and kissing Pen's dismal face, until he rebelled. The shadows were lengthening; the rock above her threw a jagged, black boundary about her feet. When the sun was behind yon farthest hill she was going back, up to the little church, with Pen; then she would give herself to her master forever.

Whatever feeling this brought into her soul, she kept it there silent, not coming to her face as the other had done in blushes or tears. She waited, her hands clutched together, watching the slow sinking of the sun. Not even to Paul had she said what this hour was to her. She had come a long journey; this was the end.

"It's a devillish cool welcome, considering you are my wife!"

Pen woke, and began to cry: she patted his shoulder in a dazed way, her eyes never leaving the man's face: then she went close, and caught him by the arm.

"It is flesh and blood"-shaking her off. "I'm not dead! You thought I was dead, did you? I got that letter written from Cuba"toying with his whiskers with a complacent smirk. "That was the sharpest dodge of my life, Grey. Fact is I was terribly in debt, and tied up with your people, and I cut loose. So, eh? What d' ye think of it, Puss?" putting his hand on her arm. "Wife, eh?"

She drew back against the sandstone with a hoarse whisper of a cry, such as can leave a woman's lips but once or twice in a lifetime. An animal tortured near its death utters something like it, trying to speak.

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Well, well, I don't want to incommode you" shifting his feet uncertainly. "I-it's not my will I came across you. Single life suits meand you too, eh? I've been rollicking round these four years-Tom Crane and I don't know Tom, though. Plains, Valparaiso, New Orleaus. Well, I'm going to see this shindy out in the States now. Tom's in it, tem-head-devil of a guerilla-band. I keep safe. Let Jack Gurney alone for keeping a whole skin! But, eh, Grey?"-mounting a pair of goldrimmed eye-glasses over his thick nose. You've grown. Different woman, by George! Nothing but a puling, gawky girl when I went away. Your eyes and skin have got colourluscious-looking! Why, your eyes flash like a young bison's we trapped out in Nevada. Come, kiss me, Grey-eh?" looking in the brown eyes that met his, and stopping short in his approach.

"I would like to be alone until the time comes," she had said, and had left him. He did not know what he was to the girl. She loved him moderately, he thought, with a perate appreciation that taunted his hot passion. She did not choose that even he should know with what desperate abandonment of self she had absorbed his life into hers. She chose to be alone, shrinking, with a sort of hatred, from the vulgar or strange eyes that would follow her into the church. In this beginning of her new life she wanted to be alone with God and this soul, only kinsman of her own. If they could but go, Paul and she, up into one of these mountain-peaks, with Him that made them very near, and there give themselves to each other, before God, forever!

She sat, her hands clasped about her knees, looking into the gurgling water. The cool, ashen hue that precedes sunset in the mountains began to creep through the air. The child had crouched down at her feet, and fallen into a half-doze. It was so still, that she heard far down the path a man's footsteps crushing the sand coming close. She did not turn her head-only the sudden blood dyed her face and neck.

"Paul!"

She knew he was coming for her. No answer. She stood up then, and looked around. It was the prisoner Gurney, leaning against the rock, motionless, only that he twisted a silk handkerchief nervously in his hand, looking down at it, and crunching his cigar vehemently in his teeth.

"I've met you at last, Grey. I knew you were at the Ferry."

The girl said nothing. Sudden death, or a mortal thrust of Fate, like this, brings only dumb astonishment at first-no pain. She put her fingers to her throat: there was a lump in it, choking her. He laughed, uneasily.

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Of the man and woman standing there face to face the woman's soul was the more guilty, it may be, in God's eyes, that minute-she loathed him with such intensity of hatred! The leer in his eyes was that of a fiend, to her-in which she was wrong. There are no thoroughbred villains, out of novels: even Judas had a redeeming trait (out of which he hanged himself). This man Gurney had a weak, incomplete brain, strong, sensual instincts, and thick blood, thirsty for excitement-all, probably, you could justly say of Nero. He did not care especially to torment the woman-would rather she were happy than not-unless, indeed, he needed her pain. So he stopped, regarding her. Enough of a true voluptuary, too, to shun turmoil.

"There, hush! For God's sake don't begin to cry out! I'm weak, yet-can't bear noise."

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'I'm not going to cry,"―her voice so low he had to stoop to hear. Something, too, in her heart, that made her push Pen from her, when he fumbled to unclasp her clenched handssome feeling she knew to be so foul she dared not touch him.

"Do you mean to claim me as your wife, John ?""

He did not reply immediately; leisurely in

specting her from head to foot, as she stood bent, her eyes lying like a dead weight on his patting and curling his yellow whiskers meanwhile.

"Wife, eh? I don't know. Your face is getting grey. Where's that pretty colour gone you had a bit ago, Puss? By George !"-laughing-"I don't think it would need much more temptation to make a murderer out of you. I did not expect you to remember the old days so well. I was hard on you then"-stopping with a look of half admiration, half fear, to criticise her again. "Well, well, I'll be serious. Will I claim you again? No. On the whole I believe not. I'll be candid, Grey-I always was a candid man, you know. I'd like well enough to have the taming of you: it would keep a man alive to play Petruchio to such a Kate, 'pon honour! But I do hate the trammels-I've cut loose so long, you see. You're not enough to tempt a fellow to hang out as family man again. It's the cursedest slavery! So I think," poising his ringed fingers on his chin, thoughtfully, we'd best settle it this way, I'll take my exchange and go South, and we'll keep our own counsel. Nobody's wiser. If it suits you to say I'm dead, why, I'm dead, at your service. I won't trouble you again; or, if you would rather, you can sue for a divorce in some of the States-wilful desertion, &c. I'm willing."

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She shook her head.

"In any case you are free."
She wrung her hands.

"I'm never free again! never again !"sobs coming now, shaking her body. She crouched down on the ground, burying her head out of sight.

"Tut! tut! A scene, after all! I tell you, girl, I'll do what you wish."

She raised her head.

"If you were dead, John Gurney-that is all. I was going to be a pure, good, happy woman, and now"

Her eyes closed, her head fell slowly on her breast, her hands and face grey with the mottled blood dark under the eyes.

"Poor thing! She won't know anything for a bit," said Gurney, laying her head back against the sandstone. I'll be off. What a devil she is, to be sure! Boy, you'd best put some water on your sister's face in a minute or two"-to the whimpering Pen. "If I was safe out of this scrape, and off from the Ferry"—

And thrusting his eyeglass into his pocket, he went up the hill, still chafing his whiskers. Near the town he met Paul Blecker. The sun was nearly down. The Doctor stopped short, looking at the man's face fixedly. He found nothing there but a vapid self-complacency.

"He has not seen her," said Paul, hurrying on. "Another hour and I am safe."

But Gurney had a keen twinkle in his eye. "It's not the first time that fellow has looked as if he would like to see my throat cut," he

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Nay, blame not my counsel, nor think that I dwell
On your vigilant zeal as a fault;

Let Knowledge march onward-I love her so well
That I could not desire her to halt.
Your lectures on stars and on fossils prepare;
Bring forth your political tracts,
And give to your pupils the sound, daily fare
Of a "Gradgrind" succession of "facts !"
But bid them not plod on a dull, beaten track
Through a series of wearisome hours;
When tedium arises, 'tis time to fall back
On a bright little corner of flowers.

There are men, gifted men, who have power to engage

The homage of age and of youth,
And Fiction becomes, in their exquisite page,
The beautiful handmaid of Truth.
The wit brings a treasure of pastime and smiles
To brighten our home and our hearth;
The lay of the poet our trouble beguiles,
There often is tumult, there often is care,
And lifts the rapt soul from the earth.

In a world that is changeful as ours;
We sometimes must cease from our work, and repair
To a bright little corner of flowers.

The leisure, so long by your pupils desired,

Concerns not their welfare alone;

The respite from toil by their spirit required,
Is needed as much by your own.

The mind, when by multiplied burdens oppressed,
Will languish repose to attain :

The labour that knows not the blessing of rest
Must always be labour-in-vain;
But seldom shall lasting and serious ill
Result from the overtasked powers,
If the cure be at hand, and we turn at our will
To a sweet little refuge of flowers.

PROMETHEUS.

What is the meaning of that punishment inflicted by the King of the gods upon one, who, stealing from heaven celestial fire-that is, a spark of knowledge and intelligence-communicated it to a mortal? Why, in our sacred writings, do we see God banishing the first man from Eden, guilty of nothing save having tasted of the fruits of the tree of Science? Why was Lucifer, the Angel of light, represented by ancient tradition as the demon of evil? And I recall to mind those ancient sages of India and China, forbidding to the people the knowledge of reading and writing; an interdiction which the old Druids, their disciples, did not fail to propagate throughout all Celtic Europe.

Is man placed here below solely to admire, and not to know? A spectator, not a commentator? Momentous question!

Seated in my garden, listening to the murmuring of my brooklet, or rather listening to nothing, lost in a sort of vague reverie, I know not how it was that suddenly there loomed up before me a mountain-it was Caucasus; and bound to it I beheld the unfortunate Prometheus, with the vulture preying upon his vitals. Thence followed the current of thought into which I lapsed, and I said to myself: " And yet, God has created man with all the instincts of social life, and what social state can exist without scientific progress? Is it not knowledge that raises us above the brutes, that draws us from barbarism? But perhaps between knowledge and science there is an infinite distance. Let us examine. Is it probable that man came from the hands of his Creator without any true conception of right and wrong, or depraved in soul like an escaped galley convict? It is repugnant to my feelings to suppose man naturally an idiot or ferocious beast. No: the savage state is not the state of nature; barbarism is born of our vices; there must have existed at the dawn of the ages a class of men, simple and ignorant perhaps, but guided by those honest instincts which I am always constrained to believe innate in all my fellow-beings."

While I reasoned thus within myself, Prometheus, his mountain and his vulture, all disappeared, giving place to fertile fields interspersed with rude cabins. Multitudes of beautiful youth-maidens and young men, not under the commands of a master, but subject only to the head of the family—were lightly and cheerfully performing their rustic labours. Mankind, less numerous then, had made choice of their abode in a fertile, salubrious land, on the banks of a lake or river, shaded with pine trees bearing luscious fruit. I imagined them domiciled in some country of the Orient, the Orient being always considered the cradle of the world; besides, I noticed that the leaves of the palm were used as covering for their cabins.

Among these labourers, bound together by the ties of consanguinity, the father or the grandfather, in all cases the eldest of the tribe, was both chief and judge; the three offices were combined in his person; his word was supreme, and the book of the law was written only in his conscience. They dispensed with other books in those days.

It was the patriarchal age, the golden age, which, after all that has been said of it, must have been something more than a mere form of expression. But this primitive civilization, barely outlined, in which the people knew not how to sound the depths of any science save that of happiness, cannot be counted in the march of human progress as more than the first stage.

Again the picture changed before me. Strange that I could thus shift it at will, but in this respect reverie is more accommodating than dreams.

The population had increased; families had multiplied into tribes, tribes into nations. The land not furnishing employment for the increased number of hands, disputes arose for possession. War mixed and disciplined the races, bringing in its train many miseries, but also many new ideas of heroism and devotion. Whatever may have been the opinion of Jupiter, Moses, the Indian or the Celtic philosophers, the law of progress is also the law of God. The need of employment for so many idle hands gave the first impulse to commerce, industry, and the arts.

There, where I had seen by mental vision the rude cabins of the herdsmen and the cultivators of the soil, arose palaces, temples, and splendid monuments. Scarcely a few ages had flown, and yet science had opened her gateways of treasures, and placed them at the service of

man.

Man, in the illimitable expansion of his power, throned it in the midst of a paradise of delights which he himself had created.

The panorama of that wonderful civilization, to which may our western civilization never attain, then passed before my sight.

In the midst of a cortége of soldiers clothed in bright armour, appeared, in gilded chariots, beautiful young maidens enveloped in veils, their hair sparkling with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. Between the chariots and the throng appeared a double rank of slaves stripping flowers from their stalks, or singing, accompanying themselves on the harp, not, as might have been expected, with songs of love and triumph, but with monals, plaintive and tender.

Next, beneath a daïs glittering with precious stones, a reliquary rather than a canopy, reclined a human being, scarcely discernible through the mists of myrrh and incense which obscured the air.

In his train marched, in a body, the college. of astrologers and the members of all the other academic societies, extending in a line as far as the eye could reach.

They halted in front of a grand palace. A man in the vigour of life, a royal diadem on his brow, came out from the daïs, and, with a gracious gesture, dismissed the cortége and

savans.

In a vast court with porticos of jasper and marble an estrade was erected. There, by his command, were arranged along the graded elevations his most magnificent fabrics and tapestries, his jewels and precious stones, in fine all his treasures. His favourite slaves, his odalisks, and his wives next took their position, adding to the glory of all this magnificence the splendour of their costumes, their youth, and their beauty. Soft music burst forth; the golden cassolettes shed their perfumes into the air, the slaves cast their flowers around, the women their smiles; then the representatives of all this civilization, the king of this people, the possessor of this palace and of all this wealth, the master of these women and slaves, raised to his lips a cup filled with delicious wine, and drank "To annihilation !"

And Paris, my dear Paris! was it destined, some day, not far distant, to perish like those ancient cities, from plethory, from an excess of science and material prosperity, those infallible generators of the decay of races and the extinction of moral sense?

The progressive tendency of our age alarmed me. It seemed to me that onr industry contributed much less to our wealth than to our artificial wants; I trembled lest our arts, in becoming perfected, should tend to enervate rather than to improve the present generation. But, above all, Science, with her daily miracles, excited my fears and forebodings. In the last scene she appeared to me, not as formerly, with a book or compass in her hand, but boisterous, raging, formidable; a giant sorceress with muscles of steel, her face besmeared with coal; around her an accumulation of bronze, iron, enormous tubes, engines of war, and machinery still more terrible.

And now I heard a voice address me thus:

"If revolutions sometimes fail in their object, if a time comes when they recoil fearfully upon themselves, it is when, after having broken their second wing, their second oar, they experience the inevitable necessity of replacing it by diAt the same instant I saw flames issue fromviding the dominant party into two, for the sake all sides of the estrade, and ascend from eleva- of creating an opposition. tion to elevation. The estrade was nothing but a vast funeral pyre!

This Assyrian, Babylonish, Ninevitish civilization, was all summed up in one word: Sardanapalus! After having been nearly a thousand years attaining the culminating point of science and human glory, it suddenly expired, leaving behind only a handful of ashes.

Sardanapalus, that pampered son of Prometheus, was, like his people, enervated and depraved by voluptuous indulgences of both mind and body. His chief occupation and delight were in pleasures, exciting spectacles, animated discussions upon the arts, cookery, perfumes, and philosophy; his sword had fallen from his hand, and he no longer felt the energy to raise it, and meanwhile the enemy was howling at his door. After casting a look around him, and beholding only poets, savans, and voluptuaries, a voluptuary himself, he finished by pledging death in a last libation.

Succeeding these tableaux arose before me, in regular succession, the towers of Notre Dame, and of Saint Jacques, the column of the Place Vendome, the Luxembourg, the Legislative Chamber, then the Rue Vivienne, the Rue Saint Denis, the Boulevard of Sebastopol, finally the whole city of Paris, grand as Nineveh, like her peopled with savans, sceptics and epicureans. I shuddered at the bare idea of this analogical

contact.

It seemed to me that, during my journey from Nineveh to Paris, however rapid and abrupt may have been the change of time and place, I had seen along the route the sinister shades of Tyre, Sidon, Athens, Rome, Byzantium, all those cities which have slept, turn by turn, on the funeral pyre of Sardanapalus.

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"Since antagonism is one of the essential laws of nature as well as of society, since both arrive at their normal development, only through struggles, beware in your political debates how you cherish hatred towards your adversaries; they are useful, indispensable even. Besides, a happy modification has taken place among you; for those implacable duels, in which the earth drank the blood of the contending parties, you have substituted a war of words, a battle of risings and sittings; to-day in your diets, the projectiles of war, instead of being hurled at your heads, are deposited in the ballot-box; this is an improvement, it will work! Upon this legal course, progress can advance a long time yet without danger to any one, thanks to the great law of antagonism which moderates it; live then in tranquillity, and do not distrust Providence ; God, in combining the two elements of fire, hydrogen and oxygen, has produced therefrom water, which will extinguish the fire; trust Him then; meddle not, but go and become reconciled to your two neighbours, whom you have cast aside, because they wound your ideas of moderation, by their two opposing poles, the right and left."

The voice ceased. Whence had it come? I looked around-I saw only Lalagé. Seated on the banks of the stream, watching its flowing, her head bowed down, her arms crossed, she seemed lost in meditation, apparently unconscious of my presence.

"Ah! Lalagé," said I, "would to Heaven you had interrupted me in that strange colloquy on social philosophy I have just held with myself! Why should I, who a few moments ago was sitting near you, enjoying the birds, the

flowers, and the sun, become suddenly occupied with our social state, our legislative chamber, our peasantry, our railroads, the manners and customs of the golden age, Nineveh and Sardanapalus! I now recollect-it was Prometheus that appeared to me first. But why should I be thinking of Prometheus rather than of any other being?"

Lalagé smiled, and pointed out to me, on the same turf upon which we were sitting, a pretty red-and-white Easter daisy.

"Only a few minutes ago," said she, "you were looking at that little flower, charming resumé of the large moon-daisy of our meadows; an insect came and lighted upon it, to sip from its disc. You recollect it? Next the daisy received a shock and swayed to and fro on its stalk; a very small bird-a wren, I believe-had just touched it with its wing, and when the bird disappeared it bore the insect away in its beak." "I recollected the incident perfectly, but could trace no connection between it and the origin of my great philosophical, political, palingenesian reverie.

Lalargé added:

"You then followed with your eye the wren in

its flight, and your thought, soaring higher still peered into the regions of space for the bird of prey, of which the wren was in its turn, perhaps, to be the victim; you thought of the kite, of the vulture; the vulture brought Prometheus to your mind. Thus, from the flower to the insect, from the insect to the wren, from the wren to the vulture, you were led to inquire what mystery of wisdom or of iniquity lay hidden in that ancient tradition; the rest followed naturally. The pebble which falls from the rock covers the surface of the lake with ever-increasing circles, all linked together in the same chain; thus the highest inspirations of man sometimes have no other first cause than the chirruping of the cricket, or the sight of a blade of grass; a breath of air may set in motion and start in its immense orbit a thought which can embrace, at the same instant, God, time, and space."

While Lalagé was speaking, I thought neither of interrogating her anew nor of replying to her. A single thought occupied my mind; it was that at that moment her voice bore a wonderful resemblance to the one which had sounded in my ear during my reverie.

VILLAGE SKETCHES: WARDLEY COURT. BY L. CROWE.

The name bestowed on our age by its Anglo-Saxon founders, is, or was, Oakdene; but this we mention more from a pardonable desire to exhibit our intimate acquaintance with the history of the county, than from any intention of misleading our readers; for alas! this pleasant-sounding designation-indicative as it was of those swelling hills, dotted with brave old trees, beneath whose shade the queen of Edward the Confessor is said to have hawked and hunted, and of those lovely meads, where the grass has a freshness of colouring the Emerald Isle may equal but cannot surpass-has long been barbarized into Hogsden. An endeayour was once made by one of the vicar's curates to restore the ancient spelling and pronunciation; but it was received by the natives with such open opposition or utter indifference that he soon despaired of ever inculcating them with his own admiration of euphony, and Hogsden it still remains.

Nothing can be more rurally beautiful than the environs of our village-nothing more awkward and ugly than the village itself. As no word-painting can do justice to the loveliness of the surrounding scenery, so must all description fail to set before our readers in their dingy nakedness its long rows of rudely-built cottages,

ungraced even by that tiny square of earth, sparsely planted with dusty evergreens, which breaks the monotony of suburban streets. We may sacrifice too freely to Bacchus, as some heathen rudely commented, who counted fourteen publichouses and beershops within the limits of the parish, but we certainly do not sacrifice anything to the picturesque. Our very bricks are of a peculiarly dingy and disagreeable tint of red; that fresh coat of paint, which although it may offend the nose is always agreeable to the eye, is an undreamed-of luxury in Hogsden; and the thatched roofs and leaden casements, filled with tiny lozenges of green and yellow glass, which look pleasantly rural in an artist's sketch, are very forlorn in reality, when divested of a carefully-painted background, and viewed without the tasteful adjuncts of jasmine sprays and climbing roses.

We are-pardon me, O Hogsdenites, for the disparaging confession-we are decidedly behind our neighbours on the route to civilization. Our Vicar is non-resident; his curate is in delicate health and easily snubbed; and the farmers, taken collectively, are old in years, and older in habits, adhering to the antiquated customs of their forefathers with true English pertinacity. Nothing new ever appears amongst us but

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