Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, September, 1878

by Various

FOOTNOTES:

[A] [For the use of the wood-cut presenting a view of the oasis of El Kantra we are indebted to the kindness of Mr. John Murray of Albemarle street, London.—Ed.]

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MODERN KASHMIR.

RUINS OF A TEMPLE OF MÁRTAND (OLD SRINAGAR).

The topographically inclined among biblical commentators might select a great many more unlikely spots for the Garden of Eden than Kashmir. The four rivers are there—the Indus, the Jhelam, the Chenab and the Ravi. Their banks present the widest possible variety of rock, soil, vegetation and animal life. The palm and pomegranate are at home in the valleys, and the dwarf willow and birch are frozen out a long way below the summits of the mountains. The tiger and the ptarmigan are, measured vertically, close neighbors, a mile or two apart, within easy calling distance. Man is equally multiform. All his races are assembled save the African. His extremes in physiognomy, dress, government and religion are brought into close communion. Character, in this cosmopolitan district, gives place to eclecticism. Its features and its occupants represent the whole world, and might readily refurnish it were all the rest of its surface laid desolate.

SUBURB OF SRINAGAR.

Curiously enough, the idea of a garden has always associated itself with Kashmir. Eastern poets and historians speak of it as a garden collectively, and lavish their most brilliant powers of description on the gardens which make it up in detail—the gardens of the terraced hills, the gardens of the broad alluvial plain, and the floating gardens of the lakes Wúlar and Dal. These last, more fortunate than those of Babylon and Nineveh, have maintained their existence to our day, the aquatic cultivator rowing among his parterres and gathering his melons over the gunwale. Fertility has never failed. The permanence in beauty and productiveness designed for Eden has here been sustained by the harmoniously-acting forces of Nature, and Adam might, for all that the explorers tell us to the contrary, have lived in Kashmir after his primitive fashion till now. He would, however, have been compelled in some degree to modify his taste in regard to clothing, unless he confined himself the year through to the valley, ninety miles by twenty, which strictly bears the name. A winter suit would have been indispensable to his excursions among the bordering mountains, which swell from an elevation of ten thousand feet above tide to twenty-two, and even, on the extreme limits of the region now officially named Kashmir, to twenty-eight thousand. As to antiquity, time is, like everything else, on a grand scale in Kashmir. Her earliest dynasty, the Pandu, runs far into the life of the first father, having come to an end twenty-five hundred years before Christ, after a duration of thirteen hundred years, if we are to believe Baron Hügel, an archæologist of the good old German type, who is daunted by no figures, and who simply "reminds the reader," as he would of what he had for dinner yesterday, of the stunning chronology here cited. To the epoch of that primeval dynasty the baron assigns the building of the great temple of Mártand, the ruins of which delight all travellers and excite to the use of such epithets as "wonderful" and "glorious" the impassive Wilson. He declares that they are quite superior to anything architectural around them, and "might yet vie with the finest remains of Greek and Roman architecture." The temple stands solitary on a stretch of table-land four hundred feet above the valley and ten leagues east of the capital. Tradition avers, partly on the strength of several ancient beaches still distinctly marked, that the whole valley was under water when the temple was built, and that it originally stood upon the immediate shore. This generally unreliable guide even goes into details and grows statistical, mentioning the year 266 b.c. as the epoch of the sudden shrinking of the waters to what—or nearly what, for desiccation is said to be still going on—is seen of them now. This becomes less incredible in the light of the extraordinary oscillations of level in the streams and lakes with which the present inhabitants are familiar. In 1858 the Indus rose, at a point below its exit from the mountains, one hundred and sixty feet in twenty-four hours, its rise in the narrow defiles above having been of course greater. A single pool, temporarily formed on the slopes of the mighty Nanga Parbat by the melting of the snow in 1850, was a mile and a half long by half a mile wide and three hundred feet deep—just so much devastation "cocked and primed."

HARI PARBAT, CITADEL OF SRINAGAR.

The modern state of Kashmir dates from 1846, when the Sikh empire, of which it was a part, was overthrown by the British. Golab Singh, who had made himself useful to the Indian government, was placed over it as maharajah, with a show of independence, but real subordination. He fixed his capital at Jummoo, in the extreme south of his dominions and within easy reach of Lahore. The name Jummoo is given by the natives to his whole territory, although the province of that name is, so far as geographical extent goes, a mere fragment of it. The provinces of Jummoo and Kashmir, immediately north of it, comprise together about a third of the aggregate of sixty-eight thousand square miles. Their share of the population is infinitely greater in proportion. Out of a total, in 1873, of 1,534,972 souls, the province of Jummoo contained 861,075—44,000 of them in the city of that name, the political metropolis. The government of Kashmir had 491,846, including 136,000 in the city of Srinagar. The district of Punch, which boasts a rajah of its own, tributary to the maharajah, had 77,566, and the outlying governments, as they are termed, of Gilgit in the extreme north-east, Baltistán in the north, and Ladákh, or Little Tibet, in the east, 104,485 together. In the province of Kashmir the Mohammedans are in the large majority of six to one. In that of Jummoo, on the contrary, the excess is slightly in favor of the Hindús—a circumstance which accounts for the sovereign's choice of a capital, he being a Hindú and showing in his political acts a preference for his co-religionists and a corresponding distrust of his Moslem subjects. In Ladákh, Búdha is supreme, his worshippers numbering 20,254 to 260 followers of Islam and 107 adherents of the Vedas—hardly one to the square mile of all religions.

KASHMIRI BOATMEN.

The different creeds get on very comfortably side by side, the mosque and the idol temple decorating the same street, and the praying-machines of the Lámas grinding out perpetual bliss without let or hinderance from those who believe in another way of reaching the ear of the Unknowable. This Utopian scene of universal toleration has not failed to attract the representatives of our own faith. The Moravians have long had an establishment on the south-eastern mountains, and we read of the conversion of the descendants of the last rajah of Kishtwár by an American missionary—of what sect is not stated.

Generally speaking, the lines of race coincide but vaguely with those of creed. The Hindús and Mohammedans are both of Aryan race, and Mohammedan converts are found among the Mongolian—or rather Turanian—worshippers of Búdh. The latter process would have made more headway but for the influence of the reigning dynasty, which discourages it on system. The change implied in this proselytism is greater in respect of some social practices than in the abstract principles of religious belief. The polyandry of the Tibetans is in direct contrast with the polygamy of the Moslems, and is far more strictly maintained. It is favored by the circumstance that, contrary to what usually obtains in old countries, the males in this region considerably outnumber the females; yet, while that disproportion exists throughout the provinces, polyandry is confined to the Tibetans. Their wretched lands, verging on the line of perpetual snow, devoid of fuel, and in many places unable to ripen grain, keep them poor; and they assign as a justification for the practice the necessity of repressing population and retaining property undivided. One mistress of the house and three or four masters, who are almost always brothers, is their unique remedy for the hardships of their lot, so lowly and yet (topographically) so elevated. Among their Mohammedan and Hindú compatriots the "twin barbarism" of a plurality of wives appears to be confined in practice to a few of the powerful and wealthy. Until within the last few years its repulsive features were wont to be brought into more hideous relief by the cruel custom of suttee, or widow-burning. It is only within half a generation past that British interference has succeeded in putting a stop to these horrible immolations. When, in 1843, Suchet Singh, uncle of the present maharajah, Ranbir Singh, died, his home harem of a hundred and fifty wives were burned with his body at Ramnagar, and the same execution was inflicted on his branch establishment of twenty-five at Jummoo. Seven years after the beginning of British sway the thirty-two widows of a cousin of the maharajah were burned. This scene was witnessed by Mr. Drew, an English engineer of eminence who was for ten years employed in surveying and exploring the new state, and from whose narrative many of the facts given in this article are drawn. Upon another occasion he saw the forcible sacrifice of a single widow. The poor woman, shrieking fearfully, sprang from the funeral pile as the flames surrounded her, but was instantly seized and thrown back into it by the "scandalized" priests.

KASHMIRIAN BRAHMANS.

The guide-book and the locomotive have marked this romantic land for their own, but their progress is far from complete. The advance of the latter, indeed, has probably reached its limit, some twenty leagues outside the extreme south-western corner. The former is still fain to depend largely on Bernier, the Frenchman who visited Kashmir two centuries ago in the train of the Mogul emperor Aurengzebe. Bernier kept his eyes open, and left not only a good account of the manners and life of the Great Mogul and his court, but a fair itinerary. His description of Srinagar and its vicinity still holds good, and modern books point us to the pass of the Pir Panjal so disastrous to the imperial ladies. The foremost of fifteen elephants, each carrying four women, took fright in a narrow part of the so-called road and backed the rest over a precipice. Only three or four of the odalisques were killed by the fall, but not one elephant was saved. Bernier passed the scene of the accident two days after, and saw some of the animals still alive, but able only to trumpet mournfully for assistance.

North of Jummoo the highest type of road accommodates no longer an elephant, but at most a hill-pony. In the vale of Srinagar the chief thoroughfares are sluggish rivers, lakes and canals, navigated by a remarkably sturdy race of boatmen. The chief line of traffic to that valley, the heart of Kashmir proper, from Jummoo, is hardly practicable for horses. In its length of a hundred and seventy-seven miles it crosses two ridges, each nine thousand feet above the sea, with a hollow between five thousand feet deep. The starting-point, or southern end of the path, is fifteen hundred feet above tide, and the valley of Srinagar from fifty-two hundred to sixty-five hundred. These are all trifling elevations compared to those of the Himáliya on the south-east and the Karakoram chain, to which England has pushed the maharajah's boundary, on the north; but they will do very well for Western tourists to "cut their teeth on," especially as they are interspersed with minor hills of every grade of height and surface. The varied assortment of climates also supports the idea of a general training-ground for travellers. Bernier thought the first summit he crossed, coming from the south, "the dreadful rim of the world," but the descent of it plumped him, "as if by enchantment, into the centre of France." In sheltered places with a southern exposure the tropics reappear, but the vegetation of the foothills and middle mountains is said to be, but for the deodara cedar (Pinus excelsa) and a few other trees, European in character. The resemblance of the undergrowth is less marked, and still less that of the inhabitants, the costume of the mountaineers, notably the tribe named Gaddis, reasserting Asia. These Oriental Swiss are as hardy as their Western analogues, thanks to a continual struggle for existence against Nature and a tolerably frequent one against man. Against the latter foe they are at present guaranteed by the quiet of English rule, but the avalanche and the torrent remain unquelled.

DOGRÁS AND MUSSULMANS, JUMMOO.

The famous vale is an emerald with a rough setting—a jewel always much sought after, and which would have been carried away long ago had it been portable. But its mightiest and most fortunate possessors were fain to come to it by a long and painful path over crags and snows, and to pass away, one after the other, and leave it in undimmed brightness, clasped tightly as ever in its frame of rocks. At the beginning of the fourteenth century its ruler was a Hindú rani, who stabbed herself rather than marry her traitorous and usurping vizier. Then came the sway of a Moslem dynasty, two of whose members stand out prominently by reason of opposite traits. One earned the name of the Image-breaker by his wanton destruction of the ancient architecture and sculpture. The balance oscillated toward the good when, in the fifteenth century, Zein-ul-Abdin introduced the Tibetan goat and the weavers of Turkestan, and originated the manufacture of the famous shawls. In 1588 the country was surrendered to the emperor Akbar, who, with the most noted of his descendants, Jehángír, Shah Jehán and Aurengzebe, made it their favorite summer-retreat and lavished upon it an expenditure the fruits of which are yet conspicuous. The Afghans, from beyond the north-west mountains, seized it in 1752, and were dispossessed by Ranjít Singh in 1819, who thus restored the supremacy of the ancient religion after more than four centuries of Moslem rule. The repose now enjoyed by it under the almost entirely unseen but distinctly felt influence of the English promises to reproduce something like the palmy days of the Moguls in the matter of improvement and embellishment, with a security to life and property under fixed and just laws quite unknown in their time.

FORT AT GILGIT.

A visitor familiar with all the scenic features of the happy valley would almost have us believe that artificial decoration has exhausted itself, and that the art now in demand is simply the art of letting Nature and antiquity alone:

"The valley of Kashmir, properly so called, remains, as in the seventeenth century, the largest and the most beautiful bit of landscape-gardening in the world, a park thirty leagues by ten or twelve. Everything in it seems planned with supernatural ingenuity to delight the eye—fields, orchards, dwellings, rivers and lakes sprinkled with green and flowery islets and ploughed by boats of varied form and size navigated by hanjis (boatmen) whose intelligent countenances, sculpturesque figures and graceful costumes harmonize admirably with the enchanting scenery; innumerable brooks and canals curving capriciously among lawns and rice-meadows and glittering in the sun like ribbons shot with silver."

This portrait leaves out the temples and villas, ancient and modern, the terraces and pavilions edged with the lotus and overhung with vines and plane trees, the Shalmiar Bagh, or Garden of Delight, and the Mishat Bagh, or Garden of Pleasure, where wine-loving Jehángír and his beautiful consort Núr Jahán, the Light of the World, luxuriated in the summers of long ago. This potentate declared that he would rather lose all the rest of his vast and affluent empire than Kashmir. It furnished a place of refreshing retreat for his energies and his conscience, the load of the latter being fully up to the average of an Eastern despot's. By these lulling waters and under this embowering verdure he could shut out from the sight and memory such spectacles as that to which he had treated his rebellious son Khosrou—a long row of seven hundred of the latter's accomplices seated in solemn gravity, but not returning his salute as he was led along, for the sufficient if not immediately perceptible reason that they sat upon thorns, each upon one thorn a foot or so long, of iron. We may suppose the father of Frederick the Great to have had in mind this passage of Oriental life when he forced the prince to witness the execution of his young friend Katte.

Wilson's preference is for the Garden of Pleasure, notwithstanding the elegance of that of Delight. It looks out upon Lake Dal, the Golden Island in front:

"Ten terraces, bounded by magnificent trees and with a stream of water falling over them, lead up to the latticed pavilion at the end of this garden. Between the double stories of this pavilion the stream flows through a marble—or at least a limestone—tank, and the structure is shaded by great chunár trees, while through a vista of their splendid foliage we look down the terraces and water-courses upon the lake below."

A fit dreaming-place this for the lotus-eating monarch of a lotus-eating people. The lake is so full of the lotus and other water-lilies that more than sixty thousand tons of the edible nuts are gathered each year and ground into flour, the root besides serving as a popular esculent. What is an object of devotion with the Tibetans of the higher Himáliyas a few days' journey distant, as formerly with the Egyptians, is to the Kashmiris an article of food and trade. They might draw from the waters, which cover a very small part of the fertile valley, fish enough to support, with the nelumbium nuts, nearly the whole of the present population; but then they are lotus-eaters, and as such improvident and indolent by all rules of poetry and legend.

Srinagar has been likened to Venice. Standing a mile higher in the world, water-communication is its dependence for movement of persons and things almost as exclusively as with the Queen of the Adriatic. For once, the lean, dry Oriental has his fill of water. Moisture prevails in excess. The characteristic flat roof of his house gives place to one with slope enough to shed any shower or number of showers; and that soon becomes clad with a spontaneous growth of plants. The surplus rainfall, however, is not so great as it would be were not the stormy south-west monsoons cut off by the mountains. The English, water-dogs by nature, and last from the blazing plains of the Panjab, do not complain of dampness. One of them, indeed, declares that "the air is exceedingly dry, notwithstanding the immense amount of water in the valley and the frequent showers of rain."

Srinagar—as the city known for four centuries as Kashmir was anciently and is again named under Hindú rule—is a little disappointing in the material employed for most of its structures. Stone is not wanting, but the deodar timber is more abundant, being floated down cheaply from the mountains, where it forms immense forests, the carefully preserved hunting-ground of the Mogul emperors. A Frenchman dubs it a city of chalets, and recommends the architects of Paris to seek there the most charming models for kiosks, verandas, turrets, cupolas, etc. The humblest suburban and rural abodes he pronounces full of the picturesque. They appear to be much in the Swiss style, so natural to an alpine region. They, too, are mostly of wood, except on the high slopes, where that material is scarce or wholly absent, and on the frontiers, where each hut is a little rock-fort.

MEN OF DARDISTÁN.

Even the piers of the bridges over the Jhelam are, above the water at least, formed of large logs, which overlap each other and approach with their ends the middle of each span after the semblance of an arch. Parasitic plants, and even considerable trees, take root in their crevices and disguise the structure in an even more bizarre way than the mediæval buildings did Old London Bridge. There are seven of these bridges within the city, about three hundred feet long, and between them on either hand the houses overhang the water at the expense of all visible shore, sometimes striding out upon stilt-like piles, their multiform gables "fantastically set" with a total disregard of uniformity and extent of façade that would have been the death of Baron Haussmann or the builder of a Philadelphia block. Nevertheless, there is a pervading tone and style which would identify a Kashmiri villa transplanted into Christendom.

Two isolated hills overlooking the city, and visible afar off to the weary wayfarer, are crowned and flanked with fortifications and temples of one or the other religion. The list of the latter edifices included, in Bernier's time, a Hindú pagoda claimed by the inhabitants to have been built by Solomon, but it has now disappeared as completely as his better-authenticated effort at Jerusalem. In return, as compensation, a Mohammedan mosque has given place to a modern fort. The march of improvement or of change shows itself in a yet more modern array of cottages erected for the accommodation of English visitors. Here these gentry hide themselves in an absolute forest of fruit trees of the kinds familiar at home—apple, apricot, cherry, etc. The lovers of the apricot may be interested to learn that it is par excellence the fruit of this soi-disant Eden, this glittering attic-window upon the Roof of the World, and of all the slopes thereof up to the white-tiled roof-tree. It flourishes up to ten thousand feet, only the stone-pine, of all edibles, going higher; and dried apricots are a leading staple among the hillmen, as dates are with the Arabs.

Upon the bazaars the English architect has laid his heavy hand, and villas and shops like those of the Thames promise to mark the artistic renaissance of Kashmir. The pleasure-houses of the emperors before mentioned have so far escaped him, although it is to be feared he will soon have the repairing of them. Their principal charms, the turf, the great trees and the cascades, were never more beautiful, and have rather gained by the softness with which age has enriched them. The trees have been steadily growing under all flags and cults, swelling in pride and strength as they looked contemptuously and calmly down on the storms of human passion. They need no repairs, and their style, nobody knows how much older than Thebes or Dendera, will endure no modification.

The level surface of this alluvion is illustrated by the very slight descent of the Jhelam. From Ismaïlabad, near the head of the valley, and fifty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea, the fall to Srinagar, thirty miles, is seventy-five feet; and from the capital to Lake Wúlar, twenty-four miles below, only fifty-five feet—declivities in marked contrast with the fall of two thousand eight hundred feet in eighty miles from the edge of the plateau at Baramúla to the plain of the Panjab. Besides the ancient beaches which indicate the origin of this upland meadow, there are traceable other and more recent evidences of a change of level in the waters, pointing to an elevation, as the former do to subsidence. In the Manas-Bal, the smallest but deepest of the Kashmirian lakes, submerged ruins, alleged to be those of a temple, are clearly visible. At another point, fifteen miles below Srinagar, ruins and fragments of pottery have been exhumed at a great depth. One of these oscillations appears to be now, or to have been within two centuries, in progress. Lake Wúlar has grown shallower, its present average depth being forty feet.

Man, among these enormous mountains, presents not less notably than inanimate Nature a singular compound of change and solidity, of the catastrophic and the secular. The little state of Kashmir, overrun from time immemorial, in peace or war, by hordes of many races and tongues, preserves a language and a physiognomy of its own. About forty per cent. of the words in Kashmiri are Persian, twenty-five Sanscrit, fifteen Hindústhani, ten Arabic and fifteen Mongol. Its letters resemble those of the Sanscrit, and are apparently the originals of the Tibetan characters. They are not much used, the literary capabilities of the Kashmiris remaining to be developed. Travellers say the men, especially the upper classes who have maintained the purity of their blood, are the finest, physically, to be found in the Himáliya. They are stout, well-built, and pleasing in countenance, resembling Europeans, except in having a darker complexion. They are more acute and intelligent than the Sikhs and than the Dográs or Hindús of Jummoo, their present superiors politically. They are industrious, manufacturing besides shawls other stuffs and much fancy-work in wood. The beauty of the women is as much remarked upon now as in the old days, and the late Mr. Moore cannot be accused of overstepping poetic license on that point.

SKÁRDÚ FORT, BALTISTÁN.

The higher classes of the Kashmiris having held more firmly to their religion during Mohammedan sway, most of the non-Moslem inhabitants are Brahmans, and they live chiefly in the city. Unlike their co-religionists of the province of Jummoo, many of whose high-caste men cultivate the soil, the Kashmiri Brahmans contemn manual occupations. They are largely employed in the offices of the state. The lowest occupations are left to a class of pariahs called Batals, who are considered by some to represent a wholly distinct race, a remnant of the aborigines who were dispossessed by the first Aryan settlers. As it is easier to procure photographs of individuals belonging to this degraded class than of those above them, an unjust impression of the physical traits of the Kashmiris is apt to reach the Western World. The dancing-girls are Batals, and are pronounced by those who know very unfavorable specimens of the Kashmiri fair. The Mohammedan women are always veiled.

But ethnic science, whether based on linguistic, physical, social or religious distinctions, is in a very unsatisfactory condition. Surprising yet illusory resemblances are constantly cropping up in the most unexpected ways and places. Wilson was struck with the Gaelic traits of the Mongolian Búdhists who inhabit the mountains of Zanskar, south-east of the valley. "The sound of their language, the brooches which fasten their plaids, the varieties of tartan which their woollen clothes present, and even the features of the people (which are of an Aryan rather than a Tartar type), strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders." He had the support, too, of one of those imaginative savants who delight in Welsh, Erse and Gaelic philology, who insisted "that the names of innumerable places in Tibet and Tartary are identical with the local names of the Gaelic language." Add to this the fact that a corps of the maharajah's army is uniformed in an almost critically exact reproduction of "the garb of old Gaul," and the argument is a good deal more complete than many on more practically momentous points which have done service for centuries and are still accepted. We have the Gauls of Galatia, Galatz, Galicia, Gallia proper and Gaeldoch (or Caledonia), forming a continuous chain of Gallic settlements from the Himáliya to the Ultima Thule. And now the circuit is complete. The current sets back from the West. The slogan, heard so tellingly at Lucknow, is swelling up the glaciers of the Asiatic fatherland to save it from the Scythians! Monkbarns lived too soon.

The Mohammedans of Baltistán, on the opposite (or northern) side of Kashmir, again surprise us by speaking a Tartar tongue. We are not told that they are Scotch, endowed though they undoubtedly are with some of the canny and thrifty characteristics of the dwellers ayont the Tweed. They are inveterate tradesmen, and carry their small wares, including hill-ponies, all through the mountains. Let us drop in upon them, if such an expression be applicable to a climb of the most tremendous description. It takes us up the steps of the steepest and loftiest slope of the amphitheatre which forms the maharajah's dominions. First, however, we begin by a gentle and pleasant descent down the Jhelam to Lake Wúlar. Then begins the trouble. We turn northward, and find ourselves at the end of the first stage four thousand feet above the valley, on the brink of an artificial sheet of water surrounded by dense evergreen woods. Next day we rise 2000 feet higher, and redescend 6500 feet to the banks of the Kischanganga, the chief affluent of the Jhelam, running mostly parallel to the course of the latter stream. Then we undulate—if so soft a term be applicable to a route so sharply, abruptly and irregularly serrate—along the spurs which border the river, now in the forest and now on a bleak plateau where careful irrigation avails to grow nothing less hardy than millet, peas and buckwheat. In crossing to the valley, or rather trench, of the upper Indus, we have the choice of two passes, one 13,060 and the other 13,500 feet above tide. Having selected the least of these two evils, we swoop nearly six thousand feet down upon the village of Astor and a new language, the Dard. The temptation to stop and study either is small. If we are insatiate of climbing or find the heat at Astor—only 7853 feet above the sea—oppressive, we have the ice-cone of Nanga Parbat, 26,629 feet high, within ten miles to the west. We are within unpleasantly easy reach of the western and north-western frontier now; for the opposite slope of Nanga Parbat and the ridge to which it belongs is held by the independent Mohammedan tribes of Yaghistán, born marauders since the beginning of tradition. They have a republican form of government, one of the fierce democracies numbering only seven houses. Life, liberty and the pursuit of other people's property is a motto they act up to with a persistency and consistency highly disagreeable to their neighbors over the hill. The latter have, in self-defence, evinced a tendency to adopt the same rule of action, and to steal from their friends by way of reimbursement for what is stolen by their enemies—a disposition which is discouraged by the maintenance of a considerable garrison at Astor.

A KÁGÁNI, OR LÁMA MONUMENT.

The valley of Gilgit, continuous with that of Astor, inasmuch as the two abut upon the Indus at nearly the same point, one falling and the other rising, is the core of a tongue of territory projecting north-west into the heart of Yaghistán, and nearly dividing that turbulent region into two parts. The British in attaching this corner to Kashmir rather strained established boundaries in their own favor, and will doubtless continue the process till all Yaghistán is absorbed and the great Karakoram range becomes the frontier from the Afghan territory to that of Chinese Tibet.

At the town of Gilgit we have a reproduction in little of the valley of Srinagar. Its level is somewhat lower, and, though farther north by two degrees, it ripens such southern fruits as the pomegranate, etc. Its attractions will not, however, have full sway so long as the peace of the region remains precarious. The last attack from Yaghistán was signally repulsed in 1866. The practice of going armed is still general, and travellers need an escort. Some of the villages resemble the casemates, mines and covered-ways of a fortress. The people are of the same family and religion with those over the border, their foes, although perhaps less hated by them than their nominal compatriots the Kashmiris and Dográs. The Dards are an active and proud people, fond of independence, with features distinctly Caucasian.

Continuing our exploration of the upper benches of the amphitheatre, we turn to the right and skirt the upper Indus, which runs for several hundred miles from south-east to north-west close along the southern foot of the Karakoram, or rather upon a "hip" of the Roof of the World. Skárdú, on the left bank, was an independent capital down to 1840, and its aspect is still stormy in a political as in a climatic sense. The land looks like a petrified storm, the waves of granite and slate dotted sporadically with huts and microscopic bits of culture. Only in a few of the deep valleys is Nature less inhospitable. The glaciers descend to an altitude of 13,500 feet, with an upward extent of twenty-five miles or more; cultivation, after a fashion, existing at their lower edge, and grass growing for a season of six or eight weeks much farther up. The Báltoro glacier leads up to a stupendous peak, the second in height of all known elevations, but not yet dignified with a name, being only labelled in the Indian Survey "K. 2." Its height is 28,265 feet, or 687 less than Gaurisankar, the giant of mountains, a peak in the Eastern Himáliya. The summits next to K.2 are from 25,000 to 27,000 feet. Among them lies the pass of Mustagh, 18,300 feet above tide, up to 1863 a high-road between India and Yarkand, practicable for but a few weeks of summer. The brief interval left by the snow the brigands have extinguished.

After the abandonment of this pass, that of Karakoram, forty leagues east of it, became the principal route to Central Asia. The elevation is exactly the same. Of the five hundred and fifteen miles, divided into thirty-five marches, between Leh and Yarkand, a hundred and fifty traverse ice, naked rocks and precipices, wholly devoid of grass or fuel. Still farther east, in the extreme north-eastern angle of Ladákh and the Kashmiri states, a third route to Turkestan has been opened. It is longer than the others, but is practicable for near half the year, and can be traversed by horses and two-humped camels instead of yaks and ponies, as at the western crossings. On three stages only are wood and grass absent. It ascends from the south over a plateau marked by salt or brackish lakes. It is difficult to say which of the three contestant empires, Russia, China and England, has easiest or least impracticable access to the coveted core of Asia.

If the handful of Little Tibetans occupy the gallery of the Kashmiri theatre, there are wells in it which go down to the level of the dress-circle. These lower levels have traits of culture—trees, grass, whitewashed brick or stone dwellings, and nunneries and religious monuments on the roadside and sometimes arching the road. All, high and low in rank and topography, are deeply pious, and devote the greater part of their waking hours to muttering a supplicatory formula of six syllables, so far translatable by Christians only to the extent of its meaning something about the Deity and the lotus.

ROCK STATUE OF BÚDH, LADÁKH.

The trip from New York to Jummoo is about as long in point of time as to California twenty-five years ago. As many years hence the survivors of us may be getting up Thanksgiving or Christmas reunions at the old homestead of the Aryan family. It will never be a hackneyed spot. It stands too much on end. Steep mountains are never hackneyed: Cook's Personally Conducted will never permeate Kashmir.

Edward C. Bruce.

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"FOR PERCIVAL."

CHAPTER XXXIX.

SHORT RECKONINGS MAKE LONG FRIENDS.

It was the first of March, and a wild wind was hurrying fragments of white cloud across the blue. Percival had taken his breakfast in snatches, performing on his bell meanwhile. Emma had not brought his boots, and would not so much as come to be told that he wanted them. At last, despairing, he went out on the landing and shouted his request to her as she shuffled on some errand below. Turning to go back, he met Miss Lisle, who had just come down the stairs behind him.

They stood for a moment exchanging trivial remarks. To them came a stout, fresh-colored, peculiarly innocent-looking old man, who went by with a beaming smile and a slight bow.

"That's Mr. Fordham," said Judith: "I don't think I ever saw him so close before."

"No: one hardly meets him from one week's end to another. He is unusually late this morning."

"He looks a very quiet, steady—Really, one might take him for rather a nice old man."

Percival stared blankly at her, and then began to laugh: "Well, Miss Lisle, I never heard a reputation blighted so completely by a complimentary sentence before."

Judith blushed a little: "But he isn't very nice, is he?"

"I don't know about nice. I should say he was as steady and harmless an old fellow as ever lived. What do you mean?"

"Well," Judith hesitated, "of course one has no business to judge any one without really knowing; but his staying out so late at night—"

"'So late at night?'" Percival repeated.

"I suppose he has a latch-key generally. But one or two nights I am sure Miss Bryant sat up to let him in. I heard them whispering: at least, I heard her. I don't think that girl could even whisper quietly."

"But there must be some mistake. Fordham comes in quite early, and very often he doesn't go out at all in the evening."

"He goes out later," said Judith.

"Indeed, no. I could time all his movements. His room is next to mine, and the wall is not so thick as I could wish. He snores sometimes."

"But—" she persisted, looking scared and white, yet what was Fordham to her?—"but I have heard him over and over again, Mr. Thorne. I can't be mistaken."

Percival was disconcerted too. He looked at the carpet, at his slippered feet—at anything but her face: "You have heard some one, I suppose: I don't know who comes in late. Not poor old Fordham." He heard Emma on the stairs, and hurried to meet her. Coming back with his boots in his hand, he found Judith standing exactly as he had left her.

"I'm sure I beg Mr. Fordham's pardon," she said with a smile. "One does make curious mistakes, certainly. That nice-looking old man!" And nodding farewell to young Thorne, she went away.

He did not see her again for two days, though he watched anxiously for her. Bertie came in and out, and was much as usual. On the third evening, as Percival was going up stairs, she called after him: "Mr. Thorne."

He turned eagerly.

"You lent Bertie some money a day or two since?"

Something in her voice or her look made Percival sure that Lisle had borrowed and spent it without her knowledge, and that it was a trouble to her. After all, what did it matter? He would sell his watch and pay Mrs. Bryant. He could not deny Bertie's debt, since she had found it out, but he could make light of it. So he nodded: "Yes, by the the way, I believe I did: he hadn't his purse or something." This in a tone of airy indifference.

"Tell me how much it was, please, and I'll pay it back." Then he saw that her purse was open in her hand.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," Percival said: "don't pay me off in such a quick, business-like way, Miss Lisle. I'm not the milkman, nor yet the washing. Bertie will settle with me one of these days."

"Please tell me, Mr. Thorne. I mean to pay it: I must."

"Well, I'll ask him about it, then."

"You know," with a look of reproach and pleading.

Percival could not deceive her, she looked so sorrowfully resolute. He met the glance of her gray eyes. "Two pounds," he said; and was certain that she was relieved at the answer.

"Bertie wasn't sure it wasn't two pounds ten."

"On my honor, no. He asked me for a couple of sovereigns, and I took it literally."

"If you say so, I am sure. I didn't doubt you: I only told you that you might understand why I asked." She put the money, a sovereign and two halves, into his unwilling hand. Then he understood her relief, for, looking down into the little sealskin purse, he saw that there was no more gold in it. The last ten shillings must have been counted out in silver, and he was not quite sure it would not have ended in a threepenny piece and some halfpence.

"Now I am going to ask a favor," she said. "Don't lend Bertie any more, please. He has been used to spend just what he liked, and he doesn't think, poor boy! And it is only wasted. Don't let him have any more."

"But, Miss Lisle," said Percival, "if your brother asks me do you mean that I am to say 'No'?"

"Please, if you would. He mustn't be extravagant: we can't afford it. He can't pay you back, and if I lost any of my work—Mrs. Barton's lessons, for instance—I couldn't either."

"You work to pay me!" exclaimed Percival aghast: "I won't hear of such a thing. Miss Lisle, you mustn't! It's between Bertie and myself, and I shouldn't be ruined if he didn't pay me till his ship comes home one of these days. Take it back, please, and he and I will arrange it."

She shook her head: "No: my brother's debts are mine."

"Ah!" said Percival, with a swift, eloquent glance. "Then let me be your creditor a little longer: I hardly know what it feels like, yet."

"Since when has your ship come home, Mr. Thorne, that you can afford to be so generous?"

The blood mounted to his forehead at her question, but he answered quickly: "My ship has not come home. Perhaps if it had I should not dare to ask you to let me help you. I feel as if our poverty made us all nearer together."

"It is not every one who would say so in your place," Judith replied. "I am your debtor for those words. But we Lisles have wronged you too much already: you shouldn't try to make the load heavier."

"Wronged me?" he faltered.

"Did you think I did not know? My father had your money and ruined you: deny it if you can! I suspected it, and lately I have been sure. Oh, if Bertie and I could pay you back! But meanwhile he shall not borrow from you and waste your earnings on his silly whims. If you lend him any more you may try to hide it from me, but I shall find it out, and I will pay it—every farthing. I will find some way, if I have to sit up every night for a week and work my fingers to the bone."

"God forbid!" said Percival. "He shall have no more from me. But be generous, and promise me that if you should want help, such as my poverty can give, you will forget old times and come to me."

"No, I won't promise that. I will remember them and come." She caught his hand, pressed it one moment in her own, flung it from her and escaped.

"Judith!" he called after her, but she was gone.

Percival went into his own room. The money had come just in time, for his landlady's weekly account was lying on the table. He looked at the three coins with lingering tenderness, and after a moment's hesitation he took one of them and vowed that he would never part with it. Yet in the midst of his ardent resolution he smiled rather bitterly to think that it was not the sovereign, but one of the halves, he meant to keep for ever. Poverty had taught him many lessons, and among them how to combine economy and sentiment. "If she had given me the ten shillings' worth of silver, I suppose I should have saved the threepenny bit!" he said to himself as he locked his little remembrance in his desk.

A couple of days later, as he was walking home with Bertie, they passed three or four men who were sauntering idly along, and Thorne felt sure that his companion received and returned a silent glance of recognition. He glanced over his shoulder at them, and disliked their look exceedingly. "Do you know who those fellows were we passed just now?" he said.

Bertie looked back: "One is the brother of a man in our choir."

"Hm! I wouldn't have one of them for my brother at any price," said Percival. The matter dropped, but he could not forget it. He fancied that there was a slight change in Bertie himself—that the boy's face was keener and haggard, and there was an anxious expression in his eyes. But he owned frankly that he was not at all sure that he should have noticed anything if his suspicions had not been previously aroused.

"Come in this evening," said Bertie when they went up stairs. He leant against the door of Percival's room, and as his friend hesitated he called to his sister: "Here, Judith! tell Thorne to come and have some tea with us: they've let his fire out, and his room is as warm and cheerful as a sepulchre."

"Do you think I order other people about as I do you?" she replied.—"Will you come, Mr. Thorne? I can, at any rate, promise you a fire and a welcome."

When she met him she was quite calm, tranquil and clear-eyed. Do the ripples of the summer sea recall that distant line, the supreme effort of wind and tide some stormy night? Percival would have thought that it had been all a dream but for the little coin which that wave had flung at his feet for a remembrance. And he had called after her "Judith!" The tide had ebbed, and he did not even think of her as other than Miss Lisle. Had she heard him that evening? He would almost have hoped not, but that twilight moment seemed so far away that it must be absurd to link it with his every-day life.

Apparently, she and Bertie were on their usual footing. Did the young fellow know of that absurd mistake about old Fordham? Did Percival really detect a shade of dim apprehension on Judith Lisle's face, as if she hid an unspoken fear? As Bertie leant forward and the lamplight shone on his clearly-cut features, Percival was more than ever certain of the change in him. Could his sister fail to see it?

"Bertie," she said when they had finished their tea and were standing round the fire—"Bertie, I'm afraid you have lost one of your pupils."

He had his elbow on the chimney-piece, his hand hung loosely open, and his eyes were fixed upon the leaping flames. When Judith spoke he looked up inquiringly.

"Miss Nash—Emmeline Nash," said Judith.

Percival happened to be looking at the fire too, and he suddenly saw Bertie's fingers drawn quickly up. But the young master spoke very composedly indeed: "Emmeline Nash—why? Has anything happened?"

"No: only Mr. Nash has given in at last, and says she may go home at Easter for good.—She is older than any of the other pupils, Mr. Thorne: in fact, she is not treated as a pupil. But her father is—"

"An old fossil," said Bertie.

"Well!—interested in fossils and that sort of thing, and a widower; so there has not been much of a home for her, and he always fancied she was better at school. But school can't last for ever."

"Happiest time of one's life!" Bertie ejaculated.

"Oh! do you think so?" said Judith doubtfully.

"Not at all. But I believe it is the right thing to say."

"Stupid boy!—And as she will very soon be twenty, I really think she ought not to be kept there any longer."

"Of course Miss Nash is delighted," said Percival.

"Yes, but hardly as much so as I expected. One's castles in the air don't look quite the same when one is close to them. I am afraid, her home-life won't be very bright."

"Perhaps she will make it brighter," said Thorne. "What is she like? Is she pretty?"

"Yes," said Bertie.

Judith smiled: "One has to qualify all one's adjectives for her. She is nice-ish, pretty-ish: I doubt if she is as much as clever-ish."

"No need for her to be any more," Bertie remarked. "Didn't Miss Crawford say she would come in for a lot of money—some of her mother's—when she was one-and-twenty?"

"Yes, five or six hundred a year."

"That's why he has kept her at school, I suppose—afraid she should take up with a curate, very likely."

"Mr. Nash is very rich too, and she is an only child," said Judith, ignoring Bertie's remark. "But I think it has been hard on Emmeline."

"Well, I'm sorry she is going," said Lisle—"very sorry."

"Is she such a promising pupil?" Thorne inquired.

"She's a nice girl," said Bertie, "but a promising pupil—O Lord!" He flew to the piano, played an air in a singularly wooden manner, and then dragged it languidly, yet laboriously, up and down the keys. "Variations, you perceive." After a little more of this treatment the unfortunate melody grew very lame indeed, and finally died of exhaustion. "That's Miss Emmeline Nash," said Bertie, spinning round on the music-stool and confronting Percival.

"It is very like Emmeline's style of playing," Judith owned.

"Of course it is. Let's have something else for a change." And turning back to the piano, he began to sing. Then he called Judith to come and take her turn. She sang well, and Percival, by the fireside, noted the young fellow's evident pride in her performance, and admired the pair. (Any one else might have admired the three, for Thorne's grave, foreign-looking face was just the fitting contrast to the Lisles' fair, clear features. The morbid depression of a couple of months earlier had passed, and left him far more like the Percival of Brackenhill. Poverty surrounded the friends and dulled their lives, but as yet it was only a burden, not a blight.)

"You sing," said Bertie, looking back. "I remember you were great at some of those old songs. I'll play for you: what shall it be?"

"I'm sure I hardly know," said Percival, coming forward.

"Let's have 'Shall I, wasting in despair,'" Lisle suggested. "It has been going in my head all this morning." He played a few notes.

"No, no!" the other exclaimed hurriedly—"not that." Too well he remembered the tender devotion of more than a year before:

If she love me, this believe,
I will die ere she shall grieve.

Sissy and Brackenhill rose before him—the melancholy orchard-walk, the little hands which lay in his on that November day. He felt a dull pain, yet what could he do? what could he have done? There was a terrible mistake somewhere, but he could not say where. If he had married Sissy, would it not have been there? He woke up suddenly. Young Lisle was speaking, and Judith was saying, "Let Mr. Thorne choose."

"Oh, I don't mind," said Percival. "Shall it be 'Drink to me only with thine eyes'?"

He sang it well. His voice was strong and full, and the sweet old-fashioned courtesy of compliment suited him exactly. The last word had scarcely left his lips when the door opened, and Emma showed in Mr. Clifton of St. Sylvester's.

The clergyman came forward, black-coated, smooth-shaven, with watchful glances which seemed ever looking out for that lay co-operation we hear so much of now. Lisle looked over his shoulder and sprang up to receive him. The visitor tried to get his umbrella and two or three books into the hand which already held his hat, and one little volume fell to the floor. Percival picked it up and smoothed the pages. "Mr. Thorne—Mr. Clifton," said the young organist as the book was restored to its owner. Percival bowed gravely, and Mr. Clifton did not shake hands, as he would have done if the young man's manner had been less reserved. He was lavish of such greetings. A clergyman might shake hands with any one.

"I'll not detain you long, Lisle," he said. "But I wanted to speak to you about the choir-practice to-morrow." And there ensued a little business-talk between parson and organist. Judith took up a bit of work and Percival leant against the chimney-piece. Presently Lisle went back to the piano and tried over a hymn-tune which Mr. Clifton had brought. The clergyman stood solemnly by. "I met Gordon a few minutes ago," he said. "He was with his brother and some other men of the same stamp. If he mixes himself up with that set, he must go."

"You'll miss him in the choir, Mr. Clifton," said Bertie.

"He must choose between such associates and the choir," the other replied. The words were moderate enough, but the tone was austere.

"Especially at Easter," said Bertie, still playing.

"What of that?" demanded the other. "I would rather have no choir at St. Sylvester's than have men in it whose way of life during the week made a mockery of the praises they sang on Sundays."

He spoke in a low voice, and Bertie's playing partially covered the conversation. "Perhaps, Mr. Clifton, if Gordon understood how much you disapproved—" the young organist began.

"Gordon? Gordon? it isn't only Gordon who should understand. Every one should understand my feeling on such a subject without my having to explain it. But I won't keep you any longer now: it is getting late. Remember, seven o'clock to-morrow evening." And with a polite remark or two to the others Mr. Clifton bowed himself out, with Bertie in attendance. The procession of two might have been more dignified if the organist had not made a face at Judith and Percival as he went out at the door, and if he had not danced a fantastic but noiseless dance on the landing behind the incumbent of St. Sylvester's, who was feeling feebly in the dim light for the top step of Mrs. Bryant's staircase.

"Is anything the matter with Mr. Clifton?" Judith asked when the boy came back and executed another war-dance all round the room. "He didn't seem pleased, I thought."

Bertie brought himself up with a grand flourish opposite the arm-chair, and sank into it: "Bless you, no! there's nothing the matter with him. Tumbled out of bed the wrong side this morning—that's all. He does sometimes."

"Might have got over that by this time of night, one would think," said Percival, looking at his watch.

"Hold hard! you aren't going yet?" exclaimed Bertie, bounding up.—"Here, Judith, let's have another song to take the taste of old Clifton out of our mouths. Whatever possessed him to come here to-night?"

"DRINK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES."—[Page 298].

They had two or three songs instead of one, and then Percival went off. Judith put her work away, shut up the piano and laid Bertie's music straight. He stood meanwhile with his back to the dying fire, idly chinking some money which he had taken from his waistcoat-pocket, a half-crown and two or three shillings. His brows were drawn down as if he were lost in thought. Presently, his half-crown went spinning in the air: he caught it dexterously—heads. Bertie half smiled to himself, as who should say, "Well, if Destiny will have it so, what am I that I should resist it?"

It is very well to toss up if you have already come to a decision which you cannot quite justify. Should the verdict be adverse, it is no worse than it was before, for if you have really made up your mind so trivial an accident will not stop you. It may even be your duty to show that you attach no superstitious importance to it. And, on the other hand, if chance favors you, some of your burden of responsibility is transferred to the shoulders of Fate.

So Bertie smiled, pocketed his half-crown, kissed his sister and went off to his own room, whistling on his way thither with peculiar distinctness and perseverance.

Nearly an hour later two figures stood by the dim light in the passage and conversed in whispers:

"Now, my charming Lydia, how about that key?"

"I'll 'charming Lydia' you!" was the reply. "I like your impudence!"

"I know you do. You shall have some more when I've time to spare. But now I must really be off. Get me the key, there's a dear girl."

"I can't, then. If you want a latch-key, why don't you go to ma and say so like a man? There it is, and you'd have it directly."

"O most unreasonable Lydia! How many times must I explain to you that that wouldn't do, because your ma, while she possesses many of the charms, is not quite exempt from the weakness of her sex: in short, Lydia, she talks."

"Well, what then? If I were a man I wouldn't be afraid of my sister. I'd be my own master."

"So will I," said Bertie Lisle.

"And I'd say what I meant right out. I would!"

"If you knew there'd be a fuss, and people anxious about you, would you?" He yawned. "No: I'll be my own master, but I like to do things quietly."

"I don't care so much about that," said Lydia, whose feelings were less delicate. To struggle openly for an avowed object seemed to her the most natural thing in the world, and she would have preferred her independence to be conspicuous. She did not understand that with men of Bertie's stamp it is not the latch-key itself, but the unsuspected latch-key, which confers the liberty they love.

"Well?" said he. "Am I to stay here all night?"

"That's just what you'd better do. You won't get any good out of that lot; and so I tell you. You'll lose your money and get into nasty drinking ways: don't you go there any more."

"Upon my word, Lydia, you preach as well as old Clifton does."

"And do you just as much good, I dare say."

"Just as much. You've hit it exactly."

"I thought so. You aren't the sort to take any heed. One may preach and preach—"

"How well you understand me! No, as you say, I am not the sort to get any good from preaching. You are quite right, Lydia: my character requires kindness, sympathy and a latch-key—especially requires a latch-key."

"Especially requires a fiddlestick!" said Lydia; and, disregarding his smiling "Not at all," she went on in an injured tone: "There's ma worrying over accounts, and likely to worry for the next hour. How am I to get a key from under her very nose?"

Lisle seemed to reflect: "Old Fordham doesn't have one, I suppose."

"Gracious! No, not he! If you gave him one he'd drop it as if it was red hot. He thinks they're wicked."

There was a pause, but after a few moments there stole through the silence a sweetly insinuating voice: "Then, Lydia—"

Lydia half turned away and put up her left shoulder.

"Then, Lydia, I suppose you wouldn't—"

"You'd better keep on supposing I wouldn't."

"Can't suppose such cruelty for more than a moment—can't really. No, listen to me"—this with a change of voice: "I must go out this evening. Upon my soul, it's important. I'm in a fix, Lydia. I've not breathed a word to any one else, and wouldn't for worlds, but you'll not let it out, I know. If I'm lucky enough to get out of the scrape to-night, I'll never get into it again, I can tell you."

"You will," said Lydia.

"I swear I won't. And if not—"

"Well? if not?"

"Why, I must try another plan to get free. I sha'n't like it, but I must. But there'll be a row, and I shall have to go away. I'd a good deal rather not."

"What sort of plan?" she asked curiously.

"Desperate," he answered, and shook his head.

"What is it?" Her eyes were widely opened in excitement and alarm. "You ain't going to be driven to forge something, like people in novels? Or—or—it isn't a big robbery, is it? Oh, you wouldn't!"

The face opposite looked so smiling and candid and innocent that it made the words she had hazarded an obvious absurdity, even to herself, as soon as she had uttered them.

"Why not a murder?" said Lisle. "I think it shall be a murder. Upon my word, you're complimentary! No, no, I don't mean to try my hand at any of them." She smiled, relieved. "But I must go out to-night. Lydia, will you let me in once more?"

"Once more? You won't ask again?"

"Never again."

There was a pause: "Didn't you say that last time?"

"Lydia, you are the unkindest girl—"

"Well, then, I will."

"No, you are the kindest."

"Just this once more. Mind, you tap very gently, and I'll be awake. But do be careful. It frightens me so!"

When the house was full of lodgers the Bryants stowed themselves away in any odd corners. At this time Lydia occupied a large cupboard—by courtesy called a small room—close to their stuffy little back parlor. Lisle would go to the yard behind the house, which was common to two or three besides No. 13, and with one foot on a projecting bit of brick-work could get his hand on the sill and make his signal.

"Some day the police'll take you for a burglar," said Lydia encouragingly. "Well, go and enjoy yourself."

"It is a shame to keep you up so long, isn't it? What do you do all the time, eh, Lydia?"

"Sit in the dark, mostly, and think what a fool I'm making of myself."

"Don't do that. Think how good you are to a poor fellow in trouble. That will be better—won't it? But I must be off. Good-bye, you kind Lydia."

He stooped forward and kissed her, taking her hands in his. He found it convenient to pay his debt in this coin, his creditor being passably pretty. Not that Bertie had any taste for indiscriminate kissing. Had he had five thousand a year, and had Lydia rendered him a service, he would have recompensed her with some of his superfluous gold. But as he only had his salary as organist and what he could make by giving music-lessons, he paid her with kisses instead. He had no particular objection, and was it not his duty to be economical, for Judith's sake as well as his own?

"Go along with you!" said Lydia; and the young man, who had achieved his purpose and had no reason for prolonging the interview, stole laughingly down stairs, waving a farewell as he vanished round the corner. Lydia stood as if she were rooted to the ground, listening intently. She heard the door opened very gently and closed with infinite precautions. She still stood till she had counted a hundred under her breath, and then, judging that Mrs. Bryant had not been disturbed by his stealthy exit, she went down to fasten it. She was prepared with an answer if she should be caught in the act, but she was glad to get away undetected, for an excuse which is perfectly satisfactory at the time may be very unsatisfactory indeed when viewed by the light of later events. So Lydia rejoiced when she found herself safe in her own room, though she pursued her usual train of meditation in that refuge. She appraised Lisle's gratitude and kisses pretty accurately, and was angry with herself that she should care to have them, knowing that they were worthless. Yet as she sat there she said his name to herself, "Bertie," as she had heard his sister call him. And she knew well that it was pleasant to her to be thrilled by Bertie's eyes and lips, pleasant to feel Bertie's soft palms and slim strong fingers pressing those hands of hers, on which she had just been trying experiments with a new wash. Lydia looked thoughtfully into her looking-glass and took her reflection into her confidence. "Ain't you a silly?" she said to the phantom which fingered its long curl and silently moved its lips. "Oh, you are!" said the girl, "and there's no denying it." She shook her head, and her vis-à-vis shook its head in the dim dusk, as much as to say, "No more a fool than you are yourself, Lydia."—"Nobody could be," said Lydia moodily.

She did not deem it prudent to keep her light burning very late, and she had a long vigil before the signal came, the three soft taps at her window. She was prepared for it. Every sound had grown painfully distinct to her anxious ears, and she had been almost certain that she knew Lisle's hurried yet stealthy step as he turned into the yard. She crept to the door and opened it, her practised hand recognizing the fastenings in the dark. The light from the street-lamp just outside fell on Bertie's white face. "What luck?" she asked in a whisper.

"Curse the luck!" he answered: "everything went against me from first to last."

"I told you so," she whispered, closing the door. "Didn't I say that?"

"Don't! there's a good girl," said Bertie softly, somewhere in the shadows.

Lydia was silent, and shot the bolts very skilfully. But the key made a little grating noise as she turned it, and the two stood for a moment holding their breath.

"All right," said Lisle after a pause.

"It's late," said Lydia. He could not deny it. "You must take your boots off before you go up," she continued. "And do be careful."

He obeyed. "Good-night," he whispered. "You'll see that girl calls me in good time to-morrow? I feel as if I should sleep for a century or so." He yawned wearily: "I wish I could."

"I ain't to be sleepy, I suppose: why should I be?" she answered, but added hurriedly, "No, no, you shall be called all right."

"You good girl!" whispered Lisle, and he went noiselessly away. A dim gaslight burned halfway up the stairs and guided him to his room. He had only to softly open and close his door, and all was well. Judith had not been awakened by the catlike steps of the man who was not old Fordham. She had fallen asleep very happily, with a vague sense of hopefulness and well-being. She had no idea that Bertie had just flung himself on his bed to snatch a little rest, with a trouble on his mind which, had she known it, would have effectually banished sleep from her eyes, and a hope of escape which would have nearly broken her heart. Her burden had been laid aside for a few hours, and through her dreams there ran a golden thread of melody, the unconscious remembrance of that evening's songs and music.

CHAPTER XL.

BERTIE AT THE ORGAN.

Bertie was duly called, and came down the next morning punctually enough, but somewhat weary and pale. A slight headache was supposed to account for his looks. Lydia complained of the same thing over her breakfast of bacon down stairs. But Fate was partial, for Bertie's marble pallor and the faint shadow beneath his eyes were utterly unlike poor Lydia's dull complexion and heavy, red-rimmed eyelids. She was conscious of this injustice, and felt in a dim way that she had proved herself capable of one of those acts of self-devotion which are the more admirable that they are sure not to be admired. But the longer she thought of it the more she felt that this noble deed was not one to be repeated. One must set bounds to one's heroism. "I can't go on losing my beauty-sleep in this fashion," said Lydia to herself. "I do look such a horrid fright the next day."

When Judith had gone to Standon Square, Bertie yawned, stretched himself, got out his little writing-case and sat down to write a letter. He spent some time over it, erasing and interlining, balancing himself on two legs of his chair, while he looked for stray words on the ceiling or murmured occasional sentences to judge of the effect. At last it was finished, and, being copied in a dashing hand, looked very spontaneous indeed. "I think that ought to do it," he said to himself as he smoked his pipe, glancing over the pages: "I think it will do it." He smiled, in the pride of triumphant authorship, but presently there came a line between his brows and a puzzled expression to his face: "I'll be shot if I know how it is to be managed afterward. People do it, but how? I wonder if Thorne knows? If law is at all catching, a year of that musty office must have given him a touch of it." Lisle considered the matter for a few minutes, and then shrugged his shoulders: "It won't do, I'm afraid. I daren't try him. I'm never quite clear how much he sees and understands, nor what he would do. And Gordon? No." There was another reverie. Finally, he arose, knocked the ashes out of his pipe and stretched himself once more: "I've got to depend on myself, it seems to me. I must set my wits to work and astonish them all. But oh, if yawning were but a lucrative employment, how easily I could make money and be quit of the whole affair!"

Bertie took a great interest in his personal appearance, and was frank and unaffected in his consciousness of his good looks. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the bottle-green mirror, and stopped short in considerable anxiety. "Brain-work and these late hours don't suit me," he said. "Good Heavens! I look quite careworn. Well, it may pass for the effect of a gradually breaking heart: why not?"

A glance at his watch roused him to sudden activity. He carefully burnt every scrap of his original manuscript, feeling sure that Lydia would read his letter if she had the chance. He looked leniently on this little weakness of hers. "Very happy to afford you what little amusement I can in the general way," he soliloquized as he directed an envelope, "but I really can't allow you to read this letter, Lydia my dear." Apparently, he was in a distrustful mood, for, after hesitating a moment, he got some wax and sealed it with a ring he wore. Then, putting it carefully in his pocket, he tossed a few sheets of blotted music-paper on the table, left his writing-case wide open, took his hat and a roll of music, and went out in the direction of St. Sylvester's, trying to work out his problem as he walked. He was not, however, so deep in thought that he had no eyes for the passers-by, and his attention was suddenly attracted by a servant-girl dawdling along the opposite pavement. He watched her keenly, but furtively, as if to make quite sure, and when she turned down a side street he followed, and speedily overtook her.

"This is lucky!" he ejaculated. "I didn't expect to see you, Susan. What are you doing here?"

She was a slight, plain girl, with a fairly intelligent face whose expression was doubtful. Sometimes it showed a willingness to please, oftener it was sullen, now and then merely thoughtful. Just at this moment, as she looked up at the young organist, it was crafty and greedy. "I'm taking a note," she said. "Miss Crawford's always a-sending me with notes or something."

"You don't mind being sent with notes, do you?" said Bertie blandly.

"That's as may be," the girl answered.

"I should have thought it was pleasant work. At any rate, it's as easy to take two as one, isn't it?"

"I have to take 'em, 'cause I'm paid to, you see, easy or not."

"Oh, of course you ought to be paid." His fingers were in his waistcoat-pocket, and some coins that chinked agreeably were transferred to her hand, together with the sealed letter. "You've saved me a walk to Standon Square," he said.

The girl laughed, looking down at her money: "It wouldn't have hurt you, I dare say. You oughtn't to make much of a walk there. How about an answer?"

"Oh, I shall get an answer when I come to-morrow." He nodded a careless farewell, and went a little out of his way to avoid Gordon's brother, who was visible in the distance.

Susan turned the missive over in her hand. "It's sealed tight enough," she remarked to herself. "What did he want to do that for?" She eyed it discontentedly: "I hate such suspicious ways. Wouldn't there be a flare-up if I just handed it over to the old maid? I won't, though, for she's give me warning, and he's a deal more free with his money than she'd ever be—stingy old cat! But wouldn't there be a flare-up? My!" And Susan, who had an ungratified taste for the sensational, looked at the address and smiled to think of the power she possessed.

Before she slipped the letter into her pocket she sniffed doubtfully at the envelope, and tossed her head in scorn: "I thought so! Smells of tobacco." It was true, for Lisle, as we know, had smoked while he revised his composition. "If I were a young man going a-courting I'd scent my letters with rose or something nice, and I'd write 'em on pink paper—I would!" Susan reflected. But Lisle was wiser. There is no perfume for a young ladies' school like a whiff of cigar-smoke. To that prim, half convent-like seclusion, where manners are being formed and the proprieties are strictly observed, it comes as a pleasant suggestion of something worldly and masculine, just a little wicked and altogether delightful.

So Lisle went on his way to St. Sylvester's, lighter of heart for having met Susan and got rid of the letter. While it was still in his pocket nothing was absolutely settled, in spite of that half-crown which had represented inexorable Destiny the night before. But now that it was gone, further thought about it was happily unnecessary, and honor forbade him to draw back. It was true, however, that he was still face to face with the difficulty which had been in his mind when he met his messenger so conveniently.

He caught a street Arab, and promised him twopence if he would come and blow for him while he practised. But he began by playing absently and carelessly, for since the letter had been despatched his problem had become infinitely more urgent, and it thrust itself between him and the music. His fingers roved dreamily over the keys, his eyes wandered, as if in spite of himself, to the east end of the church. All at once he came out with an impatient "How do people manage it?" and he finished the muttered question with a strong word and a big chord.

A moment more, and his face is illuminated with the inward light of a sudden idea. He lets his hands lie where they happen to be, he sits there with parted lips and startled eyes. The idea is almost too wonderful, too simple, too obvious, and yet—"By Jove!" says Bertie, under his breath.

His street Arab means to earn his twopence, and in spite of the silence he pumps away in a cheerful and conscientious manner till he shall be bidden to stop. The organ protests in a long and dolorous note, and startles the musician from his reverie. Forthwith he begins to play a stirring march, and the rejoicing chords arise and rush and crowd beneath his fingers. Has he indeed found the solution of his great perplexity? Apparently he thinks so. He seems absolutely hurried along in triumph on these waves of jubilant harmony. A ray of pale March sunlight falls on his forehead and shines on his hair as he tosses his head in the quickening excitement of the moment. His headache is gone, his weariness is gone. The notes seem to gather like bands of armed men and rush victoriously through the aisles. But even as he plays he laughs to himself, a boyish, happy laugh, for this great idea which is to help him out of all his difficulties is not only a great idea, but a great joke. And the march rings louder yet, for with every note he plays his thought grows clearer to his mind, plainer and more feasible. There is a gay audacity about the laugh which lingers in Bertie's eyes and on his lips, as if Dan Cupid himself had just been there, whispering some choice scheme of roguish knavery, some artful artlessness, into the young man's ear. Bertie does not acknowledge that his inspiration has come in such a questionable fashion. He says to himself, "It will do: I feel it will do. Isn't it providential? Just when I was in despair!" This is a more suitable sentiment for an organist, no doubt, for what possible business can Dan Cupid have at St. Sylvester's? Louder and louder yet pours the great stream of music; and that is a joke too, for Lisle feels as if he were shouting his secret to the four winds, and yet keeping it locked in his inmost soul, taking the passers-by into his confidence in the most open-hearted fashion, and laughing at them in his sleeve. But the musician is exhausted at last, and the end comes with a thundering crash of chords.

"Here, boy—here's sixpence for you: you may be off. We've done enough for to-day, and may go home to Bellevue street." But it seems to Bertie Lisle, as he picks up his roll of music and comes down the aisle, that Bellevue street too is only a joke now.

CHAPTER XLI.

WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY.

April had come, and the best of the year was beginning with a yellow dawn of daffodils. The trees stood stern and wintry, but there were little leaves on the honeysuckles and the hawthorn hedges, glad outbursts of song among the branches, and soft, shy caresses in the air. Sissy Langton, riding into Fordborough, was delicately beautiful as spring itself. She missed her squire of an earlier April, and his absence made an underlying sadness in her radiant eyes which had the April charm. That day her glance and smile had an especial brightness, partly because spring had come, and, though countless springs have passed away, each comes with the old yet ever-fresh assurance that it will make all things new; partly because it was her birthday, and while we are yet young there is a certain joy of royalty which marks our birthday mornings; but most of all because that day gave her the power to satisfy a desire which had lain hidden in her heart through the long winter months.

It was the Fordborough market-day, and already, though it was but eleven o'clock, the little town was waking up. Sissy, followed by Mrs. Middleton's staid servant, rode straight to the principal street and stopped at Mr. Hardwicke's office. Young Hardwicke, reading the paper in his room, was surprised when a clerk announced that Miss Langton was at the door asking for his father. He forgot the sporting intelligence in an instant: "Well, isn't my father in?"

No: Mr. Hardwicke went out about twenty minutes earlier, and did not say when he should be back. They had told Miss Langton, and she said, "Perhaps Mr. Henry—"

Mr. Henry was off like a shot. He found Sissy on her horse at the door, looking pensively along the street, as if she were studying the effect of dusky red on palest blue—chimney-pots against the April sky.

"So Mr. Hardwicke is out?" she said when they had shaken hands. "I'm so sorry! I wanted him so particularly."

"Is it important? Are you in a great hurry?" said Henry. "He won't be long, or he would certainly have left word—on a market-day especially. Could you come in and wait a little while?" he suggested. "I suppose I shouldn't do as well?"

"I don't know," said Sissy, looking a little doubtfully at the tall, fresh-colored young fellow, who smiled frankly in reply.

"Oh, it isn't at all likely," said Mr. Henry with delightful candor. "The governor can't, for the life of him, understand how I make so many blunders. I've a special talent that way, I suppose, but I don't know how I came by it."

"Then perhaps it had better be Mr. Hardwicke. If it were a waltz, now—" and she laughed. "But it isn't a waltz: it is something very important. Do you know anything about wills?"

He looked up in sudden apprehension: "Is it about a will? Mrs. Middleton's? Is anything the matter?"

"No, it isn't Aunt Middleton's: it's mine," was the composed reply. But seeing relief, and almost amusement, on his face, she added hastily, "I can make a will, can't I? I'm twenty-one, you know: it's my birthday to-day."

"Then I wish you many happy returns of the day."

"Thank you, but can I make a will?"

"Of course you can make a will."

"A will that will be good?" Sissy insisted, still speaking in the low tone she had adopted when she began to explain the object of her visit. "Can I make it here and now?"

"Not on horseback, I think," said Hardwicke with a smile. "You would be tired of sitting here while we took down all your instructions. It isn't very quick work making ladies' wills. They generally leave no end of legacies. I suppose they are so good they don't forget anybody."

"Mine won't be like that: mine will be very short," Sissy said. "And I suppose I am not good, for I shall forget almost everybody in it." She laughed as she said it, yet something in her voice struck Hardwicke as curiously earnest. "I will come in, I think, and tell you about it," she went on. "I want to make it to-day."

"To-day?" he repeated as he helped her to dismount.

"Yes. I'll tell you," said Sissy, entering his room, "and you'll tell Mr. Hardwicke, won't you? I'll get the Elliotts to give me some luncheon, and then I can come here again between two and three. I shall have to sign it, or something, sha'n't I? Do tell your father I want it all to be finished to-day."

"I'll tell him."

"Tell him it's my birthday, so of course I must do just as I please and have everything I want to-day. I don't know whether that's the law, but I'm sure it ought to be."

"Of course it ought to be," Henry replied with fervor. "And I think we can undertake to say that it shall be our law, anyhow."

"Thank you," said Sissy. "I shall be so very glad! And it can't take long. I only want him to say that I wish all that I have to go to Percival Thorne."

"To Percival?" Hardwicke repeated, with a sensation as if she had suddenly stabbed him. "To Percival Thorne? Yes. Is that all I am to say?"

"That's all. I want it all to be for Percival Thorne, to do just what he likes with it. That can't take long, surely."

Hardwicke bit the end of a penholder that he had picked up, and looked uneasily at her: "You're awfully anxious to get this done, Miss Langton: you aren't ill, are you?"

"Oh, I'm well enough—much better than I was last year," said Sissy lightly. "But there's no good in putting things of this sort off, you know"—she dropped her voice—"as poor Mr. Thorne did. And your father said once that if I didn't make a will when I came of age my money would all go to Sir Charles Langton. He doesn't really want any more, I should think, for they say he is very rich. And he is only a second cousin of mine, and I have never seen him. It's funny, having so few relations, isn't it?"

"Very," said Hardwicke.

"And some people have such a lot," said Sissy thoughtfully. "But I always feel as if the Thornes were my relations."

"I suppose so. At any rate, I don't see that Sir Charles Langton has any claim upon you." There was silence for a minute, Sissy drawing an imaginary outline on Hardwicke's carpet with her riding-whip, he following her every movement with his eyes.

"I shall have to sign both my Christian names, I suppose?" she said abruptly.

"Have you two? I didn't know. What is the other?"

"Jane."

"Jane! I like that," said Henry. "Yes, sign them both."

"Thank you. I don't want to seem like an idiot to your father. I should like it best if I could just write 'Sissy' and nothing else, as I do at the end of my letters. When I see 'Cecilia Jane Langton' I feel inclined to call out, 'This is none of I!' like the old woman."

She stood up to go: "You won't forget, will you?"

"No, I won't forget."

"Everything to Percival Thorne."

"Percival Thorne is an uncommonly lucky fellow," said the young man, looking down.

Sissy stopped short, glanced at him and colored. In her anxiety she had never considered the light in which the bequest might strike Henry Hardwicke. In fact, she had not thought of him at all except as a messenger. She was accustomed to take him for granted on any occasion. She had known him all her life, and he was always, in her eyes, the big friendly boy with whom she pulled crackers and played blindman's buff at children's parties. She dreamed of no possible romance with Henry, and did not imagine that he could have such a dream about her. He was as harmless as a brother, without a brother's right to question and criticise. It was precisely that feeling which had been at the root of the friendliness which the Fordborough gossips took for a flirtation. They could not have been more utterly mistaken. She liked Henry Hardwicke—she knew that he was honest and honorable and good—but if any one had said that he was a worthy young man, I believe she would have assented. And that is the last adjective which a girl would apply to her ideal.

Sissy's scheme had been in her mind through all the winter, but she had always imagined herself stating her intentions in a business-like way to old Mr. Hardwicke, who was a friend of the family. She had been so thunder-struck when she found that he was out that she had taken Henry into her confidence at a moment's warning. She dared not risk any delay. It would be impossible to go home leaving Percival's future insecure. Suppose she died that night—and she was struck with the fantastic coincidence of Mr. Hardwicke's second absence at the critical moment—suppose she felt herself dying, and knew that the only thing she could have done for Percival was left undone! She could not face the possibility of that agony. Indeed, she wondered how she had lived through the long hours which had elapsed since the clock struck twelve and the day began which made her twenty-one—not the girl Sissy any longer, but the woman who held Percival's fortune in her hands. How could she have gone away with her purpose unfulfilled?

When Henry said "Percival Thorne is an uncommonly lucky fellow," she colored, but only that transient flush betrayed her, for she answered readily: "Why, Mr. Hardwicke, what a dreadful thing to say to me! I hope you don't have second-sight or anything horrible of that sort?"

"Second-sight!" Henry repeated doubtfully, looking down at a little dangling eye-glass: "what's that?"

"Oh, you must know. Isn't it second-sight when you can tell if people are going to die? You see them in their winding-sheets, and they are low down if it will only be rather soon. But if it is to be quite directly their shrouds are wrapped round them high up. What was mine like, that you said Percival Thorne was so lucky? Up to here?" And, standing before him, she smiled and touched her chin.

"God forbid!" said Henry. "How can you say such fearful things?"

"Oh, you didn't see it, then? I'm very glad."

"Good Heavens! no! And I don't believe it. I didn't mean that Thorne would be lucky if you died!"

"I can't do him any good any other way," said Sissy with sweet composure; "but I don't think I'm going to die, so I don't suppose I shall do him any good at all. Do you think this is a strange fancy of mine? The truth is, Aunt Middleton and I have been unhappy about Percival ever since last May, because we know his grandfather meant to have done something for him. He isn't rich, and he ought to have had Brackenhill; so I should like him to have my money if I die. It is only a chance, because I dare say I may live fifty years or so—only fancy!—but I would rather Percival had the chance than Sir Charles. That's all. You'll explain it to your father? It can't do any harm if it does no good."

"Oh no: I see. It can't do any harm."

"And now I'll be off," laughed Sissy. "How dreadfully I have made you waste your time! I dare say if I hadn't been here you would have written ever so many things on parchment and tied them up with red tape."

"Oh yes, quantities!" Hardwicke replied as he escorted her to the door. "A cartload at least. I'm glad you think I'm so industrious."

Standing outside, he said something about her horse. He did not like Firefly's look, and he told her so. Moreover, he threatened to tell Mrs. Middleton his bad opinion of Sissy's favorite.

"Nonsense!" she answered lightly. "There's nothing to be afraid of." But suddenly she turned and looked at him. "Don't you really think Firefly is safe?" she said. "Well, I must see about it.—William, I'm not going back now, and I think I'll walk to Mrs. Elliott's. You had better meet me here at half-past two."

And with a parting glance at Hardwicke she went away down the sunshiny street, and he stood looking after her. He would have liked to be her escort to the Elliotts' house, but he had her message to deliver to his father, and he knew she would not permit it. Besides, to tell the truth, she had taken him by surprise, and gone away before he thought of anything of the kind. So he could only stand bareheaded on the office-steps watching her as she went on her way. But suddenly his lips parted to let out a word, which certainly would not have escaped him had he been by Sissy's side. "There's that Fothergill fellow!" said Henry, recognizing the captain's slim figure and black moustache. And he turned on his heel and went in.

He was quite right. It was Fothergill who came sauntering along the pavement, looking at the shop-windows, at the passers-by, at the preparations for the market, with quick eyes and an interest which conveyed the impression of his superiority to it all better than any affectation of languid indifference. His glances seemed to say, "And this is a country town—a market—these are farmers—people live here all their lives!" But when he saw Sissy Langton he came forward eagerly. And perhaps it was just as well that he was at hand to be her squire through the busy little street, for the girl was seized with a new and unaccountable nervousness. A bit of orange-peel lying in the road caused her a sudden tremor. Two or three meek and wondering cows, which gazed vacantly round in search of their familiar pasture, appeared to her as a herd of savage brutes. She looked distrustfully up and down the road, and waited at the pavement's edge for a donkey-cart to pass before she dared attempt a crossing. It was just at this moment that the captain appeared, quickening his pace and lifting his hat, only too ready to guard her through all the perils of a Fordborough market-day.

Henry Hardwicke hated reading, and had no particular love for the law. His father said he was a fool, and was inordinately fond of him nevertheless. It might be that the old lawyer was right on both points. And, dull as Henry was supposed to be, he was capable of delicate feelings and perceptions as far as Sissy Langton was concerned. It seemed to him that accident had revealed to him a hidden wound in her heart; and the revelation pained him—not selfishly, for he had never hoped for himself, but because of the secret suffering which it implied. His one idea was to do her bidding, yet not betray her. He delivered her message to his father with a tact of which he was himself unconscious. On his lips it became no less urgent, but he dwelt especially on Sissy's desire to see justice done to the man who had been accidentally disinherited; on her feeling that she owed more to the Thornes, whose home and love she had shared, than to the Langtons, with whom she shared nothing but a name; and on her impatience of even an hour's delay, because the squire's sudden death had made a deep impression on her mind. All this, translated into Harry's blunt and simple speech, was intelligible enough to Mr. Hardwicke. The girlish whim that all should be done on her birthday made him smile, but the remembrance of Godfrey Thorne was present in his mind as in hers. He did not attach much importance to the whole affair, and felt that he should not be overwhelmed with surprise should he hear a few months later that Sissy was going to be married to some one else, and wanted to make some compromise—perhaps to resign the squire's legacy to Percival. To his eyes it looked more like an attempt at restitution than anything else. "She is sorry for him, poor fellow!" thought Mr. Hardwicke. "She did not know her own mind, and now she would like to atone to him somehow."

Sissy came back alone at the time she had fixed, looking white and anxious. A client came out as she arrived, and five farmers were waiting in the office to see Mr. Hardwicke: therefore, though she was ushered in at once, the interview was brief. The old lawyer paid her a smiling compliment on her promptitude. "We have to advise people to make their wills sometimes," he said, "but you are beforehand with us." Sissy expressed a fear that she had troubled him on a very busy day, and he assured her that to blame her because her twenty-first birthday happened to fall on a Friday would be the last thing he should think of doing. Then the girl looked up at him, and said that old Mr. Thorne had always been so good to her, and she thought that perhaps if he could see he would be glad, so she could not put it off. She stopped abruptly, and her eyes filled. Mr. Hardwicke bent his head in silent acquiescence, the brief document was duly signed and witnessed, and Sissy went away, riding home as if she had never known what fear meant. Suppose Firefly threw her, what then? She had been to Mr. Hardwicke, and though her "Cecilia Jane Langton" was not all she could have wished, because she was nervous and Mr. Hardwicke's pen was so scratchy, still there it was. And was not the paper, thus signed, a talisman against all dread of death?

So her burden was lighter. But what could lighten the other load which lay on her heart? She hardly knew whether it were love or fear that she felt for Percival. The long days which had passed since she saw him had only deepened the impression of that summer evening when they parted. His reply to her entreaty that he would come back to her had been exactly what she had feared—as gentle as he himself had been when they stood face to face in the old drawing-room at Brackenhill, and as inflexible. If she could forget him—if she could learn to care for Captain Fothergill or Walter Latimer—what a bright, easy, sunshiny life might yet be hers! No, ten thousand times, no! Better to suffer the weariness of dread and doubt and longing for Percival.

But Percival would have been astonished if he could have seen the darkly heroic guise in which he reigned over Sissy Langton's dreams.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

---

THE BOY ON A HILL-FARM.

There is nothing like a wide horizon to give a boy aspirations—nothing like a hill-farm to give him hope—especially the hope of leaving it. In spring, on a day of expectation, when the warm air has not yet brought out the flowers, and carts go past with loads of young trees whose dry roots and branches look like emblems of old hopes still unfulfilled, a boy is working on the top of Ford Hill. The five-inch soil covering the solid rock that forms the New York hill—the first of all, perhaps, to show its head above the pristine waters—has nourished a lofty forest which, battling with everlasting winds, resembles a body of men strong from incessant toil: its elms and beeches are so tough they defy the forester, and are fit only for water-wheel shafts. Working among these adamantine timbers, the boy stops to look across the broad and deep valley. Not at the old hill-quarries opposite, in whose depths snow lies all summer, does he look, nor at the hanging woods above the new piece, nor at the yellow farmhouse and barn; but higher, toward the west, where, on a level with his eye, 'twixt hills like cloud-banks, he sees a white streak, the distant lake. Storms are running down the Deerfield hills. In one of the woody valleys rain-clouds have formed a mirage, another seeming lake, and from its bosom rise to the clear, fine air of the hills the muffled clangor and whistle of the New York Central train, in the boy's mind a glittering image fleeing to splendid cities, and one that he longs to follow.

A boy has no perception whatsoever of the poetry of farm-life: he considers a woodman's work crabbed prose. The idea of making poetry out of any part of it, or out of a herder's work either, is to him stark idiocy. Sheep-washing, for instance, is simply working a whole spring day in very chilly water, and sheep-shearing is a task at which he makes "ridgy" work and endures the horror of seeing the gentle, thin-skinned creatures bleed under his awkward shears. The boy cannot conceive what poetry there is about oxen. From the moment a calf hides in the hay with its mother's help, and makes believe there is no calf born yet, until it becomes an ox, it cannot for an instant be considered poetic by a boy. The calf is a creature that insists, whenever it drinks, on thrusting its head to the bottom of the pail with a splash that deluges the boy with milk: it drinks until it is out of breath, and then withdraws its head with another splash and an explosion of milk-steam from its nostrils—performances which cause the boy's friends to remark wherever he goes, "You smell of sour milk." The boy likes well enough to feed the oxen their full measures of meal; he likes to see them get down on their knees to lick up morsels that roll into corners of the stable-floor; he stretches his hand in before them for little balls of meal they cannot reach with their long tongues, at which they draw back with a thwack against the stanchion, breathing hard and gazing at him with their large black eyes; and when the off ox tries to capture the nigh ox's portion, the boy raps him back to his place. Quite a pastoral friendship exists between the boy and the nigh ox, which, being continually bullied by the off ox, needs the boy's protection, and is therefore placed next him at work. But, for all that, he does not see the romance of such matters.

The yoking of oxen is decidedly not matter for a flying smile to a boy. He lays one end of the yoke's beam on the ground, lifts the other end with his right hand, and, waving one of the ox-bows in his left, cries to the nigh ox, "Come under!" The "nigh" slowly obeys, bending its head low to accommodate the boy's stature, and permitting itself to be fastened by the ox-bow to the yoke. The boy now lifts the free end of the yoke's beam as high as he can and calls the off ox to come under. It also obeys, treading deliberately with its heavy feet, and waiting patiently for the boy's small fingers to fasten the weighty bow with a clumsy bow-key. Then the boy lifts the ponderous cart-neap and attaches it to the ring in the yoke—a labor that causes his heart to "beat like a tabor;" and thus the beasts are wedded to their daily toil. Occasionally, however, the ox will not come under at all, but will require the boy to follow it about the barnyard, dragging the jingling yoke and waving the bow with infinite fatigue; and occasionally the boy makes the mistake (no greater could be made) of yoking the off ox first. The off ox, finding a yoke sans yokefellow dangling at its neck, is much amazed, not being "broke" to that, and takes to whirling round and round and galloping up and down the barnyard in a manner suggestive of nightmare. This is a circumstance that makes a boy hopeful of going somewhere else.

The yoking of oxen, though difficult, is nothing compared with the working of oxen. The boy can direct his plough lightly along its straight furrow, anticipating each movement of his oxen, and he can turn a corner "straight as a bug's leg;" nevertheless, he would like those persons who have a Wordsworthian idea of following the plough along the mountain-side in glory and in joy to witness the struggles of a green hand learning to plough—of a tramp hired man, say, one of the sort that can't milk and don't know "haw" from "gee." This miserable being tires himself out doing nothing. He cannot lay a furrow over sod downward: he has to stop and turn it over with his hands. He leaves patches of turf. He does not touch up his oxen scientifically, the "nigh" on the head, the "off" on the rump: therefore they frequently do not move at all. His plough-point hits the stones, and his plough-handles knock him in the ribs and lay him out. If he is ploughing near the barn, which is the home of the oxen, approaching it, they go like lightning, and he must drop the plough and rush at their heads to keep them from running straight into the barn: leaving it, they creep like snails, and perhaps they take to "pulling"—that is, walking sidewise, with their bodies as far apart as possible; or to "crowding"—leaning against each other over the chain that holds the plough to the yoke, and one of them gets its foot on the chain and proceeds on three feet. If the tramp hired man goes between them to adjust the chain, the oxen squeeze him flat, and one ox steps on his toe. The toe goes Pop! and what anguish! The ox cannot be made to understand that it must step off. No use in saying "Highst!" or anything else. Nothing but kicking the ox in the leg with your free foot will stir it. In addition to these troubles of the ox-driver, the oxen know how to "turn the yoke:" they can twist their heads in the yoke after a fashion that enables them to stand facing the plough and staring at the driver. If they "turn the yoke" while drawing a cart down a side-hill, the cart, with the driver in it, slips about in front of them, and drags them down the gulf face foremost. The noisiest being on earth is a man ploughing with a pair of old bulls. At night, when he comes home to supper, he is scarcely able to whisper, and the parting blow he gives his beasts is no damage to them nor consolation to him. A man ploughing green sward with two old plugs of horses is about as miserable.

Cows, whether the fine old "line-backs" of the hills or scrawny, beefless Alderneys or milkless Durhams, have one merit with a boy. It is not that they enjoy fine weather, a good pasture and a green landscape—have thoughts, notice the sprouting beanfields as they come up to milking, and the new flag-staff on the green: it is that they are good at fighting. In every herd there is a queen who can vanquish all the rest, and a vice-queen who can vanquish all but the queen, and a second vice-queen who can vanquish all but the first two, and so on down to the weakest of the herd, who cannot withstand any of the others. Sometimes there is one that can defeat the queen, but none of the rest; and other complications occur that give diversity to the cow-fights. The boy has comfort superintending these combats. He encourages the cowards and helps the weak by drawing them forward by the horns to attack. When the queen stops the way at the bars, and will not let the rest through, or when she amuses herself running up and down the stanchions driving away the other cows, the boy puts her down and relieves the drove of her tyranny.

The boy oversees some fighting among the fowls of the hill-farm, where they still keep the old hawk-colored breed—a breed that fights to the death—not being over-partial as yet to Shanghais that won't lay and Leghorns that won't sit. On a large farm, where there are several barns and as many sets of hens, the boy cultivates the fighting qualities of the cocks by keeping them around together, and not letting them forget each other. The turkeys—strange birds! so tender in youth a spring rain kills them, so tough in age they roost in the tree-tops in winter, and come down o' mornings covered with frozen sleet and looking as if they enjoyed it—are objects of no interest to the boy; but for the geese he has a kindness, not because they fight each other, but because they fight him. "Can't you let them geese alone?" is the frequent exclamation of the hired man in the stable to the boy in the mow. The boy is always perfectly willing to hunt goose-eggs: he has a battle with the biting, shrieking, wing-flapping goose every time he takes an egg from her nest. When she begins to sit on her empty nest, it is his business to bring back a part of her eggs and place them under her, which leads to a pitched battle. The pea-hen is a different creature: she keeps her nest a secret even from the peacock, never leaving it save on the wing, and approaching it with the greatest circumambulation. Nobody but the boy knows where it is. Should he take up her egg, though he might lay it down exactly as it was before, she would never lay another egg there. This he knows. He is acquainted with many things other people have no idea of. He knows how a roost of poultry looks at morning dusk, when, if you enter the barn, the entire roost turns one eye at you, and then for an unknown cause simultaneously shakes its head. He knows how hens catch mice in the hay-mow—how they gnaw the sucking pigs' tails to the bone (the hired man says they need the meat). He knows how to obtain bumblebees' honey, paying for this information with an ear like a garnet potato, one of the sort that "biles up meller;" and he knows how to find mushrooms. Life for a boy on an upland farm is to labor, to abstain, to sweat and to be grievously cold (see Horace); nevertheless, there comes a soft spring dawn when on the rich spots of the sheep-pasture he finds a bushel of mushrooms, snow-white on their tops and pink underneath, crisp, tender, rising full grown from the moist earth, and lifting bodily away the chips and leaves that overlay them. He brings this treasure home. He inverts the mushroom-cups in a clean frying-pan, fills each one with butter and a pinch of salt, cooks them gently a few minutes—dishes them. Then he dashes more butter and some water from the tea-kettle into the frying-pan—for he is as fond of gravy as "Todgers' boarders"—pours this over the mushrooms, and sits down to a feast that has some poetry about it.

The boy brings a sharp appetite to his few pleasures. All agreeable thoughts float in his mind during his summer nooning doze when he lies on the grass after dinner waiting for the sun to strike the west side of the farmhouse chimneys, which, standing square north and south, serve for sun-dials. And in haymaking, when he is "mowing away" far above the "purline beam" in the barn as fast as a man in the hayrack can toss the hay up to him, and the air is heated like a furnace by the hot haymaking sun on the shingles close above his head, and his shirt is full of timothy-seed, and he is almost dying with exhaustion, suddenly he hears the sound of rain pattering on the roof. The hay in the meadow will be spoiled, but down he slides to enjoy an hour's rest in the cool lower world of the barn-floor. And when the Fourth of July comes, and the farm-boys gather at The Corners and fire off old shot-guns, pistols, an anvil, a cannon and empty thread-spools, then and there is the poetry of the whole harvest-season for the boy. The harvest-moon, bringer of hot days and "bammy" nights to glaze the corn, may be the admiration of many, but is not so to the boy. It is accompanied by a special grievance to him: at the end of days' works that take the tuck out of him to the last fragment he has to go for the cows, and to come home late after everybody else has washed up and is partly through supper. The hunter's moon too, large, mild and beaming though it may be, is a thing of disgust to the boy, for it marks the beginning of the season when, after chores are finished and the men are sitting comfortably around the kitchen fire, he has to split kindlings in the woodhouse for the hired girl, and to fill the four wood-boxes with which the hill farmhouse warms its kitchen, dining-room, nursery and parlor.

The hill-farmer's mind is rich in suggestions of work for a boy. After haying, harvesting and everything else is done, you will find that lad down cellar of a dark morning by the light of a tallow candle cutting bushels and bushels of potatoes for the cows with a "slice"—one of those antique long iron shovels used about a brick-oven. You will find him foddering forty head of cattle before school-time in the morning, rising at four o'clock for the purpose, and going over the work again after school; and if he does not ride to the woods on Saturdays with the choppers, the farmer calls him "dreadful slack." The boy would like to get the work all finished some time, but on a hill-farm there is no hope of being done save the hope of being done with it entirely. There is always plenty of work for the boy. In the vast, dark, lofty, cathedral-like orchard, whose untrimmed, mossy trees bear profusely on their interlacing branches the small fair apples for countless barrels of cider, there is work for him. There is plenty of work at the cider-mill or in boiling down the sweet cider over the bonfire that cheers the damp fall weather.

In fact, his tasks are endless. Perhaps it is raining like suds. The sun for several weeks has reminded the hired man of a drop of hair-oil on a basin of water. The only weather-sign that occurs to any one is the old Indian one: "Cloudy all around, and pouring down in the middle." You might suppose no work could be done in such weather. It is then the farmer starts the boy off with five hundred dollars in his pocket to pay various husbandmen for cattle, and with directions to make a détour on his way back collecting moneys due for other cattle, stopping at the Chittaninny Tavern to meet a man who will have a sum of cash ready for him there. The Chittaninny Tavern is in a cutthroat neighborhood. The man with the cash pays it at the bar in the presence of a crowd of ruffians, the bartender looking over the boy's shoulder, and a loafer follows him out to his horse, shows him a pistol and asks him if he hasn't "one of them things." While the boy dashes homeward through the rain and night, pursued in imagination by the man with the pistol, he makes up his mind that a well-lighted city is the place for him to do business in.

Should the rain lessen, the farmer and the boy set out for town with a herd of cattle. Having disposed of the herd, on their homeward way, toward nightfall, the boy, who has walked, as near as he can guess, four hundred miles around the cattle in the November mud, is dismayed to see the farmer stop at a house by the wayside. There are more cattle to be bought and driven home. The master of the wayside house is in some remote pasture, whither the boy runs to fetch him. After a long bargain with this man the farmer pulls out a roll of bills, pays down a round sum, a fresh creature is brought out to the road, and again they pursue their homeward way. It is a young heifer this time—most difficult of animals to drive. She runs like a deer: in a minute she is far ahead of the boy. She takes the wrong road: the boy makes frightful efforts to overtake her—enters the fields to follow her unseen, and cuts across lots to head her off. She, being a bright creature, is aware of his manœuvres. She watches him over the fences, and contrives to keep beyond his reach, spite of all he can do. To hold her on the homeward route is a miracle: still, the trio of farmer, boy and heifer do manage to reach the home village, where the farmer, who is riding in his carriage, stops at the bank and tells the boy to be "boss and all hands" and go on alone with the heifer. This is terrible. Night is at hand, the demoniac beast is wilder than ever, and the boy knows that, though palpitating with fatigue through all his frame, there are the chores at home yet for him to do. Well, it is then he determines to go on a whaling-voyage or to go and be a stoker for a steam-engine, or a boiler-maker, or a tramp, or anything but a boy on a farm; and so hope grows strong in his heart.

An old hill-farmer must be beloved of Hermes, he so understands the arts of gain. If he wants to buy anything, he takes a sap-bucketful of eggs to the village, and makes a point of bringing back a part of the money. When in town he does not dine at a tavern, but on some crackers and cheese: he says baker's bread tastes like wasps' nests, and city fare in general is light and dry. He saves more picking up horseshoes when the snow melts than many persons do in all their lives. He works all the year round: he thrashes in midwinter with the thermometer below zero. The hard times affect him no more than a fly would a rhinoceros. This is perfectly exasperating to the poor spendthrift, good-for-nothing, lazy part of the community. The tramp hired man is particularly mad about it; he declares the old farmer wants him to work all day for a sheep's head and pluck, and sleep under a cart at night. The tramp hired man entertains inverted financial ideas, and a creed that would probably read, "Strike a man on his right cheek, and if he don't turn his left, boot him;" and the tramp hired man lies en grand—tells lies two days long when he finds a listener.

The old hill-farmer never wastes nor wears out things. He has a coat for butchering-days that belonged to his great-great-grandfather who fought in the Revolution, and he has an ancient tin lantern that he considers valuable. He almost quarrels with the young farmer about his corrugated glass lantern and his large, brilliant, one-paned lantern with the polished concave tin back, and his brass-mounted globe lantern: they have resplendent lanterns on the hills. The old farmer says they will blow up or smash up, whereas his ancient tin lantern is safe. The old man does not see the boy shinning up a post in the horse-barn (there is no staircase—nothing but a few pegs stuck over the horses' heads by which to climb to the hay), the tin lantern swinging on his arm, its door open and candle flaring. Nor does he see the boy attempt to increase the lantern's light by filling it with dry leaves. "What has that darned Irishman been up to now?" says the old farmer, finding it unsoldered on its shelf.

"The mill-streams that turn the clappers of the world arise in solitary places." The old hill-farmers are lovers of their country. Their carefully-saved money and their patriotism sustained our great war. Whoever was a boy on a hill-farm during the war remembers the neighbors stumbling over the stony roads at twilight, when the day's work was done, to hear the daily paper read at the farmhouse on The Corners, eager to know the worst or the best every night. Hugh used to hold the candle, while Mark read in a slow, understanding voice about the marching, fighting, wavering, conquering of those days, now less remembered than the Iliad, when we warmed our hearts at the blaze of war. At every new local name, "Stop!" the old farmer used to say: "let's see where that is. Get the map.—Hugh, hold the light.—There 'tis, by that grease-spot—not the tallow-spot Hugh just dropped—the spot where people have put their fingers around Washington." Such a prodigious trampling of fingers on the map followed our armies to battle! What a memory it is to have in the mind!

The old farmer of the hills, however frugal, fosters some luxuries: one is horses. He has plenty of them, fat and slow from careful usage, and for the most part spotless bays.

Four white feet and a white nose,
Skin him and give his body to the crows,

says the man of the hills. Melvine, a great horse-breeder, one day took sides in a quarrel between a horse and its master, fought the man for abusing his horse—fought him hard and long: 'twas "t'other and which" with them for a while. "I wouldn't have done it," said his neighbor, Squire Greffern: "I wouldn't have fought the man. I'd have reasoned with him kindly. I'd have said, 'See here, now, this horse isn't to blame: he ain't human,' says I, 'and you ought not to abuse him,' says I. And says I, 'You ought to know better than to hurt a horse: it injures him,' says I. 'He has more sense than you have' (getting excited). 'You deserve to be licked yourself, by hoky! Why, Gosh Almighty! get out, or I'll thrash the daylights out of your darned rotten hide!'" So ended the squire's reproof.

The old hill-farmer has an old dog grown from indulgence, like his horses, in the habit of going his own gait. He will trot to church on Sundays, and trot, trot, down the aisle after meeting has begun, or, if he likes, up into the gallery. When two of these obstinate old dogs once met before the pulpit they indulged in a whirlwind of fight. The minister requested the sexton to put them out, but they showed him their teeth and fought until satisfied. Then the minister administered a grave rebuke to the farmers for desecrating the house of God by bringing dogs to church. Whether the dogs understood it or not, one of them never went to church again.

Another luxury of the hill-farmer is unabridged hospitality. He would agree with Doctor Johnson that nothing promotes happiness so much as conversation. Blazing fires—beacons of company—often flame up his best rooms' chimney-stacks, pouring their blue wood-smoke high in the clear air of the hills. Thanksgiving Day in the hills would do for a festival in honor of Jupiter, the patron of friendship, 'tis a day of such hospitality. It is the only day of the year when the boy has enough to eat. Not that there is not plenty all the year round. It is always jam and never satis with the boy, to borrow Tom Hood's joke. In killing-time they put down hecatombs of beef in snow and of ham and sausage in hot lard, and they have stores of cod-fish to be cooked with cream, and of chickens for potpies, which are never made properly, for some mysterious reason, save by a farmer's wife. A fearful fate, though, has been known to befall a farmhouse among the wintry hills when the farmer's wife has put too much sage in the sausage. Too much sage all winter, ah! Nothing short of being "clyed," as the farmer's wife pronounces it, will satisfy a boy who works on the hills; and that he is on Thanksgiving. 'Tis a day of perfect bliss to him, when he sleeps long, and after his morning's work is done goes to skate in his best clothes on a very glary pond where a crowd of other boys are skating. He skates until he is tired and hungry, and comes home late, stopping on the way to climb the fences of the orchards in search of frozen apples, delicious food to his famished lips. When he reaches home the turkey smells away out to the gate, and in the kitchen everything is all cluttered up and "t'other end to," and dinner is nowhere near ready yet. 'Tis a joyous hour for the boy when it is ready, and for the hired man too. The hired man's pleasure is somewhat damped by hearing the hired girl remark that his mouth is like a barn-door with a load of hay in it. "I declare for it if 'taint," says she. He informs her that she is always "bellerin'" about something, and she requests him not to be so "putchy;" nor does that end the matter. Guests like the Melvines of Melvine Farm, the Bligh boys of Bligh's Corners, the Plunkett girls and Deacon Buckingham's hired girl, and Yem Finny and Sam Bab's folks, are the kind to invite to a party. They are the kind to keep up a rumble of talk in the parlor, and in the other rooms a rush of games—Hide the Handkerchief, Hunt the Slipper, and so on: Achilles's troops did not play Whirl the Platter on the sands of Troy with a greater gusto.

Very hospitable people are not particular as to who comes to see them, if only some one comes: therefore, pack-peddlers, stove-peddlers, drovers, the old crazy man and the old crazy woman, and other wanderers, are welcome at the hill farmhouse. These vagabonds come from all directions—up the Red Mill road, down from Windy Row, over from the Huddle and the Hollow, and across from Ranger's Field Centre, sometimes meeting two or three together. The boy is glad to see them, particularly the peddlers, they bring such an uproar of talk with them. The brown Bohemian or Hungarian receives a bombardment of questions at the farmhouse that breaks all bounds to his loquacity: he tells everything he knows of foreign lands, as well as news of what is going on in ten counties round. Two only of the vagrant tribe the boy dislikes, the colporteur and the travelling Spiritualist—two cold, shabby, sniffling beings, each wrapped in a shawl and each driving an old horse afflicted with poll-evil. Whenever the boy goes to put up one of these men's horses he wants to break his wagon and whip, and he does give them a few ferocious shakes in the solitude of the stable. The boy worships the clockmaker, who comes once a year on a Saturday and stays over Sunday, mending all the clocks in the house, the tall, timeworn wooden one up in the boy's bedroom as well as the rest. This fellow has a taste for pugilism. While working at the clocks he holds discussions with the hired folks about Heenan, Sayers, Morrissey, dogs, cocks and horses, and lets out secrets about mills coming off in London and New York next week. This is delightful. But once let the horse-pitchfork man arrive, and there is a regular sitting up at night, a grand debauch of talk on politics, patent-rights, improved agricultural implements and other themes, the whole interspersed with original jokes. The old farmer is obtuse about jokes—

An owl might make him laugh, if only it would wink,

but nothing less could—yet the horse-pitchfork man's jokes penetrate him.

The boy thinks it dull when there is no company at the farmhouse of a winter evening. He then sets a pitcher of cider to warm by the fire, and makes himself as comfortable as he can over a book. The few books he reads are fastened minutely in his memory. He obtains The Perfect Gentleman from the district school library, and thenceforth knows what is proper behavior for an Englishman under all circumstances. He reads The Vestiges of Creation, and in afterlife is amazed to find half the world fighting the ancient theory of evolution. His love of society causes him to plunge into the vortex of the mite society and singing school if he has anything decent to wear. Cheerfully he works in pantaloons whose legs have been cut off and turned hind side before, in order that the thin and faded places may come on the back of his legs and the unfaded ones on his knees; contentedly he sustains them by one suspender twisted from a solitary button in front around to another on his right side: he knows the farmer's wife has no time to take care of his clothes. But when old Mrs. Lyburn, a woman who can no more design a suit of clothes than a theatre-ceiling fresco, is commissioned to make him a coat out of an old goose-green overcoat, and a pair of trousers out of some thick, old light cloth breeches, and when she cuts the legs of those breeches off at top and bottom, leaving them broad enough for a Turk, with pockets like large bags hanging down inside of them, then the boy rebels and refuses to go anywhere. If he goes he takes his road through Stone's Woods, and comes home the back way by the wagon-house. The boy has grit, real grindstone grit: therefore he keeps this up, and sooner or later he has it out with the old farmer about his clothes. "Well, well, don't rare and pitch like a flax-break: we'll see about it," says the old gentleman. The old farmer takes the boy to town and buys him a sleek, shiny black suit—the coat is a long-waisted, long-tailed frock—and he adds a pair of good "stubbid" shoes, having strings made of leather.

"You're stuck, and stuck bad," says the hired man compassionately when he sees the suit. A boy who is as keen as a brier and smart as a whip cannot be expected to wear "humbly" clothes forever. A neat suit made by the village tailor, and a necktie, hat and boots that put him into positively ethereal spirits, are articles that he finally attains. In these clothes he joins the debating society and the choir. Saul Lapham, a friend of his, plays the cornet at the choir-rehearsals. Saul lays down the dignity of a human being to puff out his cheeks, bulge his eyes and grow red in the face blowing a brass horn. Saul is a tyro in the business—can't blow softly, though he tries hard to do so, and completely drowns the singers except when he breaks down, which occurs rather often, to their extreme relief. The little spats and sensations of the choir-rehearsals are entertainment for the sylvan boy. One evening Miss Tway was so "worked up" about failing in a solo she was trying to sing that she fainted twice, the first time with her mouth shut, the second time with it open; and Saul, not knowing what else to do, put a gum-drop into it, which offended Miss Tway, for she thought it was his finger.

The lad is a gallant figure in his new suit galloping on horseback from his highlands down to the village on the flats to attend some rustic diversion. In the tavern ballroom there is a little stage with a curtain hung across it, and on that stage the boy sees the most charming performance he ever beholds. It consists of a regular play, with a ballet between the acts, and a minstrel performance introducing the celebrated scene of a negro teaching another negro to tune the banjo, where the pupil climbs up the back of his chair while endeavoring to ascend the scale; and all ending with a puppet-show, the whole being done by three young fellows. "Why-ee! 'twas wonderful!" says the boy.

Balzac remarks: "People who are very happy are naturally stupid." Perhaps it is because he is not stupid that the boy is unhappy on the many-fountained hills. The longed-for evening soon appears—his last on the farm. He sleeps no moment that night in his soft farmhouse bed under homemade blankets hemmed with woollen thread. He does not know that he will be homesick for his old bedroom—homesick for the Gothic chest, the picture from The Pirate and Three Cutters, and the toilet-table holding nothing but a hairbrush, which, with its half dozen bristles, resembles a Captain Cook club. He will be homesick for the very closet under the roof that makes his clothes smell of hops, wool and dried apples. How glows the morn when he leaves! He goes to success, for he carries power—power as great as Fate.

Mary Dean.

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THE VISION OF THE TARN.

Alone, in contemplation lost,
I stood upon a castled height,
Dark-beetling o'er a lurid tarn
That glassed the brow of night.

Between the icy flash of stars,
Above me sprinkled and beneath,
The silence of the listening air
Was counterfeit of death.

No cloud upon the naked sky,
No ripple on the lake below;
But o'er the sluggish waters hung
A phosphorescent glow,

That suddenly, all quivering wan,
As smitten with the throes of birth,
Upheaving, vanished, to reveal
A phantom not of earth—

A lily wonderful as light,
Unfolded on the balmy deep,
And, cradled in its bosom, lay
A presence lost in sleep.

And tenderly a star remote
Shed holy lustre o'er the place
Where innocence and peace displayed
Such unimagined grace

That e'en the calm celestial orb,
Enamored of the dream below,
With tremulous emotion pale
Diffused a milder glow.

And I beheld, in mystery,
The secret of my vision fair—
That of a relic sprung the flower
That bore its image there.

And from the watchful star above—
The dwelling of a spirit fled—
That faithful sentinel of love
Its vacant shrine surveyed,

And knew, through all transition seen,
Its place and habitation dear,
Still waiting, in the throb of hope,
Its resurrection here.

Long had I gazed; but, lo! a cloud,
Down-sweeping as a bird of night,
O'erwhelmed me, and the phantasy
Was blotted from my sight.

John B. Tabb.

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THROUGH WINDING WAYS.