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Miles Kambert's Whree Chances.

BY MARY E. PALGRAVE.

CHAPTER XII.

SUCCESS.

HE pale sunlight of a chilly November morning shone through the kitchen window of the Lamberts' cottage at Bottom, and lit up three large oil sketches set out on a box against the wall. Before them stood the artist, with an expression of intense anxiety on his face, and by him was Margery, with her hand tucked under his arm, and her brown eyes devouring the pictures. A dead silence prevailed in the kitchen, for this was a most thrilling moment. Margery had been her brother's model for all three drawings, but he had made her promise at the beginning that she would not look at what he was doing till he gave her leave. He felt as if he could not bear even her criticisms on his work while it was going on, but now it was done, her approval was everything. On her verdict it would depend whether or not he sent in his designs for competition. "Well, Madge," he said at last, as she did not speak, "what do you think of them? the honest truth-I shan't mind!"

Tell me

"What will he say?"

"This is not talent-it is genius,' "" answered Margery, trying to compose her face into gravity like Raymond's, and to imitate his measured tones. "Nonsense!" cried Miles, but he reddened with pleasure, and the anxious look began to pass away from his face. All through his life the approval that made him happiest and the praises that sounded sweetest in his ears were his sister Margery's. And I think those are very happy people to whom the "Well done!" of their home circle is the proudest thing in the world, that which they look for first and treasure longest.

You would wish to know, I expect, what the three pictures were like which Margery approved of so much. I daresay you have seen pictures of the three Christian Graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, and know the symbols which belong to each-the heart to Love or Charity, the cross to Faith, and the anchor to Hope. But Miles Lambert, as it happened, had never seen any representations of the virtues he had got to paint, and so was obliged to think out for himself the proper attitude in which to represent each. This gave to his designs, however rough and faulty their workmanship might be, the sovereign merit of originality. He had one teacher, though, to help him; one whom we may all learn from if we choose, whether we be artists or not-that strict, kind mistress, the Experience of Life.

So Miles had drawn Faith as a girl asleep in a rocky cave, with her head pillowed on her arm, and a calm face turned peacefully upwards, while close beside her, so close that he could all but touch her with his terrible claws, was a lion, with his fierce teeth shining and his cruel eyes fixed upon her. The only thing which prevented him from pouncing upon the girl was a chain which bound him to the rock behind, but a chain so slender and frail that it looked as if, with one start and spring, he could snap it asunder and be free to seize his defenceless prey. The girl's figure was studied from Margery, but the face was like what Miles remembered of his mother's. The lion, to be sure, was a very wooden and conventional animal-in fact a severe critic might have said that there was more of the red lion of the signboard at Welshcombe than of the king of beasts about him-but the artist had got the contrast between the noisy rage of the wild animal and the silent peace of the sleeping girl very forcibly and well, and the colouring was natural and true.

Miles's idea of Hope was a very simple one: just a girl springing up off a bank, with her arms stretched out and raised and her face turned up towards the sky, as if she were reaching after some glorious prize hung just out of sight. Miles had drawn her with her back turned and only a little bit of her cheek visible to the spectator, but somehow he had contrived to give to the straight, white, flowing dress, the slender arms, and upturned head, such an innocent, eager look of glad expectation, that to many people this picture was the most charming of the three.

Perhaps if Miles had been an older man, he would have felt that a leading feature of all true hope is patience, and would have represented his

ideal Hope with less of impulsiveness and more of endurance in her attitude; but then she would hardly have told so well what she was, perhaps, or have looked so guileless and joyful.

Miles's third picture had two figures in it, and had cost him more thought and trouble than either of the others. His first idea had been a very commonplace figure of a grandly dressed damsel giving away bread, but he had not long begun to draw before he felt dissatisfied with it and knew he could do better than that if he only tried hard enough. He wasted a whole precious day in vain attempts to think of something better, but in the evening, when, as usual, he was reading a chapter of the Bible aloud to his sisters and Robin, a happy idea came to him. He was reading David's answer to Araunah when he had pressed him to accept of his oxen and his wood to offer sacrifice with: "Nay; but I will surely buy it of thee at a price; neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing." It came across him, as he read those words, that in this lay the true heart and spirit of charity, and next morning he took a fresh canvas and sketched on it a girl taking off her own cloak to cover a shrinking, trembling figure, for which one of his old studies of Phyllis in her weakly childish days did only too well. He drew his Charity with her head thrown a little back and her arms stretched out to fling the cloak round the shoulders of the poor beggar before her "an exceedingly difficult attitude, my young friend," said Sir John Layne, "and very happily rendered;"-her hair was blown out by the wind, and her face was lofty and sweet. Even Miles knew that he had drawn the figure well, and on this last picture it was that he grounded his few hopes of success.

It had been arranged between Raymond Layne and Miles, during that short visit to Rainscombe Farm, that the latter was to bring his pictures up to London himself, and stay there till he heard the decision on them.

Accordingly, the earliest grey dawn of a December morning saw a group assembled at the door of the farm-house. There was Farmer Selby's taxcart, in which he was going to drive Miles over to Welshcombe to meet the coach, waiting at the door, and the farmer himself sitting ready in it, with the reins in his hand and a mighty frieze coat buttoned up to his chin. The precious pictures, on which so much depended, were reposing on a bed of straw in the back of the cart; Miles's bundle was in, and everything ready.

Dick had come up from Swanford the night before

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'Good-bye, and good luck to you, Miles!" cried Mrs. Selby from the doorstep. "I'll take good care of the girls till you come back."

'Good-bye, good-bye," they all cried in chorus, and Miles, with a mighty effort, steadied his voice enough to answer back. The last thing he saw, when he turned for a final look before the winding road hid the farm from sight, was Margery waving her handkerchief, and even the fluttering folds seemed to bid him hope. Ah, what should he have to tell her when he came back?

There was a big fire in the hall at Sir John Layne's house in Piccadilly, and four young men were gathered round it, waiting. They were evidently anxious and in suspense about something, for very few words passed between them, but all of them fidgeted and all looked impatiently towards a certain door. The one who seemed least ill at ease was a tall young fellow in a rough country suit, who stood quietly at the corner of the fireplace, and only betrayed his anxiety by an occasional restless movement. He was a stranger to the others, his dress and appearance seemed to amuse them a good deal, and when they were not looking at the door they were generally staring at him.

At last the door in question opened, and everybody started and looked nervous. Some one inside called, "Mr. Lambert, have the goodness to step this way," and the young countryman went quietly across the hall, and the door was shut behind him.

A groan echoed from the three who were left behind.

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"He has got the prize-my word for it, he has got the prize!" cried one.

"That must be young Layne's pet," said another, "the self-taught genius they told us of, who was going to compete with us."

"Oh, come! they can't have decided yet,” said the third; "those uneducated prodigies will hardly go down with Sir John; he knows good drawing when he sees it."

Miles, when he had passed through the heavily curtained door, found himself in a large room, full -so it seemed on his first bewildered glance-of nothing but easels with pictures on them. Presently, however, he perceived at the further end a group of gentlemen standing, among whom the only face he knew was Raymond Layne's. Among the pictures he recognised his own three designs, but at first he scarcely knew them again, so wonderfully well they looked among the others. "Did I really do those?" he asked himself.

"This is my friend Miles Lambert, sir," said Raymond, coming forward and laying his hand on Miles's arm. He led him up to a handsome elderly man who was standing with his back to the fire.

"I am happy to inform you," continued Sir John, "that these gentlemen you see present-all of whom are excellent judges of art-and myself have decided that your designs are, in respect of spirit and originality, unquestionably the best of the series. I shall therefore be most happy to bestow on you a reward which I am sure you will abundantly profit by."

"Sir?" faltered Miles, who only half understood this pompous speech, and scarcely dared believe what he did understand.

"You are the successful man, Lambert," struck in Raymond; "let me congratulate you." And

he held out his hand.

Miles took it silently, too much overwhelmed to speak.

Every one in the room looked at him with interest and kindness, for Raymond had been telling them the story of his intense desire to be an artist, of his patient industry and great disappointments. Mr. Flaxman (one of the greatest of English sculptors) asked to be introduced to him, and gave him a hearty invitation to his house, and several others spoke to him in terms of praise which made him blush up to the ears.

But pleasantest of all was the hearty grip of Raymond Layne's fingers, and the tone of cordial pleasure in his voice as he whispered

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Ah, Miles, didn't I tell you the third chance would be the lucky one?"

That night Miles sat up till the small hours, writing a long letter to Margery. It ended thus

"If I have got my wish at last, it is all owing to you. But for you I should have given up long ago, and been nothing but a quarryman all my life. If these gentlemen could have known how many, many times I have lost my temper and my patience, and grown tired of working and waiting, they would not have said what they did about my industry and perseverance. I felt quite ashamed to let them say it, and could scarce keep myself from telling them that it was all your doing. But this I am resolved upon, Margery, I will show myself not ungrateful. If ever I have any success you must share it. I will never rest till I have earned enough to make a home for you. If you knew how I miss you already! I can't feel half glad to have won the competition without you to talk it over with. But, please God, I will have a home for you and Phyllis before many years are out. I can keep my eyes open no longer, so goodnight. God bless you, my dear sister, and reward you for all that you are to me.-MILES LAMBERT."

One brilliant May morning in the year 1833 the rooms in Somerset House, in which the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy was then held, were crowded with people. But full as they were, there was one special point where the crowd was greatest of all, and that was round a picture which everybody said was the picture of the year-by Mr. Lambert, the Royal Academician. There were several beautiful portraits by him also in the exhibition, but this was his principal picture, and the one most admired.

It represented a fair-haired, rosy child, lying asleep on a cottage floor, with his head resting comfortably on the back of a shaggy, rough-coated dog. Through the small, dusty panes of the cottage window a sunbeam had found its way between the geraniums on the sill, and lay bright on the child's curly locks, and made a patch of brilliance on the floor. A very simple subject, you see, but so exquisitely and lovingly treated that every touch bore witness that the hand which had laid it there was the hand of a great painter.

The artist himself had been in the exhibition earlier in the day, before the doors were open to

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"I think I must make a copy of it for the Duke, and keep this one," said Miles. Do you remember the afternoon-how many years ago is it, Madge?-when I made the drawing of Robin asleep, with his head on Toby's back, from which I did this? You came and looked at it when I had finished; and do you remember what you said?"

She shook her head and laughed. "Something very remarkable, I have no doubt," she answered. "No, it wasn't; only, somehow, I never forgot it. 'Miles, you must be a painter,' you said; and from that day I made up my mind that, by the grace of God, a painter I would be."

"And it has come to pass," said Margery.

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Yes," answered Miles, and he bent his head, and his sister knew by the look on his face that he was thanking God.

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Peeps into Westminster Abbey.

BY EVELYN L. FARRAR.

PEEP XII.

T is easy to see in the nave where the work of one period begins and ends. Richard II.'s part is marked by the substitution of shields for carvings on the spandrels of the wall arcadings; the arch mouldings are slightly different, and, as if funds for the Abbey had failed at this point, the diaper pattern on the walls suddenly ceases. Henry V.'s last bay, which completes the nave, is also different in detail. The nave was first used for Divine ser. vice in his reign, after the battle of Agincourt, when a thanksgiving service was held here.

At the west end is a fine stained glass window, representing Moses, Aaron, and the patriarchs. On each side are two small windows of ancient glass, probably of the fourteenth century, the one on the south side containing the figure of Edward the Black Prince, and the other that of Edward the Confessor. The nave contains chiefly the memorials of statesmen, soldiers, and men of science, but there are an unfortunate number of eighteenth century monuments, false in taste and bad in art, erected to persons of little or no repute, at a time when the English people seemed dead to all feelings of national honour and reverence. In those days people bought cheaply what we now consider the greatest honour a nation can bestow on her sons, the reward of long services and great deeds.

The choir is shut off from the nave by brass gates. On the north side of these the great Sir Isaac Newton is buried (1727). His monument is a most interesting one; it consists of a reclining statue of himself, which is a good likeness, above of a globe, on which Astronomy sits, having shut up her book as if her labours were no longer needed, and below of a bas-relief in which children are engaged in making experiments typical of his works. One is weighing the sun and planets on a steelyard, a second pouring out coins in allusion to his labours as Master of the Mint, a third is looking through a telescope, a fourth viewing the rays of the sun through a prism, and a fifth constructing a steam-engine. On one side is an aloe, signifying the immortality which he acquired by his works.

Among the monuments on the north side is that of Spencer Percival (1812), who was assassinated