Among the lions of Tenby none is more interesting than St. Catharine's Island, a great rugged hill of solid limestone almost devoid of verdure and rent into innumerable fissures, with a succession of dark romantic coves and caverns and jagged projecting crags fringing its sides completely round. At high tide this islet is separated from the mainland by a deep rolling sea. At low tide its shores are left dry by the receding waters. It is a curious sight to watch this daily advance and retreat of the sea. To see the tides of ocean come and go is no novelty, but it becomes a novelty under circumstances like these, where every day a dry bridge of yellow sand is stretched forth from the islet to the mainland, across which a stream of humanity pours the moment the path is clear. At first only one person at a time can pass. Ten minutes later the sand-bridge is a broad road. Ten later, and all Tenby might cross in a crowd. There is an iron staircase built up the rocky face of the islet, winding about among its crags and fissures, and the isle is overrun with people during the time the tide is out. It has many attractions. The view is grand from those heights. Yawning gulfs fascinate you to look dizzily down into the secret heart of the isle. On the highest point of rock stood, a few years ago, an ancient chapel which had in Roman Catholic days been dedicated to St. Catharine. Within the past six years this chapel has given way to a fortress, its walls partly embedded in the solid rock. The people who throng to the islet between tides roam about, loiter with breeze-blown garments on the stairs and landings, peer into the fortress, or, perching themselves in the sheltered nooks which are innumerable among the crags, sit and sew, read, chat, make love and watch the pygmy bathers in the sea far down below. As long as the tide is low the tenants of the islet are safe to remain, but as soon as it turns those who are wise begin to gather up their things and clear out. Now and then incautious ones get caught; and then there are screaming, hurrying and a terrible fright, especially if the trapped ones are of the gentler sex, and still more especially if their proportions are ample. Such women are, as a rule, the cowardliest. Probably, they feel their amplitude a disadvantage in moments of peril, and know emotions which their scrawnier sisters escape. A case in point greets us this morning as we stand watching the rising of the tide. A roly-poly woman of forty or so is caught on the islet by the closing of old Ocean's drawbridge. She is a fair being with dark hair and eyes, a sweet smile, a clear complexion, and some two hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois, richly dressed, pleasant-mannered, and in all respects no doubt a lady to be admired and loved, as well as respected, in the social circle. But at present she is at a sad disadvantage. I noticed her a few minutes ago at the top of the iron staircase, and said to myself that she would have just time enough to come down, for there was an isthmus of sand some twenty feet wide as yet to be obliterated by the crawling tide. A quickly-tripping foot would have accomplished it, but the fair-fat-and-forty lady occupied one whole minute in coming down. Now that she has reached the bottom step there is a wide wash of sea between her and the mainland, and she raises her hands in horror. How is she to get over? There is no boat in sight. Shall she wade? There is a nervous motion of her fat white hands in the direction of her gaiters, but she hesitates. The woman who hesitates is lost: the water grows deeper and deeper every instant; in ten minutes it will be over her head. A bathing-machine boy comes trotting his horse through the water, and, backing up by the rock on which the distressed lady stands, bids her get on. Get on the back of a horrid bathing-horse! behind the back of a horrid boy! Had she been a sylph the prospect would have been most untempting, but a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder! Nevertheless, the unhappy fair one begins to prepare for the sacrifice with grief and consternation in her face. "How can I do it?" her trembling lips whisper, and she looks about her on the rocks as if to say, "Oh, is there no other way out of this wretched predicament?" The boy, as he sits astride, is getting his feet wet by this time: the horse will have to swim for it presently. Still she hesitates, and throws a shrinking glance over the vast audience gathered on the sands silently attentive—the band, the organ-grinder and the balladist all breathlessly awaiting the issue, no doubt feeling that it would be mockery to indulge in music at such a moment. Suddenly a bare-headed and shirt-sleeved man is seen to dash through the water, regardless of danger and of wet trousers, who, seizing the fat lady round the knees in spite of her screams, dumps her on the horse's back all in a heap. Saved! saved! Such a giggling (for joy) has seldom been seen to shake a large assemblage. The emotion caused by the spectacle of beauty in distress is no doubt a pain to every masculine mind not hopelessly vitiated by the cynical tendencies of the age; but the pain produced by the emotion of mirth at seeing a fellow-creature at a ridiculous disadvantage is greater when you feel bound not to laugh.

There are four strange caves piercing St. Catharine's Island completely through from side to side. In rough weather the storming of the sea through these extraordinary tunnels creates a prodigious uproar. When the weather is still it is possible to take boat and sail quite through one of them: at low tide you may walk through. Marine zoological riches abound in these caverns, which have been for many years a real treasure-house for naturalists. The walls are studded with innumerable barnacles, dogwinkles and other shells—not dead and empty, but full of living creatures, requiring only the return of the tide to awaken them to an active existence. There are simply myriads of them: a random stone thrown against a wall will smash a whole colony; and there are besides polyps and sea-anemones and other strange animals of eccentric habits in unusual abundance. The visitors to Tenby find great diversion in these and the other caves on the coast: in fact, the whole coast as far as Milford Haven is one succession of natural curiosities and antiquities. One cavern bears the name of Merlin's Cave, and is hallowed by a legend of the enchanter, who was born at Carmarthen in the next county.

WIRT SIKES.



NOCTURNE.

There'll come a day when the supremest splendor Of earth or sky or sea, Whate'er their miracles, sublime or tender, Will wake no joy in me.

There'll come a day when all the aspiration, Now with such fervor fraught, As lifts to heights of breathless exaltation, Will seem a thing of naught.

There'll come a day when riches, honor, glory, Music and song and art, Will look like puppets in a wornout story, Where each has played his part.

There'll come a day when human love, the sweetest Gift that includes the whole Of God's grand giving—sovereignest, completest— Shall fail to fill my soul.

There'll come a day—I will not care how passes The cloud across my sight, If only, lark-like, from earth's nested grasses, I spring to meet its light.

MARGARET J. PRESTON.



THROUGH WINDING WAYS.

CHAPTER IV.

It was soon decided that I was to set out for The Headlands the first week in October. I had studied too hard, and was growing so tall and slight that Harry Dart used to draw caricatures of me, taking me in sections, he declared, since no ordinary piece of paper would suffice for a full-length. I was glad of a change, yet felt some sorrow about it too. I knew nothing of what it was to miss the warm home-life and the constant companionship which had filled every idle hour with ever-recurring pleasures. I hated to part from my mother, who had grown of late so inestimably dear to me; I should miss the boys; what could make up to me for Georgy? I did not know that I was never again to enjoy the old Belfield routine, with all my untamed impulses making the wild, free physical life full of deep and passionate delight—never again to stand the peer of all my mates, running the familiar races, playing the familiar games. I did not know what a changed life awaited me, and I looked forward to my opening vistas of a bright future with longings inconceivably sweet.

I reached The Headlands one fine day in October a little past noon. Mr. Raymond's carriage met me at the station, and a grave elderly servant, who told me his name was Mills, put me inside and assumed all responsibilities concerning my luggage. I had plenty of time to remember with regret our homely, pleasant life at Belfield, and recall Thorpe's words when he heard that I had been invited to The Headlands. "It will be a glimpse of another life," he had remarked with his usual air of consummate knowledge of the world. "Even I, who am used to living on terms of intimacy with men of all ranks and positions, find it difficult to adjust the balance in that quiet, stately house, where everything goes on oiled wheels."

"But what makes it hard to get along?" I had inquired with a sort of awe.

"Oh, I can't describe it," he had returned with a wave of his white hand, "but you'll soon experience it for yourself."

But as I went on and the great sea opened before my eyes, I quite forgot my fears in the pleasure of such wide horizons, such magnificent scenery. The ocean was here in all its grandeur, yet there was no bleakness or bareness in these rock-bound shores, softly veiled in the haze of the October afternoon. The voices of the breakers greeted me as something vaguely familiar: I seemed to have been listening for them all my life. In such joys as I felt that day eyes and ears do but little—imagination works most wonders.

I had not noticed, so raptly was I watching the fleeting tints of opal, steel and blue which chased each other along the smooth slow waves, that we had entered enclosed grounds, and when the carriage stopped suddenly before a wide, pillared portico I was wholly taken by surprise. Mills opened the carriage-door, and I got down with a blank, dreamy feeling, and followed him up the steps through the wide portal and along the hall. He ushered me into the library, and left me while he went to announce my arrival.

I sat perfectly still in the lofty Gothic room. It was lined with books except on the west side, where were long oriel windows of stained glass, with figures of saints glorious in blue and gold and crimson and purple, with aureoles of wonderful splendor above their beautiful heads. The floor was of inlaid woods polished until it shone, and over it was laid a Persian carpet thick and soft as moss. The chimney-piece was of wonderful beauty, and extended into the room, leaving a sort of alcove on each side, and a low fire was burning in a quaintly-designed grate. Over the mantel hung a large picture which I did not know, but which made my heart beat as I looked: it was a copy of the Sistine Madonna. In front of the fire was an easy-chair piled with cushions, and beside it a low stool, while on either hand were painted screens: on one the field of brilliant azure was strewn with flowers of dazzling hues; the other was crossed by a flight of birds of gorgeous plumage.

I had looked at everything, had taken in every surprise of beautiful form and color: then my eyes were lifted again to the windows, and I was gazing at the meek saints with their shining raiment and radiant hair when I was suddenly recalled to a recollection of where I was and why I was there. A hand pushed aside the velvet curtain which hung across the doorway—a child's hand—and then a little girl entered, followed by a greyhound as tall as herself. I rose and stood waiting while she advanced, the same sunshine which transfigured the saints in the windows playing over her white dress in brilliant rainbow tints.

She was a very little girl, yet her large, serious dark eyes and her lithe way of carrying her slim height impressed me with a sort of awe which I might not have felt for a grown woman. When she neared me she stood perfectly still, regarding me silently with a deliberate glance. She was very pale, with a complexion like the inner leaves of a white rose, but her eyes lent fire to a face otherwise proud and cold. Her hair had evidently been cut short, and curled close to her head in loose brown curls. When she had fairly taken me in she held out her hand. "How do you do?" she asked in a clear, deliberate voice. "I am very glad to see you."

"Did you expect me?" I inquired shyly.

"Of course we did," she answered with some imperiousness, "or we should not have sent the carriage and servants to meet you."

Then we were both silent again, and went on mentally making up our minds concerning each other.

"Yes," she said presently, putting her hand into mine again, "you look just as I thought you did. I asked papa: he said you had brown hair and gray eyes, and that you were good-looking when you smiled. And am I like what you expected to see?"

I did not know, I told her. In fact, although I had heard much and thought some about Helen, she had hitherto possessed no personality for me except as Mr. Floyd's little girl. And now she impressed me differently from any person I had ever seen before, and if I had formed any previous conceptions, they all fled. She seemed, I will confess, a haughty, aristocratic little creature, with her slight form and somewhat imperious look, her deliberate, commanding voice and intense eyes: still, I liked her at once. Mr. Floyd had begged me to be kind to her, and it seemed easy for me to cherish and protect her: she appeared to need being taken care of with both strength and tenderness, for it was such a fragile little hand I held, and, with all its beauty, such a wan little face I looked upon.

"I hope you will like me, Helen," said I bluntly, "for your father wants you to enjoy my visit."

She smiled for the first time. "I like you very much already," she said in the same distinct, melancholy voice; and without more words she put up her little face to mine and kissed me softly on my lips. I was unused to caresses, and my cheeks burned; but I followed her, at her request, to the back lawn, where Mr. Raymond was waiting to see me.

"Grandfather is not strong," she explained, "and we save him all the steps we can. It is so sad to be old! Have you a grandfather?"

"No," I returned: "there is nobody in our family but mother and me."

"And I have got grandpa and papa too," said she thoughtfully. "Only papa is so busy: he is never here but a week at a time."

We had passed through the hall, crossed the rear piazza and descended the steps, and were advancing along the grassplat toward a summer-house which faced the sea. I could now for the first time gain an idea of the extent and grandeur of the place. The house towered above us solemnly with its towers, pillared arches, cornices and pediments, while, beyond, the glass roofs of numberless greenhouses lifted their domes to the warm afternoon sun. All around the lawn stood lofty trees, their foliage glorious with crimson, russet and gold, and their shadows crept stealthily toward us as if they were alive. And beyond house, lawns, gardens and tree-lined avenues was a pine wood which extended its solemn verdure all round the place, enclosing it almost to the edge of the bluff. All this on the right hand: on the left the mysterious sea, whose music filled the fair sunshiny world we two children were traversing hand in hand.

"There is grandpa," exclaimed Helen as we neared the summer-house; and I saw an old man sitting in an arm-chair in the sunshine, looking eagerly toward us as if in anxious expectation.

"You were gone a long time, Helen," he called out peevishly.

"Oh no, dear," she replied soothingly. "Here is Floyd, grandpa."

He had looked, when I first saw him from a distance, like a very old man, but when I was shaking hands with him I was surprised to discover that his face had little appearance of age. Even his thin dark hair was but sprinkled with gray at the curly ends on the temples: his eyebrows were a black silky thread, his eyes dark and full of a peculiar glitter. His features were finely formed and feminine in their delicacy, but the expression of his face was marred by the restlessness of his eyes, and made almost pathetic by the dejected, melancholy lines about his thin scarlet lips.

He shook hands with me gracefully, and made inquiries about my journey, then sank back into his chair listlessly, and allowed Helen to pull the tiger-skin which formed his lap-robe over his knees. There was a peculiar feebleness about his whole attitude as he sat—something almost abased in the sinking of his chin upon his breast. It was hard for me to realize that he was the owner of all this magnificence, and, dressed although he was with faultless elegance, and although luxurious appurtenances filled the summer-house, waiting for his momentary convenience, I was certain that his great wealth brought him no pleasure, and that, except for his little grandchild, he was comfortless in the world. He was full of complaints toward her. He was sure, he said, that now when I had come she would have no thought of him; that taking care of an old man was a dreary and thankless task; that only the young could be beloved by the young. And her way of listening and answering made me suspect that she was but too used to such querulousness. I was perhaps too young to understand mainsprings of action, yet nevertheless I seemed to know at once that her calm, mature manner and precocious imperiousness were the result of his weakness and wavering, of his selfish and morbid doubts.

"You are older than I thought," Mr. Raymond said to me, regarding me for the first time with languid curiosity. "I expected to see a velvet-coated little fellow of Helen's size. What is your age, my boy?"

I told him I should be fifteen the next spring, counting, as most young people do, by the milestone ahead of me, instead of the one I had passed.

"Oh, that is quite an age," said he with an air of relief. "Do not expect to make a playmate of Mr. Floyd Randolph, Helen: he is quite too old to care for a mere child like yourself."

"He is not nearly as old as papa." returned Helen quickly, "and papa will play with me all day long."

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Raymond, sinking back among his cushions and tiger-skins, "all the world can play but me. I must be content to sit outside the joy and the sunshine. I have lived too long. Only the young, bright people of the world are welcome even to my own little grandchild."

Helen threw her arm about his neck and stroked his cheek with her slim hand. "You know, grandpa," she said simply, "that I do not care for play, and I love our quiet times together; but you forget what Dr. Sharpe says—that I must run about out of doors and be as merry as I can, or else—"

He stopped her with a quick, shuddering gesture. "Oh no," said he, "I do not forget. Do not make me out worse than I am to Floyd, Helen." He rang a hand-bell on the table by his side, and began feebly to adjust the wrappings about his shoulders.—"I will go in, Frederick," he murmured to the servant, who advanced at once as if he had been waiting close by—"I will go in and sit by the fire.—Helen, you must show Floyd the place.—There are greenhouses, and the stables are worth seeing too," he added to me apologetically. "I hear that Robinson has some rare fowls, and Helen has dogs of all kinds, and a few deer. It will do her good to go about, you know." He broke off suddenly, a spasm crossing his face, and without more words he turned abruptly to his valet, took his arm and walked feebly toward the house.

We stood together looking after him—I a little shy and perplexed in my new position, Helen thoughtful and melancholy.

"Poor grandpa!" she said presently with a sigh: "he has only me, you know, Floyd. He has nothing else in the whole wide world, and it worries him to think that he cannot be with me always, that he cannot—"

She broke off, and the small face twitched as if she were about to cry, but she controlled herself.

The splendid house, with its gleaming windows and stately pillars, the wide grounds, the air of quiet magnificence which reigned over the whole place, had so much impressed me that I could not resist uttering an exclamation at her words. She spoke of Mr. Raymond as having nothing in the wide world but herself, yet he was rich enough to be master of what appeared to me the pomp of kings; and I told her so.

She regarded me curiously. "Is grandpa rich?" she asked. "He says sometimes that the greenhouses cost so much money that they will send him to the poorhouse. I do not think grandpa can be rich. But if he were rich," she cried out indignantly, "that makes no difference: he has nothing but me—nothing to care about. There was poor grandmamma: she died—oh so long ago!—and my uncles died when they were little boys not so old as I. And mamma—she stayed the longest: then she died. No, grandpa has nothing left but me."

"Your father too: he has only you. I wonder you do not live with your father, Helen."

She shook her head. "Oh, you don't know," she returned. "I couldn't leave grandpa. Oh, Floyd, if you knew how it hurts me to tell papa that I must stay here! He does not understand. He will say, 'I want my little girl: you can't guess how badly I want my little girl.'" She finished with a great sob which shook her from head to foot. I pitied her very much, and I could easily comprehend that she was too delicate still to be allowed to have any sort of trouble. So I asked her to go down to the shore with me, and while we went I told her all the funny things I could remember until I made her laugh. She was quick and sympathetic; and her spirit was so strong, yet so repressed, that the moment she was really glad it seemed to have the exuberance of a bird's joy at freedom after imprisonment.

I have reason, beyond that of mere admiration for its admirable picturesqueness, to remember and note down the form of the shore at The Headlands. The house stood on the highest part of the promontory, and there was a gradual descent to the end of the bluff, which terminated in a line of black rocks, some of which were firmly embedded in the soil, while others lay piled above each other as they had been tossed by some horrible convulsion of the sea. In one place there was a perpendicular precipice of eighty feet, washed by the waves at its base; but the beach was easily accessible from every other point, although in some places the descent needed sure feet and agile limbs. But I had always been the best climber in Belfield, and I ran up and down the rocks now with the ease of a monkey, until Helen begged me not to terrify her by any new exploits. Under the frowning citadel of rocks the beach was particularly fine, well pebbled below watermark and above a strip of shining sand. The tide was coming in with a strong dull roar, and every wave broke on the shore with curling cataracts of foam and a voice like thunder. It was hard for me to realize that above us on the headland the mild October sunshine was gilding and reddening the trees, for here we were in shadow, and the cry of storm and the din of tempest were in our ears. Yet beyond the bar opaline tints were playing along the sunlit sea, and the luminous, shifting-hued swell of crested waves merged into the iridescent sky. There was a secret and a mystery about the scene to me. I could not understand its influence upon me, and felt under a spell as I gazed at the distant white sails and listened to the roar of the waves as if I could never hear it enough.

After Helen had shown me all the strange, beautiful places of the beach, I helped her up the precipitous bank, where steps had been carefully cut in the rock or laid upon the crumbling sods. She took me to the stables, and I saw the horses, her pony and the blooded colt in training for her: her dogs had followed us about, leaping and fawning upon her and smelling suspiciously at me. Mr. Raymond disliked animals, and it was to the stables or the gardener's cottage that the child came to pet her hounds, her sheep-dog and her snowy Pomeranian: not even Beppo, the Italian greyhound, was domesticated at the house. Some shy deer peered out at us from their paddock, and a doe, less timid than the rest, approached us and gave me a good look out of her meek, beautiful eyes. Gold and silver pheasants lurked in the shrubberies, and peacocks spread their tails and paraded before us on the greensward. Everything seemed to be Helen's, and not a flower that bloomed or a bird that flew but she gave it an ample tenderness.

We did not talk much, but stood together hand in hand, I gazing with ardent delight and curiosity at all these beautiful expressions of life which filled the place.

"Do you like it?" she inquired anxiously from time to time, and when I answered her gravely that I liked it, she would smile a contented little smile. She asked me if I rode, and carefully selected the horse she considered suitable for me, and gave the groom orders about exercising him regularly. The man took her instructions with a respectful air: she was evidently mistress of the place, and the centurion in the Gospel had not his servants better under his command than had she. It was a quaint sight to see the child knitting her brows over some complaint of Robinson's against McGill the gardener: she settled it promptly with but half a dozen words. She had energy enough and to spare for her duties, but she had nothing of that eager bubbling up of light thoughts and bright hopes which other children know and use in endless chatter and playful gambollings, like puppies and kittens and other happy young things. There was always shrewd purpose behind her few words, and she seemed always on her guard, always ready to act promptly and with decision.

"Why don't you send those men to Mr. Raymond?" I burst out finally. "You ought not to be bothered. What do you know about such things?"

"I know all about them," she returned gravely. "I never let anybody trouble poor grandpapa."

"My mother would not let anything trouble me if she could help it, yet I am a boy and almost fifteen years old."

She looked at me wistfully and smiled her peculiar indefinable smile, then put her hand in mine, and we went toward the house together. Just as night fell dinner-time came. I had gone to my room to dress at five o'clock, but finding that all my windows looked out upon the water, I had forgotten everything else in watching the sea, which took hue after hue as the sun sank, growing black and turbid as it settled into a bank of gray cloud, then, when the last beams reddened every rift, lighting up into a brief splendor of crimson and gold, absorbing all the glory of the firmament. I felt rather homesick and dreary. I knew that in the dusky streets of Belfield the boys were walking up and down beneath the russet elms, wondering about me while they talked. I knew that my mother was sitting in the bay-window with the light of the sunset in her face, and that she was longing to have me with her again. When, finally, I roused myself to dress, and went along the dim halls and down the great staircase lined with niches where calm-faced statues stood regarding me with a fixed and solemn air, I was quite dull and dreary, and needed all the cheerful influences of the warmed and lighted rooms to brighten me up.

At dinner Mr. Raymond seemed more what I had expected him to be than I had found him at first sight. He was dressed with scrupulous propriety, and wore a ceremonious and precise air which better accorded with his position as master of the house. He talked well, and asked me many questions about our life in Belfield, made inquiries about George Lenox, and was interested when I told him about Georgina. And about Georgina I found myself presently talking with a freedom which amazed myself, for my habits were reserved, and of all that I felt and thought about Georgy I had never yet said anything except to my mother. But in this beautiful house, which seemed so fitting a place for my lovely princess, and which was of late the object of her dreams, I felt moved to be her ambassador and to plead her cause as well as I might. I spoke not only of her beauty and her cleverness, but of the drawbacks to her success in life. I anticipated criticism, and disarmed it. "Oh, Helen!" I burst out at length, "you would love her so dearly—I am sure you would!"

Helen's eyes were shining, and her color came and went. "Oh, grandpa," said she softly, "why may I not ask her to come here? Floyd will like it, and I—"

She could not finish, she was so glad and excited, and she ran around the table and laid her cheek against Mr. Raymond's shoulder in mute entreaty.

"Oh, do whatever you please," rejoined the old gentleman impatiently: "you know very well that you must have your own way in everything."

The glad little face fell at once, and she went back to her chair slowly and climbed into it. It was a high-backed, crimson velvet chair, with a footstool for the child's feet to rest upon. She looked very slight and young as she sat there, her baby face thrown into clear outline and startling pallor by the ruby-colored cushions. She filled the place well, however, helping to the soup and fish, and even the meats after Mills had carved them at the sideboard. I noticed too, with some surprise, that the decanter of sherry stood at her elbow, and was not passed, but that she herself poured out Mr. Raymond's glass of wine, and once replenished it. He sent it to her to be filled for the third time, but she shook her head.

"No, no, grandpa," she said with a queer little smile: "you have had two already."

He looked angry, and affirmed that she had given him but one glass, appealing to Mills, who corroborated the words of his young mistress. Helen said no more, but gave the decanter to the butler, who took it away, and I heard him lock the door of the wine-closet and saw him drop the key in his pocket. Then, presently, when coffee came on, Helen and I went into the library, and left Mr. Raymond alone, with his easy-chair turned toward the fire. I knew that something in the house was wrong, and experienced a vague humiliation out of sympathy for Helen, but what my fears were I did not name to myself.

"Promise me," said she, clasping my hand suddenly—"promise me to say nothing to papa. Remember that grandpa is very old, and that he has nothing in the world but me."

I gave the promise eagerly, more to avoid the subject than because I understood as to what I was to be silent and why the subject should be interdicted.

"You see," said she, her clear eyes meeting mine with their peculiarly wistful, melancholy gaze, "this is why I cannot go away. Papa thinks I do not love him: he does not know that it would not be safe for me to leave grandpa all alone. If papa did know—"

"You ought to tell your papa everything," I said gravely.

"I wish I could," she cried in a trembling voice. "But I can't. He would not let me stay here, and I could not go away. You must never tell papa, Floyd—never!"

I said I would not tell with the air of one who never discloses a secret; and she believed in me, and we were soon bright and happy again, and wrote a letter to Georgy Lenox inviting her to The Headlands on a visit.

With all his faults and weaknesses, I soon found there were good and lovable traits in Mr. Raymond. He had been in early life a successful merchant, and the habit of controlling widespread interests had given him a broad and sympathetic insight into men and their ideas. He possessed a graceful and comprehensive culture, and had embodied his conceptions of the fitness of things in the arrangement of his home, making it beautiful in all ways. He was an old man now, yet had not lost the thirst for knowledge, and could talk, when inspiration was upon him, generously and eloquently. He had been a part of the busy great world; he understood society and social ways: all these talents and acquirements made him a pleasant old gentleman when at his best, but it needed only a touch of suspicion or jealousy to put him at his worst. It was easy enough to see that Helen did not exaggerate when she told me he had nothing to care for but herself; and his care for her was so mixed with morbid fears that he was not first in her heart, so embittered by a distrust of her love for her father, that she could gain small comfort from all his overweening devotion and pride.

The child and I were constantly together in those October days. I do not think it would have been so but for the fact that Mr. Floyd wrote daily concise and peremptory orders that Helen was to be out of doors from morning till night, and that Dr. Sharpe, a brisk, keen-eyed old gentleman, came every morning at breakfast-time to feel the little girl's pulse, order her meals and command Mr. Raymond to let her have all the play she could get before the cold weather came.

"You see," Helen would explain to me as we tramped the meadows and the uplands gorgeous with every mellow hue of autumn's glorious time—"you see, Floyd, I was going to die in September when papa came. Oh, I felt so tired I wanted just to go to sleep. But papa came, took me in his arms and held me there. Whenever I woke up, there he was, his strong arms holding me tight. He wouldn't let me go, you know, so I couldn't die. I couldn't have lived for grandpa: I knew that he would die too, and that perhaps it would all be best."

"But now you are getting strong," I said: "your cheeks are quite rosy now."

"Oh yes," she answered. "I like to live now. I love you so dearly, Floyd, and I have such good times."

I loved her dearly too, after a boy's fashion. It was easy for me to talk to her, and I told her many things that lay near my heart and far from my tongue—much about my mother and my worship of her—about our home and its surroundings—about my father and my brother Frank, and my grief when they died. I had never expected to tell any one these memories, but I told them all to Helen.

One day we came in a little later than usual. We had carried our luncheon down to the beach, and had eaten it there: we had never been quite so happy together before, for everything had conspired to make our enjoyment perfect. We had made up stories about the people on board the ships that went up and down in the offing; strange and beautiful things had looked at us from out the sea; a fisherman had offered us some oysters as he coasted about the bar in his boat, and I had bought some and opened them for Helen with my knife, every blade of which I broke in the effort. Altogether, we had had a blissful experience.

But as, upon returning, we neared the house, Mills met us on the terrace with a grave face. "You'd better go to your grandfather, Miss Floyd," said he—"you had, indeed, or it will be all over with him. You must not blame me, miss—it was none of my fault—but some gentlemen came here for lunch, and he's been a-drinking and a-drinking ever since they went away, and will not let either decanter go out of his hand."

Helen's little face had been warm with color, but it froze into pallor while I looked at her. We entered the door, and she took off her things slowly and gave them to Mills, smoothing her hair mechanically with her little trembling hands.

"What shall I do?" I whispered, quaking as much as she. "Let me help you somehow, Helen."

"You can't," she returned quietly: "nobody can help me."

She bade Mills go about his work: then went into the dining-room and shut the door.

The man had tears in his eyes as he turned to me as soon as we were alone. "I declare, Mr. Randolph," said he, "it's enough to break anybody's heart to see that child a-bowed down at her age with the care of an old man who can't be kept from drunkenness unless her eye is on him every minute."

"Is he violent when he's—" I tried to ask the question, but could not form the horrible word upon my tongue.

Mills did not flinch from facts. "When he's drunk?" he said. "He is ready to break my head, but he's never anything but tender with her. She's naught but a baby, but I have seen him, in a regular fury, just fall a-whimpering when she came in and said, 'Oh, grandpa! oh, grandpa! I'm so sorry!' Oh, it is a burning shame! And to think that that splendid gentleman, her father, does not know it!"

"He ought to know it," I cried.

"And if he did, sir," said Mills solemnly, "he would take Miss Floyd away, and the old gentleman would drink himself to death, and that would kill the little girl too. It's hard to see the right of it, Mr. Randolph. But," he added with a complete change of manner, "she would be vexed to see me stand gossiping here."

He went up stairs with the cloak and hat, smoothing them with his big hand as if to comfort somebody in need of comfort. I stole across the hall and stood at the dining-room door, wishing to go in, yet fearing to vex Helen by my intrusiveness. She opened the door presently, as if she knew I was there, and beckoned me, and I entered. The old man sat at the table in his usual place, looking half defiant and half ashamed. She had removed both decanters and glasses to the sideboard, and stood by him with her arm about his neck, urging him to go into the library, kissing him now and then softly on the forehead.

"What do you think, Floyd," he said to me in a thick, unnatural voice—"what do you think of the way my only grandchild treats me? She despises me."

"No, no, grandpa! I love you dearly."

He went on with vehemence: "A few years ago I was living among the finest ladies and gentlemen in the world: I was admired and sought. I have been called the most accomplished of hosts, the most perfect of gentlemen. Look about this house. Where in this entire country will you find a more liberal patron of the arts than I? Yet this little girl treats me like a servant. For a year she has not permitted me to have even a few friends to dine with me. Because to-day I extended hospitality to half a dozen gentlemen who drove over from the Point, she fumes at me: she treats me as if I had committed a deadly sin.—By and by, Miss Floyd, you can have it all your own way here: I shall be dead."

She never flinched, nor did her face change as he glared at her, but she went on smoothing his hair and softly putting her lips to his temples. "Dear grandpa," said she, "come into the library now. It is getting late, and Mills wants to set the table for dinner."

"Very well," he exclaimed with a sort of petulant dignity, and, pushing back his chair, half rose. Helen gave me a swift glance, and with our united strength we barely kept him from falling on his face. He staggered to his feet, looking at us angrily, and not releasing our hold we steadied him into the library and seated him in the great chair before the fire. He sank down with some inaudible exclamation not unlike a groan, and in five minutes he had fallen asleep with loud breathings. Helen rang the bell and told Mills to send for Dr. Sharpe, then came back and drew two low seats opposite the sleeper, and we sat down together hand in hand. She was as pale as death, and her great eyes dilated as she gazed steadily at her grandfather. From time to time she felt his pulse and looked with painful scrutiny at the temples and forehead, which grew every moment more and more crimson. The half hour before the doctor came appeared to me endless. Inside it was almost dark but for the firelight, and outside the twilight glooms slowly gathered: a storm was coming on, and the waves bellowed against the rocks. Mills lit the candles and drew the curtains, but could not shut out the roar of the angry sea. I could see that Helen was miserably anxious, but she said nothing, only sighed and set her lips tight against each other, and seemed to listen. Presently we could hear the gravel crunched under a horse's hoofs outside, then the sound of wheels, and in another moment Dr. Sharpe came in.

"How is this?" said he without any salutation. "Somebody to lunch, eh? —— luncheons! Where were you, Miss Chicken?"

"I am so sorry!" she faltered painfully. "But I was playing down on the beach, and I did not know. You told me to play about out of doors, doctor—you know you did," she added deprecatingly.

"Of course I told you to play about out of doors. You need it bad enough, God knows! Now run away, both of you."

"Is there any danger?" she whispered.

"Not a bit," said Dr. Sharpe, adding, under his breath, "A good thing for her if there were.—Run away, I say," he said, hustling us both out of the door, "and send Mills and Frederick here."

We were shut away from the dim luxurious library with its blazing fire, and the old man asleep before it, but we did not feel free to move, and stood awed and speechless outside, listening and waiting. Helen, who had been so brave, gave way now: her face was piteously convulsed and the tears streamed down her cheeks. I made clumsy attempts to soothe her, and finally took her in my arms and carried her into the great lighted drawing-room and laid her on the sofa. She uttered nothing of her impotent childish despair, but I could read well enough her humiliation and her shame. Mills came in presently and whispered to me that dinner was ready. She heard him and sprang up with the air of a baby princess. "I will come to dinner in five minutes, Mills," said she imperiously: then, when she met the honest sympathy of his glance, she ran up to him and thrust her little slim hand into his. "I trust you, Mills," she murmured, her lips quivering again, "but you must never let papa know and never let the servants suspect." And presently, with the outward indifference of a woman of the world, the child took her place at table and entertained me through dinner with an account of what we should do for Georgy Lenox.

CHAPTER V.

For Georgy was coming next day, and in spite of my unhappiness on Helen's account I woke up the following morning with my pulses all astir with joy. It would be something for me to have her here, away from her mother, who always frowned upon me—away from Jack, whose claim upon her time and attention made mine appear presumptuous and intrusive—away from Harry Dart, with his teasing jokes, his wholesale contempt for any weakness or romantic feeling. I had never declared to myself that I was in love with Georgina, nor had I formed my wishes to my own heart in distinct thoughts. Still, young although I was, I should hardly dare to write down here how far above every other idea and object on earth Georgina appeared to me. I never thought of her then, I never looked upon her, without the blood thickening around my heart as if I stood face to face with Fate: my every impulse toward the future was blended with my desire to be something to her. I had not dared to dream then that she could be anything to me.

Before I was out of bed that morning, Frederick, Mr. Raymond's valet, came to me with the request that I should go to his master's room before I went down stairs. It was in the wing, and the third chamber of a handsome suite comprising study, dressing-room and bedroom. It was hung and curtained with red; a wood-fire was burning on the hearth; the chairs were covered with red; even the silken coverlet of the bed was red, and the only place where living, brilliant color was not seemed to be the pale shrunken face on the pillow, a little paler and more delicate than usual: the hands, too, clutching each other on the red blanket, had a look of languor and waste.

"Good-morning, Floyd," Mr. Raymond said, and then dismissed Frederick.

"But you ought not to talk, sir," expostulated the valet, "until you have had your breakfast."

The sick man made a gesture for him to leave the room, watched him go out, and then fastened his piercing black eyes on me and looked at me long and fixedly. "You saw me yesterday?" said he at last, breaking the silence.

I nodded, finding it a difficult task to speak.

"Are you a babbling child?" said he with considerable force and earnestness, "or have you enough of a man's knowledge to have learned to respect the infirmities of other men?"

"I tell no one's secrets, sir: they are not mine to tell."

He quite broke down, and lay there before me strangling with sobs and cries. "Should Mr. Floyd know," he murmured, "should Mr. Floyd even guess, that I am the wretched wreck of a man that I am, he would not let Helen stay with me another moment. He would extenuate, he would pity, nothing: he does not know what it is for a man like me, once proud, witty, gay, to bear seclusion and depression and decay. I long at times for some of the inspiration of my youth: it comes with a terrible penalty."

I could believe it, for his face expressed such abasement and despair as I had never dreamed of.

"I know," he continued, his voice broken and husky, "that I shadow Helen's life. I know that if I had died last night she would be a luckier girl to-day than she is now. But I sha'n't last long, Floyd. Put your finger on my pulse."

I did so, and was obliged to grope for the uncertain, slow beating at his wrist. It seemed as if so little life was there it might easily flicker and go out at any moment.

"I may die at any time," said he, putting my unspoken thought into words. "Dr. Sharpe tells me not to count on the morrow. What cruelty it would be, then, to deprive me of my grandchild! What could I do without her? What would become of me, living alone, with no company but the gibbering shapes mocking at me out of the corners?" He cowered all in a heap and looked up at me with clasped hands. "Let her stay," he went on imploringly. "It is only for a little while, and then everything will be hers—this house and these grounds, my house in New York and blocks of stores, all my pictures, my statues, my books. Why, I tell you, Floyd, I am worth more than a million of dollars in invested property that brings me in a return of ten per cent. It is all for her. I save half my income every year to buy new mortgages and stocks, that she may be the richer. I think," he exclaimed with a sudden burst of feeling, "that such wealth as I shall give her might atone for a great deal. Remember, Floyd, it is only a little while that I shall burden her: let her stay."

He was pleading with me as if I were the arbiter of his fate. He had grasped my arm, and his glittering eyes were fastened on me with the intensity of despair in their expression.

"Why, Mr. Raymond," said I gently, "I have nothing to do with Helen's going or staying. If you fear that I shall inform Mr. Floyd about what—what happened yesterday, you do me injustice. I shall tell him nothing. I have no right to say a word about anything that takes place in your house."

"You are a good boy," said Mr. Raymond, with an expression of relief relaxing his convulsed features. "I do not wonder that James loves you as his own son—that it is the wish of his heart that you should grow up with Helen, learn to love her, and marry her at last."

I listened doubtfully: it did not occur to me that his words had any foundation in fact; yet, all the same, the newly-suggested idea burdened me. "I think you are mistaken," said I gently. "Nothing of that kind could ever possibly happen."

"Not for years—not until I am dead," returned Mr. Raymond peevishly. "It was nothing—nothing at all. All that occurred I will tell you, since I was foolish enough to speak of it in the first instance. James said he wanted Helen to be much with you. 'You know how those childish intimacies end,' I replied to him—'in deep attachment and desire for marriage.'—'I ask nothing better for Helen,' James exclaimed. 'She will grow up like other girls, and love, and finally become a wife; and if she became Floyd's wife I should have no fears for her.'" Mr. Raymond's eyes met mine. "You will never tell Mr. Floyd I spoke of this to you," he said under his breath. "I am not quite myself this morning, or I should not have suggested a thought of it to you."

I was very sure that I should never mention it, for I found the idea of my marrying Helen so painfully irksome that it went with me all the day, casting a shadow across our intercourse. I told myself over and over that the idea was absurd—that such a thing could never, never come to pass. She was so mere a child. I studied her face with its baby contours, where nothing showed the dawn of womanhood yet except the great melancholy eyes; I took her hand in mine, where it lay like a snowflake on my brown palm; and I laughed aloud at the grotesqueness of the fancy that I should ever put a ring on that childish finger.

"Why do you laugh?" she asked me wonderingly.

"To think," I rejoined, "how funny it is to remember one day you will be grown up and have rings upon your fingers."

"Is that funny?" she asked. "Of course, if I live I shall grow up and be a woman. My mamma was married when she was only seventeen, and in seven years I shall be seventeen." I dropped her hand as if it had stung me. "I have all mamma's rings," she went on: "I have a drawerful of trinkets that mamma used to wear. When Georgy Lenox comes I shall give her a locket and a chain that are so very, very pretty they will be just right for her. Tell me more about her, Floyd."

It was easy enough for me to grow eloquent in talking of Georgina, and Helen was as anxious to hear as I to tell. The little girl had had few friends of her own sex and age: every summer had brought the New York and Boston Raymonds to The Headlands, and when the neighboring watering-place was in its season numerous flounced and gloved little misses had been introduced to the shy, quaint child, who felt strange and dreary among them all. In fact, the little heiress's position, so unique in every respect, had isolated her from the joys of commonplace childhood, and she found more companionship in her dumb pets, in the sumptuous silence of the blossoming gardens, in the voices of the shore, than among girls of her own age with their chatter about their teachers or governesses, their dancing-steps and their games. Nevertheless, she was both ardent and affectionate, and ready to love all the world; and no sooner had Georgy appeared than she lavished upon her all the passion of girlish fondness for her own sex which had hitherto lain dormant within her. Georgy had always been used to adulation and to lead others by her capricious will and her radiant smile, and within a day after her coming had established almost a dangerous supremacy over the child. It was at once fascinating and disappointing to be under the same roof with Georgy: every morning when I awoke it seemed a miracle of happiness that I had but to dress and go out of my room to have a chance of meeting her, of perpetually recurring smiles and conversation such as I had never enjoyed before at Belfield. But the reality never bore out the promise of my vague but delicious reveries. Mr. Raymond at once took an active, almost virulent, dislike to his young guest, and pointed out her faults to me with clear and concise words, each one of which pierced me like a rapier; and the certainty of his condemnation gave me a keen, and at times almost inspired, vision for her weaknesses.

Nothing could exceed her rapture at being in the beautiful house which she had so long wished to see, and which she loudly asserted a thousand times surpassed all her expectations. And she fitted admirably into her costly surroundings: the sheen of her golden hair made the dark velvet cushionings and hangings a more beautiful background than before; she gave expression to the stately, silent rooms; and what had at first been almost, despite its luxury, a desert to me, became a fairy land. Little Helen was so burdened with possessions that it was a pleasure for her to give them away. Still, I wished that Georgy had not been so willing to accept all that the lavish generosity of the child prompted her to offer. But Georgy was no Spartan: she wanted everything that could minister to her comfort. She was a natural gourmand, hungry for sweets and fruits all day long: she coveted ornaments, and found Helen's drawer of trinkets almost too small for her; she liked velvets and furs, silks and plushes, and wore the child's clothes until Mr. Raymond sent his housekeeper to Boston to purchase her a complete outfit of her own. But all these faults I could have pardoned in Georgy, and ascribed them to her faulty education and false influences at home, had she been grateful to little Helen.

"She hates Helen for being luckier than herself," Mr. Raymond affirmed: "she would do her a mischief if she could."

I could not believe that, yet I could see that she loved to torture the child, whose acute sensibilities made her suffer from the slightest coldness or suspicion.

"If you really loved me, Helen," Georgy would say, "you would do this for me;" and sometimes the task would be to slight or openly disobey Mr. Raymond, to outrage me or to make one of the dumb, loving pets which filled the place suffer. And if at sight of the child's tears I remonstrated, I was punished as it was easy enough for Georgy Lenox to punish me.

She would melt Helen too by drawing a picture of her own poverty and state of dreary unhappiness beside the good fortune of the heiress, until the little girl would search through the house to find another present for her, which she besought her beautiful goddess almost on her knees to accept. All these traits, which showed that Georgina was far from perfect, caused me a misery proportionate to my longing to have her all that was lovely and excellent. It is indeed unfair to write of faults which are so easy to portray, and to say nothing of the beauty of feature and charm of manner, which might have been enough to persuade any one who looked into her face that she was one of God's own angels. What does beauty mean if it be not the blossoming of inner perfection into outward loveliness? And Georgina Lenox was beautiful to every eye. Let every one who reads my story know and feel that she had the beauty which can stir the coldest blood—the eyes whose look of entreaty could melt the most implacable resolution—the smile which could lure, the voice which could make every man follow.

CHAPTER VI.

Mr. Floyd had again entered upon active life in Washington, and his duties were so absorbing that it was almost impossible for him to find any opportunity of joining me at The Headlands, as he had promised. But just as my visit was drawing to an end he came, and kept me on for the week of his stay. I had become used to the routine of life at Mr. Raymond's, and had again and again wondered if Mr. Floyd's presence there would make any difference; but the change in the entire aspect of the household after the advent of my guardian absolutely startled me. Mr. Raymond was again master of the house, and little Helen was left free of all care and responsibility. There seemed a tacit understanding between Mills and the child and her grandfather that Mr. Floyd was to gain not the faintest idea of the usual state of things. Mr. Raymond wore a dignity which was not without its pathetic side: he no longer touched wine, although a different vintage was offered with every course, and his selfish, peevish ways seemed entirely forgotten. Helen had grown steadily stronger every week of my stay, and now that her father was with her she rallied at once into a happy, careless state of mind which made her almost as light-hearted a child as one could wish. She had none of Georgy's gay boisterousness, but her blitheness of heart seemed like a lambent fire playing over profound depths of gladness and security.

Mr. Floyd was scarcely well pleased to find Georgy at The Headlands, and at once observed with solicitude the influence she had gained over his little girl. Georgy's idea of power was to put her foot on the neck of her subjects and hold them at her mercy; and Mr. Floyd showed his displeasure at her course by at once withdrawing Helen almost entirely from her society. Georgy rebelled defiantly at this; and I too felt keenly the injustice of leaving her so utterly alone as we did day after day when Mr. Floyd, Helen and I went riding through the woods together. Directly after breakfast my guardian and I mounted our horses, and Helen her pony, and off we started for the hills, where the keen autumn winds would put color into the little girl's pale cheeks. Far below us we could see the curving reaches of beach and promontory, the sparkling fall of the low surf, and in the offing the white-winged ships bringing all the wonders of the East and the richness of the tropics to our barren New England shores. What wonder if I have never forgotten a single incident of those too swiftly succeeding days? The glow, the enthusiasm, the wild gush of free, untrammelled enjoyment, were to go from me presently, and to return no more.

When Mr. Floyd first came he had shaken me roughly by the shoulder, laughing in my face as he told me he had just come from Belfield, where he had spent six hours with my mother. I felt ashamed to look him in the eyes when I remembered my interference, and I began to debate the question in my own mind whether I had not better yield my boyish whim of pride and exclusive, domineering affection to this noble, splendid gentleman, whom I loved better and better every day.

The week appointed for his visit at The Headlands had almost passed. It was a Thursday morning, and we were to set out early the ensuing day, when he asked me to walk with him an hour on the bluff, as he had something to speak to me about. It was a lovely day: the fogs were rolling off the water, and disclosed a sea of chrysoprase beneath.

"In my old courting-days," began Mr. Floyd at once, "I used to walk here with Alice. We were engaged six weeks, and looking back now eleven years the days seem all like this. It was the Indian summer-time."

I was dumb, but stared into his face, which showed emotion, and pressed his arm bashfully.

"I was thirty-four when I first met her," he went on, "and she was just half my age. She was an heiress and I was poor, yet the world called me no bad match for her. Still, I felt as if I could not marry a rich woman: I went away, and tried to forget her, but stole back to the Point, hoping to get one glimpse of her sweet face by stealth. Then when I saw her I could not go away again, nor did she want me to go. Mr. Raymond hated me in those days, yet we were so strong against him that he gave his consent, and we were married on just such a November day as this. It seems like a dream, Floyd, that I, so long a lonely man, without a private joy, could ever have been so happy as I was then. I loved her—the light of her eyes and the white lids that covered them when I looked at her; the smile on her parted lips; the way her hair curled away from her temples; the little dimples all over her hands; her voice, her little ways. And while I loved her like that, before the first year of my happiness had passed she was dead. I hope you will never know what that means. That she had left me a child was nothing to me: I was only a rapturous lover, and had not begun to long for baby voices and upturned children's faces. When, finally, I did turn to Helen, it was as you see now: to part her from her grandfather would be to wrench body from soul."

"Mr. Raymond is a very old man," I suggested.

"He has a surer life than mine: I doubt if anybody would insure mine at any price."

We were silent. I felt awkward and ashamed: I knew what was in his thoughts.

"You wise young people!" said he presently, throwing his arm over my shoulder—"oh, you wise young people!" Then turning me square about, he looked into my face: "Oh, you foolish, foolish young people!"

I felt foolish indeed—so foolish I could not meet his eyes.

"Why begrudge us a few years of happiness together?" he asked in his deliberate gentle voice. "Your mother is still young, and so beautiful that she deserves to shine in a sphere worthy of her. I will say nothing of my profound and respectful love for her. My love for Alice was my passionate worship of a singularly charming child: your mother commands a different feeling. But of that I will say nothing. Think, Floyd, what a life I can offer her! It seems to me that in marrying me she will gain much: what can she lose?"

What, indeed, could she lose? My doubt and dread shrank into insignificant and petty proportions: it seemed to me the noblest fate for any woman alive to gain the love of this man into whose face I was looking earnestly. Yet I could find no words to utter, and he went on as if trying to convince me against my will.

"You do not appear to entertain any aversion for me," he pursued, smiling, "and in our new relation I will take care that you do not like me less. You are dear to me now, yet when your mother is my wife you will be much dearer."

My self-control vanished: my lip trembled. "What does mother say?" I asked almost in a whisper.

He put his hands on my shoulders, laughing softly: "She says she has a son whose love and respect she so highly prizes she will do nothing to forfeit them."

"Does she love you, Mr. Floyd?" I questioned bluntly.

"I think she does—a little," he answered, dropping his eyes. "But," he went on more hurriedly, "in such a marriage love is not everything, Floyd, although it is much. There is sympathy, constant close companionship: of these both your mother and I have bitterly felt the need."

"Don't say any more, sir," I cried, humbled to the dust. "When I first saw what was coming I suppose I thought only of myself: now—"

"Now you think of two other people, and withdraw your opposition. I confess I can't see how you will be worse off. Come now, give me your hand, you young rascal! I shall go home with you to-morrow, and—"

"Will it take place at once?" I asked with a pang at my heart.

"What? our marriage? You are hurrying matters charmingly. Mrs. Randolph has not yet accepted me. But I will confess to you, my boy, that I shall be more than happy, more than proud, if I can persuade her to allow me to introduce her to my friends in Washington in December."

We walked about for more than an hour after, but said no more about the matter, although it was stirring below every thought and word of each of us. I felt the weariness of soul which succeeds a struggle, and my guardian tried, but unsuccessfully, to conceal the elation which follows victory. Yet subdued and unhappy though I was, haunted by a sense of terrible loss, I was proud and glad to have contented him. He talked to me intimately, and discussed my plans for the future. I was to enter college the next year, and he pointed out the fact, to which I was not insensible, that our old life at home would necessarily have been broken up when I left Belfield. He spoke of my pecuniary means, and frankly informed me that his property amounted to three hundred thousand dollars, and that this amount he had divided into thirds—one for my mother, one for Helen and one for me.

"Oh, sir," I burst out, "you must not be so generous to me."

"And why not? My little girl has too much already: it has always been one of the discomforts of my life that she is so rich, so raised above all human wants, that I have had it in my power to do nothing for her. I have seen poor men buying clothes and shoes for their little sunburned children, and envied them."

We had been lounging toward the house, and now had reached the terrace, where we found Mr. Raymond pacing feebly up and down in the mild sunshine leaning on Frederick's arm. Mr. Floyd stepped forward and took the valet's place, investing the slight courtesy with the charm of his grand manner.

"Where is Helen?" asked Mr. Raymond. "I supposed that she was with you, James."

"I have not seen her since breakfast.—Suppose you look her up, Floyd? I am afraid she is with Miss Georgy, and in mischief, no doubt.—I object, sir," Mr. Floyd added to his father-in-law, "to Helen's having too much of the society of Miss Lenox. She is a pretty little devil enough, but then I don't like pretty little devils."

"I have written to Mrs. Lenox to recall her," returned Mr. Raymond stiffly. "She is no favorite of mine. There is a look in her eyes at times that makes me shudder at the thought of the harm she is pretty sure to do. Floyd here is her only partisan."

I had already sprung along the terrace, and quickly crossed the lawn and garden to the rocks. I remembered having seen a blue and a scarlet jacket going toward the shore during my talk with Mr. Floyd; and, sure enough, on the rocks I found traces of the girls—a ribbon, the rind of Georgy's oranges which she was always nibbling, and Helen's book. Supposing they were on the beach, I descended the stone steps leading to the sands. There was a faint plashing and lisping of the waves, but otherwise no sound and no sight but the great rocks and the smooth sea lustrous and glittering like steel. I had no doubt but that Helen and Georgy were somewhere near me, and sat down to wait. My mind was full of thoughts that came and went, bringing clear but swiftly-shifting pictures of our old life and the new, which rose suddenly fresh and vivid before me. I could see my mother's face, the color coming and going like a young girl's, and the movement of her little hands clasping and unclasping in her lap. I could see her, too, by the side of Mr. Floyd in a bright, wonderful world of which I knew nothing. For a moment I felt already parted from her, and the pang of separation wrenched body from soul. I threw myself face downward on the sand and declared myself profoundly miserable.

Suddenly I started to my feet. I was vaguely terrified, yet could not tell what had aroused me from my brooding thoughts. I seemed conscious of having heard a cry, but so faint and inarticulate as hardly to differ from the distant note of a sea-bird. But as I ran frantically along the sands I distinctly heard my name, and knew that the entreaty was for help.

"I am coming!" I screamed at the top of my voice—"I am coming as fast as I can." The rocks gave back so many deceitful echoes that I was not certain from what point the imploring cry came; but I knew every inch of the beach for a mile up and down, and knew, too, that there was but one place in which with ordinary prudence there could be the slightest danger. So with unerring instinct I flew along the wet shingle to "Raymond's Cliff." At this point the beetling line of rocks which coiled and frowned along the coast terminated abruptly in precipitous crags. On one side it was sheer precipice, but on the other the cliff, exposed both to wind and wave, washed by the rains and gnawed at its base by ever-advancing and receding tides, had gradually been worn away in the centre by the constant crumbling of the sandy soil, so as to form a sort of ravine. It was a dangerous and gloomy place, and I had received many a warning from Mr. Raymond never to take Helen there.

"Helen!" I cried—"Helen! if you are here, answer me. I cannot see you." A gull flew away from the cliff with a scream, and I could hear no other sound. "Tell me, Helen, if you are here."

I heard a cry from above—almost inaudible it was so spiritless and faint—yet, gaze as I might toward the top, I could see nothing. I skirted the main rock and climbed as far as I easily could up the ravine. Here my attention was arrested by a dot of scarlet against the grim, bare face of the basalt. Yes, there she was, about forty feet above me, hanging on to a shelving rock with her little Italian greyhound in her arms. She was peering down, disclosing a pallid face. I saw at once that she had hung there until her strength was almost gone.

"Listen to me, Helen," said I, calmly and very gently, for I had a ghastly dread that she would fall before my very eyes. "Don't look down: just keep your eyes fixed on the rock, and hold on tight until I reach you." She obeyed me. "Now," I went on authoritatively, "drop the dog—drop him, I say!—Here, Beppo! here!"

She again obeyed me, and the dog scrambled down and fell—scratched and bruised, no doubt, yet otherwise unhurt—at my feet. "Helen, answer me one question," said I. "Can you wait until I go round up to the top and get a rope?"

She gave a little scream of pitiful anguish: I saw her slight figure sway, and some loose stones came rattling down. "I feel so sick, so dizzy!" she cried.

"I will climb up, then. Hold on tight for a few minutes more. Keep perfectly still, and don't look down: you know how well I can climb."

I was a capital climber, and could hold on like a cat where there was a crevice to fasten my feet or my hands. Still, I was anything but certain about these hollow, worn sides, which in places were as smooth as glass. But it had to be done, and done quickly. If the child fell she was dead or maimed to a certainty. She had crawled in some unheard-of way down from the top, and must go back the way she had come; and since I had no time to help her from above, I must go up to her. A spar had been washed up among the debris upon which I had mounted, and this helped me up a little way. Then I managed to creep a trifle farther, hand over hand: whenever I could take breath I called out to her that it was all right and I should be up in another minute. The necessity of keeping up her courage endowed me with miraculous strength, and in a little while I stood beside Helen on the narrow shelf, and waited for a moment to breathe freely and see what was yet beyond me. I smiled at her, and she looked steadily into my face, but said not a word.

"How in the world did you get here, Helen?" I asked.

"I came after Beppo," she returned, her lip trembling.

"How did Beppo get here?"

"Georgy flung him down," cried the child, bursting into tears. "Perhaps she did not mean to, but she was angry that he would not go by himself after the stone she flung."

I had looked to the top by this time, and saw at once that the worst part of the ascent was before me. It had been sheer rock beneath: here the strata were crumbled, and the interstices filled with earth and dried vegetation. The angle was much greater than it had been below, and it was easy to see that even Helen's light footstep had loosened every fragment it had touched. I gained a foothold above her; stretched out my hand and drew her up; then another and another. Once she lost her footing, but I caught the slim figure in my arms and went on, with her half fainting against my shoulder, her puny strength quite worn out.

When we were within a few feet of the top I told her to look up. "You see that we are almost there," I said gently. "Can you do what I tell you to do? When I raise you place one foot on my shoulder: ... now, then, take hold of something firmly and clamber up."

My footing was precarious, and in order to lift her up I was obliged to unfasten my hold of the few scant wisps of withered grass. If she could but reach the top, I believed I could make a supreme effort to save myself; and I risked everything.

In an instant she was on the brow of the cliff. She gave a convulsive cry of joy and relief, and reached out her little hand to me. I almost stretched out to grasp it; then, remembering that with her slight weight I might easily drag her back into danger, I took hold of a little bush: it was dried to the roots, and came out in my hand. My footing gave way: I slipped down, with nothing to break my fall—not a shrub, not a fissure in the rocks. The blue sky had been above me, but that blessed glimpse of azure vanished, and I could see nothing but the frowning sides of the precipice as I went down, my pace accelerating every moment. I believed I could gain a hold or footing on the shelving rock where I had found Helen, but it gave way as I touched it and slid suddenly down the ravine. I was dizzy and bruised, but was wondering if Helen would give the alarm—if Georgy would be sorry. I thought with pity of my mother, who would surely weep for me. Then I heard Beppo barking joyfully, and I knew that I was at the bottom of the abyss. I suffered a few seconds of such terrible pain that I was glad when a sickening sort of quietude settled over me, and I felt that I must be dying.

ELLEN W. OLNEY.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]



A SEA-SOUND.

Hush! hush! 'Tis the voice of the sea to the land, As it breaks on the desolate strand, With a chime to the strenuous wave of life That throbs in the quivering sand.

Hush! hush! Each requiem tone as it dies, With a soul that is parting, sighs; For the tide rolls back from the pulseless clay As the foam in the tempest flies.

Hush! hush! O throb of the restless sea! All hearts are attuned to thee— All pulses beat with thine ebb and flow To the rhyme of Eternity!

JOHN B. TABB.



THE BRITISH SOLDIER.

I allude to the British soldier, more especially, as I lately observed and admired him at Aldershot, where, just now, he appears to particular advantage; but at any time during the past twelvemonth—since England and Russia have stood glaring at each other across the prostrate body of the expiring yet reviving Turk—this actually ornamental and potentially useful personage has been picturesquely, agreeably conspicuous. I say "agreeably," speaking from my own humble point of view, because I confess to a lively admiration of the military class. I exclaim, cordially, with Offenbach's Grand Duchess, "Ah, oui, j'aime les militaires!" Mr. Ruskin has said somewhere, very naturally, that he could never resign himself to living in a country in which, as in the United States, there should be no old castles. Putting aside the old castles, I should say, like Mr. Ruskin, that life loses a certain indispensable charm in a country destitute of an apparent standing army. Certainly, the army may be too apparent, too importunate, too terrible a burden to the state and to the conscience of the philosophic observer. This is the case, without a doubt, just now in the bristling empires of the Continent. In Germany and France, in Russia and Italy, there are many more soldiers than are needed to make the taxpayer thrifty or the lover of the picturesque happy. The huge armaments of continental Europe are an oppressive and sinister spectacle, and I have rarely derived a high order of entertainment from the sight of even the largest masses of homesick conscripts. The chair a canon—the cannon-meat—as they aptly term it in French, has always seemed to me dumbly, appealingly conscious of its destiny. I have seen it in course of preparation—seen it salted and dressed and packed and labelled, as it were, for consumption. In that marvellous France, indeed, which bears all burdens lightly, and whose good spirits and absence of the tragic pose alone prevent us from calling her constantly heroic, the army scarcely seems to be the heavy charge that it must be in fact. The little red-legged soldiers, always present and always moving, are as thick as the field-flowers in an abundant harvest, and amid the general brightness and mobility of French life they strike one at times simply as cheerful tokens of the national exuberance and fecundity. But in Germany and Italy the national levies impart a lopsided aspect to society: they seem to drag it under water. They hang like a millstone round its neck, so that it can't move: it has to sit still, looking wistfully at the long, forward road which it is unable to measure.

England, which is fortunate in so many things, is fortunate in her well-fed mercenaries, who suggest none of the dismal reflections provoked by the great foreign armies. It is true, of course, that they fail to suggest some of the inspiring ones. If Germany and France are burdened, at least they are defended—at least they are armed for conflict and victory. There seems to be a good deal of doubt as to how far this is true of the nation which has hitherto been known as the pre-eminently pugnacious one. Where France and Germany and Russia count by hundreds, England counts by tens; and it is only, strictly speaking, on the good old principle that one Englishman can buffet a dozen foreigners that a very hopeful view of an Anglo-continental collision can be maintained. This good old principle is far from having gone out of fashion: you may hear it proclaimed to an inspiring tune any night in the week in the London music-halls. One summer evening, in the country, an English gentleman was telling me about his little boy, a rosy, sturdy, manly child whom I had already admired, and whom he depicted as an infant Hercules. The surrounding influences at the moment were picturesque. An ancient lamp was suspended from the ceiling of the hall; the large door stood open upon a terrace; and outside the big, dense treetops were faintly stirring in the starlight. My companion dilated upon the pluck and muscle, the latent pugnacity, of his dear little son, and told me how bravely already he doubled his infant fist. There was a kind of Homeric simplicity about it. From this he proceeded to wider considerations, and observed that the English child was of necessity the bravest and sturdiest in the world, for the plain reason that he was the germ of the English man. What the English man was we of course both knew, but, as I was a stranger, my friend explained the matter in detail. He was a person whom, in the ordinary course of human irritation, every one else was afraid of. Nowhere but in England were such men made—men who could hit out as soon as think, and knock over persons of inferior race as you would brush away flies. They were afraid of nothing: the sentiment of hesitation to inflict a blow under rigidly proper circumstances was unknown to them. English soldiers and sailors in a row carried everything before them: foreigners didn't know what to make of such fellows, and were afraid to touch them. A couple of Englishmen were a match for a foreign mob. My friend's little boy was made like a statue: his little arms and legs were quite of the right sort. This was the greatness of England, and of this there was an infinite supply. The light, as I say, was dim in the great hall, and the rustle of the oaks in the park was almost audible. Their murmur seemed to offer a sympathetic undertone to the honest conversation of my companion, and I sat there as humble a ministrant to the simple and beautiful idea of British valor as the occasion could require. I made the reflection—by which I must justify my anecdote—that the ancient tradition as to the personal fighting-value of the individual Englishman flourishes in high as well as in low life, and forms a common ground of contact between them; with the simple difference that at the music-halls it is more poetically expressed than in the country-houses.

I am grossly ignorant of military matters, and hardly know the names of regiments or the designations of their officers; yet, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, I am always very much struck by the sight of a uniform. War is a detestable thing, and I would willingly see the sword dropped into its scabbard for ever. Only I should plead that in its sheathed condition the sword should still be allowed to play a certain part. Actual war is detestable, but there is something agreeable in possible war; and I have been thankful that I should have found myself on British soil at a moment when it was resounding to the tread of regiments. If the British army is small, it has during the last six months been making the most of itself. The rather dusky spectacle of British life has been lighted up by the presence in the foreground of considerable masses of that vivid color which is more particularly associated with the protection of British interests. The sunshine has appeared to rest upon scattered clusters of red-coats, while the background has been enveloped in a sort of chaotic and fuliginous dimness. The red-coats, according to their number, have been palpable and definite, though a great many other things have been inconveniently vague. At the beginning of the year, when Parliament was opened in the queen's name, the royal speech contained a phrase which that boisterous organ of the war-party, the Pall Mall Gazette, pronounced "sickening" in its pusillanimity. Her Majesty alluded to the necessity, in view of the complications in the East, of the government taking into consideration the making of "preparations for precaution." This was certainly an ineffective way of expressing a thirst for Russian blood, but the royal phraseology is never very felicitous; and the "preparations for precaution" have been extremely interesting. Indeed, for a person conscious of a desire to look into what may be called the psychology of politics, I can imagine nothing more interesting than the general spectacle of the public conduct of England during the last two years. I have watched it with a good deal of the same sort of entertainment with which one watches a five-act drama from a comfortable place in the stalls. There are moments of discomfort in the course of such a performance: the theatre is hot and crowded, the situations are too prolonged, the play seems to drag, some of the actors have no great talent. But the piece, as a whole, is intensely dramatic, the argument is striking, and you would not for the world leave your place before the denouement is reached. My own pleasure all winter, I confess, has been partly marred by a bad conscience: I have felt a kind of shame at my inability to profit by a brilliant opportunity to make up my mind. This inability, however, was extreme, and my regret was not lightened by seeing every one about me set an admirable example of decision, and even of precision. Every one about me was either a Russian or a Turk, the Turks, however, being greatly the more numerous. It appeared necessary to one's self-respect to assume some foreign personality, and I felt keenly, for a while, the embarrassment of choice. At last it occurred to me simply that as an American I might be an Englishman; and the reflection became afterward very profitable.

When once I had undertaken the part, I played it with what the French call conviction. There are many obvious reasons why the role, at such a time as this, should accommodate itself to the American capacity. The feeling of race is strong, and a good American could not but desire that, with the eyes of Europe fixed upon it, the English race should make a passable figure. There would be much fatuity in his saying that at such a moment he deemed it of importance to give it the support of his own striking attitude, but there is at least a kind of filial piety in this feeling moved to draw closer to it. To see how the English race would behave, and to hope devoutly it would behave well,—this was the occupation of my thoughts. Old England was in a difficult pass, and all the world was watching her. The good American feels in all sorts of ways about Old England: the better American he is, the more acute are his moods, the more lively his variations. He can be, I think, everything but indifferent; and, for myself, I never hesitated to let my emotions play all along the scale. In the morning, over the Times, it was extremely difficult to make up one's mind. The Times seemed very mealy-mouthed—that impression, indeed, it took no great cleverness to gather—but the dilemma lay between one's sense of the brutality and cynicism of the usual utterances of the Turkish party and one's perception of the direful ills which Russian conquest was so liberally scattering abroad. The brutality of the Turkish tone, as I sometimes caught an echo of it in the talk of chance interlocutors, was not such as to quicken that race-feeling to which I just now alluded. English society is a tremendously comfortable affair, and the crudity of the sarcasm that I frequently heard levelled by its fortunate members at the victims of the fashionable Turk was such as to produce a good deal of resentful meditation. It was provoking to hear a rosy English gentleman, who had just been into Leicestershire for a week's hunting, deliver the opinion that the vulgar Bulgarians had really not been massacred half enough; and this in spite of the fact that one had long since made the observation that for a good plain absence of mawkish sentimentality a certain type of rosy English gentleman is nowhere to be matched. On the other hand, it was not very comfortable to think of the measureless misery in which these interesting populations were actually steeped, and one had to admit that the deliberate invasion of a country which professed the strongest desire to live in peace with its invaders was at least a rather striking anomaly. Such a course could only be justified by the most gratifying results, and brilliant consequences as yet had not begun to bloom upon the blood-drenched fields of Bulgaria.

To see this heavy-burdened, slow-moving Old England making up her mind was an edifying spectacle. It was not over-fanciful to say to one's self, in spite of the difficulties of the problem and the (in a certain sense) evenly-balanced scales, that this was a great crisis in her history, that she stood at the crossing of the ways, and that according as she put forth her right hand or her left would her greatness stand or wane. It was possible to imagine that in her huge, dim, collective consciousness she felt an oppressive sense of moral responsibility, that she too murmured to herself that she was on trial, and that, through the mists of bewilderment and the tumult of party cries, she begged to be enlightened. The sympathetic American to whom I have alluded may be represented at such an hour as making a hundred irresponsible reflections and indulging in all sorts of fantastic visions. If I had not already wandered so far from my theme, I should like to offer a few instances here. Very often it seemed natural to care very little whether England went to war with Russia or not: the interest lay in the moral struggle that was going on within her own limits. Awkward as this moral struggle made her appear, perilously as it seemed to have exposed her to the sarcasm of some of her neighbors—of that compact, cohesive France, for instance, which even yet cannot easily imagine a great country sacrificing the substance of "glory" to the shadow of wisdom—this was the most striking element in the drama into which, as I said just now, the situation had resolved itself. The Liberal party at the present hour is broken, disfigured, demoralized, the mere ghost of its former self. The opposition to the government has been, in many ways, factious and hypercritical: it has been opposition for opposition's sake, and it has met, in part, the fate of such immoralities. But a good part of the cause that it represented appeared at times to be the highest conscience of a civilized country. The aversion to war, the absence of defiance, the disposition to treat the emperor of Russia like a gentleman and a man of his word, the readiness to make concessions, to be conciliatory, even credulous, to try a great many expedients before resorting to the showy argument of the sword,—these various attributes of the peace party offered, of course, ample opportunity to those scoffers at home and abroad who are always prepared to cry out that England has sold herself, body and soul, to "Manchester." It was interesting to attempt to feel what there might be of justice in such cries, and at the same time feel that this looking at war in the face and pronouncing it very vile was the mark of a high civilization. It is but fair to add, though it takes some courage, that I found myself very frequently of the opinion of the last speaker. If British interests were in fact endangered by Russian aggression—though, on the whole, I did not at all believe it—it would be a fine thing to see the ancient might of this great country reaffirm itself. I did not at all believe it, as I say; yet at times, I confess, I tried to believe it, pretended I believed it, for the sake of this inspiring idea of England's making, like the lady in Dombey & Son, "an effort." There were those who, if one would listen to them, would persuade one that that sort of thing was quite out of the question; that England was no longer a fighting power; that her day was over; and that she was quite incapable of striking a blow for the great empire she had built up—with a good deal less fighting, really, than had been given out—by taking happy advantage of weaker states. (These hollow reasoners were of course invidious foreigners.) To such talk as this I paid little attention—only just enough to feel it quicken my desire that this fine nation, so full of private pugnacity and of public deliberation, might find in circumstances a sudden pretext for doing something gallant and striking.

Meanwhile I watched the soldiers whenever an opportunity offered. My opportunities, I confess, were moderate, for it was not often my fortune to encounter an imposing military array. In London there are a great many red-coats, but they rarely march about the streets in large masses. The most impressive military body that engages the attention of the contemplative pedestrian is the troop of Life Guards or of Blues which every morning, about eleven o'clock, makes its way down to Whitehall from the Regent's Park barracks. (Shortly afterward another troop passes up from Whitehall, where, at the Horse Guards, the guard has been changed.) The Life Guards are one of the most brilliant ornaments of the metropolis, and I never see two or three of them pass without feeling shorter by several inches. When, of a summer afternoon, they scatter themselves abroad in undress uniform—with their tight red jackets and tight blue trousers following the swelling lines of their manly shapes, and their little visorless caps perched neatly askew on the summit of their six feet two of stature—it is impossible not to be impressed, and almost abashed, by the sight of such a consciousness of neatly-displayed physical advantages and by such an air of superior valor. It is true that I found the other day in an amusing French book (a little book entitled Londres pittoresque, by M. Henri Bellenger) a description of these majestic warriors which took a humorous view of their grandeur. A Frenchman arriving in London, says M. Bellenger, stops short in the middle of the pavement and stares aghast at this strange apparition—"this tall lean fellow, with his wide, short torso perched upon a pair of grasshopper's legs and squeezed into an adhesive jacket of scarlet cloth, who dawdles himself along with a little cane in his hand, swinging forward his enormous feet, curving his arms, throwing back his shoulders, arching his chest, with a mixture of awkwardness, fatuity and stiffness the most curious and the most exhilarating.... In his general aspect," adds this merciless critic, "he recalls the circus-rider, minus the latter's flexibility: skin-tight garments, simpering mouth, smile of a dancing-girl, attempt to be impertinent and irresistible which culminates only in being ridiculous."

This is a very heavy-handed picture of those exaggerated proportions and that conquering gait which, as I say, render the tall Life Guardsman one of the most familiar ornaments of the London streets. But it is when he is armed and mounted that he is most picturesque—when he sits, monumentally, astride of his black charger in one of the big niches on either side of the gate of the Horse Guards, cuirassed and helmeted, booted and spurred. I never fail to admire him as I pass through the adjacent archway, as well as his companions, equally helmeted and booted, who march up and down beside him, and, as Taine says, alluding in his Notes sur l'Angleterre to the scene, "posent avec majeste devant les gamins." If I chance to be in St. James's street when a semi-squadron of these elegant warriors are returning from attendance upon royalty after a Drawing-Room or a Levee, I am sure to make one of the gamins who stand upon the curbstone to see them pass. If the day be a fine one at the height of the season, and London happen to be wearing otherwise the brilliancy of supreme fashion—with beautiful dandies at the club-windows, and chariots ascending the sunny slope freighted with wigged and flowered coachmen, great armorial hammercloths, powdered, appended footmen, dowagers and debutantes—then the rattling, flashing, prancing cavalcade of the long detachment of the Household troops strikes one as the official expression of a thoroughly well-equipped society. It must be added, however, that it is many a year since the Life Guards or the Blues have had harder work than this. To escort their sovereign to the railway-stations at London and Windsor has long been their most arduous duty. They were present to very good purpose at Waterloo, but since their return from that immortal field they have not been out of England. Heavy cavalry, in modern warfare, has gone out of fashion, and in case of a conflict in the East those nimble, pretty fellows the Hussars, with their tight, dark-blue tunics so brilliantly embroidered with yellow braid, would take precedence of their majestic comrades. The Hussars are indeed the prettiest fellows of all, and if I were fired with a martial ambition I should certainly enlist in their ranks. I know of no military personage more agreeable to the civil eye than a blue-and-yellow hussar, unless indeed it be a young officer in the Rifle Brigade. The latter is perhaps, to a refined and chastened taste, the most graceful, the most truly elegant, of all military types. The little riflemen, the common soldiers, have an extremely useful and durable aspect: with their plain black uniforms, little black Scotch bonnets, black gloves, total absence of color, they suggest the rigidly practical and business-like phase of their profession—the restriction of the attention to the simple specialty of "picking off" one's enemy. The officers are of course more elegant, but their elegance is sober and subdued. They are dressed all in black, save for a broad, dark crimson sash which they wear across the shoulder and chest, and for a very slight hint of gold lace upon their small, round, short-visored caps. They are furthermore adorned with a small quantity of broad black braid discreetly applied to their tight, long-skirted surtouts. There is a kind of severe gentlemanliness about this costume which, when it is worn by a tall, slim, neat-waisted young Englishman with a fresh complexion, a candid eye and a yellow moustache, is of quite irresistible effect. There is no such triumph of taste as to look rich without high colors and picturesque without accessories. The imagination is always struck by the figure of a soberly-dressed gentleman with a sword.

The little riflemen, the Hussars, the Life Guards, the Foot Guards, the artillerymen (whose garments always look stiffer and more awkwardly fitted than those of their confreres) have all, however, one quality in common—the appearance of extreme, of even excessive, youth. It is hardly too much to say that the British army, as a stranger observes it now-a-days, is an army of boys. All the regiments are boyish: they are made up of lads who range from seventeen to five-and-twenty. You look almost in vain for the old-fashioned specimen of the British soldier—the large, well-seasoned man of thirty, bronzed and whiskered beneath his terrible bearskin and with shoulders fashioned for the heaviest knapsack. This was the ancient English grenadier. But the modern grenadier, as he perambulates the London pavement, is for the most part a fresh-colored lad of moderate stature, who hardly strikes one as offering the elements of a very solid national defence. He enlists, as a general thing, for six years, and if he leave the army at the end of this term his service in the ranks will have been hardly more than a juvenile escapade. I often wonder, however, that the unemployed Englishman of humble origin should not be more often disposed to take up his residence in Her Majesty's barracks. There is a certain street-corner at Westminster where the recruiting-sergeants stand all day at the receipt of custom. The place is well chosen, and I suppose they drive a tolerably lively business: all London sooner or later passes that way, and whenever I have passed I have always observed one of these smart apostles of military glory trying to catch the ear of one of the dingy London lazzaroni. Occasionally, if the hook has been skilfully baited, they appear to be conscious of a bite, but as a general thing the unfashionable object of their blandishments turns away, after an unillumined stare at the brilliant fancy dress of his interlocutor, with a more or less concise declaration of incredulity. In front of him stretches, across the misty Thames, the large commotion of Westminster Bridge, crowned by the huge, towered mass of the Houses of Parliament. To the right of this, a little effaced, as the French say, is the vague black mass of the Abbey; close at hand are half a dozen public-houses, convenient for drinking a glass to the encouragement of military aspiration; in the background are the squalid and populous slums of Westminster. It is a characteristic congregation of objects, and I have often wondered that among so many eloquent mementos of the life of the English people the possible recruit should not be prompted by the sentiment of social solidarity to throw himself into the arms of the agent of patriotism. Speaking less vaguely, one would suppose that to the great majority of the unwashed and unfed the condition of a private in one of the queen's regiments would offer much that might be supremely enviable. It is a chance to become, relatively speaking, a gentleman—more than a gentleman, a "swell"—to have the grim problem of existence settled at a stroke. The British soldier always presents the appearance of scrupulous cleanliness: he is scoured, scrubbed, brushed beyond reproach. His hair is enriched with pomatum and his shoes are radiantly polished. His little cap is worn in a manner determined by considerations purely aesthetic. He carries a little cane in one hand, and, like a gentleman at a party, a pair of white gloves in the other. He holds up his head and expands his chest, and bears himself generally like a person who has reason to invite rather than to evade the fierce light of modern criticism. He enjoys, moreover, an abundant leisure, and appears to have ample time and means for participating in the advantages of a residence in London—for frequenting gin-palaces and music-halls, for observing the beauties of the West End and cultivating the society of appreciative housemaids. To a ragged and simple-minded rustic or to a young Cockney of vague resources all this ought to be a brilliant picture. That the picture should seem to contain any shadows is a proof of the deep-seated relish in the human mind for our personal independence. The fear of "too many masters" weighs heavily against the assured comforts and the opportunity of cutting a figure. On the other hand, I remember once being told by a communicative young trooper with whom I had some conversation that the desire to "see life" had been his own motive for enlisting. He appeared to be seeing it with some indistinctness: he was a little tipsy at the time.