A MONTHLY MISCELLANY, EDITED BY R. HANBURY MIERS. No. XII. APRIL, 1892. I. My Sister Cecilia. Chaps. XXIII-XXV. By F. T. PALGRAVE. II. To a Fair Chinese Visitor. By J. W. PRESTON. V. Palermo. By the REV. J. B. CAMM. VI. A Vegetarian Banquet. By FRANK HIRD. VII. In Dreams. By J. D. ERRINGTON-LOVEland. VIII. Some Remarks on Golf. By P. IX. Redistribution of Wealth. By F. WILLS. PAGE 281 329 X. Bushey and Professor Herkomer's Studio. By MISS STARBUCK. 327 XI. Studies in Shakespeare. By the Rev. C. R. PEARSON. XII. The General, a Reminiscence. By J. D. ERRINGTON LOVELAND. XIII. Double Acrostic. By W. M. WYNCH, Junior. PUBLISHED BY F. DUNSTER, BROAD STREET, LYME REGIS. 1892. Price One Shilling. All Rights Reserved. No. 12. THE GROVE. APRIL, 1892. VOL. II. MY SISTER CECILIA. CHAPTER XXIII. SUNRISE tenderly bright as that watched some three years before from the Bohemian hill awoke me betimes next morning. The last thoughts of the night claimed naturally the first audience: Cecilia's quiet suppression in regard to Robert, and all past or future relations with one whom I already thought of in a double sense as a brother. Yet, though thus waking with me, I remember how comparatively light that anxiety now appeared: a heavy perplexity the night before, in the morning it came before me as a maiden's caprice: at most as one of the subtle phases which affection takes in womanly hearts, and we judge capricious because they are to us unintelligible. Every one must have noticed this strange result of what the ancients hence called the Divine Sleep, and how this "bath and balm of hurt minds" makes row itself the most authentic and in its real cause undiminished, pear almost like another dream, for a few minutes. "I will speak her in an hour or so," I thought, "and take her over to FountainIl for breakfast"; and the image of my dear Eleanor (a little scured perhaps of late by the nearer engrossments of Ardeley), urned in the sweetness of our last interview. A sound of light steps as I lay surrendered to this (it may be) selfish ...joyment, rustling on the pathway and dying away on the lawn, awoke me, as it were, again. Cecilia rising before the household had crept down to the garden, and thence, (I thought for a moment), to go on to the Church at so little distance. But she was without her bonnet; she walked on till the shadow of the hill which bounded our fields and garden relieved her from the dazzling rays of the yet level sun, then turned, and looked fixedly at the house. I signed to her to wait; she consented with a smile, and was ready for me at the door when I came down, and without speaking at once of my intention, led her again towards the hill which, as I think I have before noticed, barred our view in the direction of Fountainhall. That we might at last speak of Robert, I reverted to the subject of our evening's conversation. "When I remembered what she had told me of her early experiences, it suggested to me that youth, as contrasted with childhood, is perhaps in a certain sense a passive, an unprogressive state; and that our individual powers or peculiarities, noticed almost in the cradle, reappear later under the pressure of actual life." "I have often thought of that," Cecilia said: "and wished to change Wordsworth's famous lines; - at least we should understand them thus,that it is in the infant child we see the "father of the man." It is like what people so often notice about family resemblance; so perceptible to parents at least in the baby, hidden then by the full tints and roundness of childhood, and brought out again when the hair falls, or the forehead is furrowed. Very likely those who are wise in such matters would find reasons for this." "Yes, physical reasons: infants-think of their strange smiles ! — appear less identified with the flesh-as if in them the soul were not fully incorporated; immanent, not identified." "Shades of the prison house," she replied, quoting three or four of the well-known lines:-"In youth, at least in mine, I think I was less myself-only," she added blushing, "it is laughable that I should perplex you with my philosophy of girlhood." "You have given me such an interest in your own early days, dear, by all you said yesterday, that I am not likely soon to tire of the matter." "A novel interest," she said with a smile; then quickly: "This old Saxon or Danish mound (as Papa prefers),"—the hill we were now fast ascending" was one of these early fancies, Edmund. When I saw it, not so much from the nursery windows, whence the further and loftier |